When the Fondation Cartier moved out of its 1994 Jean Nouvel building on boulevard Raspail into its Jean Nouvel renovation at the Palais Royale last year, it left some art behind. I got no response from the Fondation during the run-up and opening, and figured I’d give it some time, let them sort it out. But they haven’t responded to renewed inquiries, so I just assume their plan is to ignore and erase the works abandoned and destroyed by their move.
The biggest is also the most inevitable: in 1994-95 Lothar Baumgarten designed the garden surrounding Nouvel’s building, planting over 200 French species among the Cedars of Lebanon brought to Paris by Chateaubriand in 1823, which were central to Cartier’s selection of the site, to Nouvel’s transparency-centered architecture, and to the Fondation’s opening in September 1996. Titled Theatrum Botanicum, it included a shallow amphitheater used for events and temporary installations of other artists’ work. It was actually an artist, Claudio Sant’Ambrogio, who raised the question the fate of Baumgarten’s work to me last year.
In 2013 the Fondation released an interview with gardener Metin Sevrin about tending the Theatrum Botanicum, which really was an inextricable element of the place and experience. Presumably it is all still there on bd. Raspail in some form. Though likely suffering without artisanal cultivation, it could presumably be revived. I have seen no information on what will become of the building, or the site. Baumgarten is no longer listed in the Fondation Cartier’s collection.
Another disappeared work is by filmmaker Agnès Varda, whose exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in 2006 was a catalytic moment in her practice as a visual artist, begun in 2004 at age 74 at the invitation of—who else?—Hans Ulrich Obrist:
Agnès Varda a notamment collaboré avec la Fondation Cartier pour “L’Île et Elle” en 2006, une exposition présentant ses installations et vidéos inspirées par l’île de Noirmoutier. Son film “Le Tombeau de Zgougou” (2006) fut montré en permanence dans “La Cabane du chat” installée dans le jardin de la Fondation Cartier, boulevard Raspail, depuis sa commande pour l’exposition Le Grand Orchestre des Animaux (2016).
In a 2012 interview Varda discusses the show; her interest in environment and the nuances of the space offscreen; the difference between presenting work installed in a gallery vs a film in a theater; and the making of the short film about her cat, The Tomb of Zgougou, which she debuted at the Fondation show. As the Fondation still points out above, Le Tombeau de Zgougou went on permanent exhibition inside a purpose-built structure, La Cabane du chat, installed in the Fondation Cartier garden in 2016.
The video was projected onto the wall and a mound of sand. Permanence is not what it used to be, and neither, it seems, is La Cabane du chat.
The Fondation did save another Varda work from the garden, sort of: Nini sur son arbre (2019) is a 3-meter tall statue of another of Varda’s cats sitting on a dead tree. The sculpture shown last fall at the opening of the Palais Royale space is not the same one from bd Raspail, which was installed for Trees, an indoor/outdoor group exhibition that opened the summer after Varda’s death in 2019. Nini’s original perch was a tree trunk transferred from Varda’s own garden. By last year, the whole thing—cat and tree, minus the branches, but plus some moss—was cast in bronze. The Fondation’s website says it’s from 2009, the first of an edition of 8, and that it’s 33 cm tall. At most, one of those things is true. [Granted, Varda showed another version of the work posthumously, l’Arbre de Nini, with the branch, a wider root base, and a painted cat, so some of this may be an Estate question.]
Another collection work included in Trees reveals that the Fondation Cartier knows how to handle site-specific artworks when it moves, when it wants to. Giuseppe Penone’s Biforcazione (1987) was commissioned for the Fondation’s original home, a chateau outside Paris in Jouy-en-Josas. The ten-meter long torqued tree, cast in bronze, includes a trickling pool of water in the artist’s handprint. Another commission for the grounds of Jouy-en-Josas was Jean-Pierre Raynaud’s 1985 sculpture, le Pot d’oré. The Fondation donated the 3.5m gilded fiberglass pot to the Pompidou in 2002, but the little cabane, well, by this point we know what they do with cabanes.