The shadow of a Russian oligarch on the Center Pompidou

Passing through Paris a few years ago, Vladimir Medinski visited the Center Pompidou incognito. The Russian Minister of Culture, in office from 2012 to 2020, is pouting. On the occasion of their recent acquisition by the National Museum of Modern Art, several hundred works by his compatriots are exhibited there. Among them, a photograph by the Moscow duo Blue Noses, dating from 2005, shows two soldiers kissing each other on the mouth in a birch forest. Not far away is a reproduction of Lenin’s mausoleum, made in 2008 by Yuri Avvakumov, with dominoes. Not really to the liking of the chief propagandist: Luckily we got rid of all that crap! »grumbles Medinski – today he heads the Russian delegation responsible for negotiating peace with the Ukrainians.

Begun in 2015, this collaboration has enabled the Center Pompidou to acquire nearly 550 works, designed by Russian or Soviet artists

Since the beginning of the war, on February 24, this collection has also caused embarrassment for the teams of the French contemporary art center. Because it was set up with the help of the Potanin Foundation, headed by the second richest man in Russia according to the magazine Forbes, oligarch Vladimir Potanin. Begun in 2015, this collaboration has enabled the Center Pompidou to acquire nearly 550 works, designed by Russian or Soviet artists between the 1950s and 2000s. Some have been donated by the Potanine Foundation, others by around forty donors – private collectors, artists, heirs… Most of them were exhibited on the fourth floor of the Parisian building, as part of a tour entitled “Kollektsia! Contemporary art in the USSR and Russia 1950-2000”, from September 2016 to April 2017.

The Russian foundation notably financed the edition of the catalog and the transport of all the works, including those of other donors. “In 2016, the Foundation paid us 604,000 euros for the installation of the exhibitionsays the Center Pompidou. Another part of the budget, the amount of which we do not know, was taken care of directly by her. » From the beginning of 2017, the two institutions “deepen” their links: conference cycles, various publications, exchange programs for young curators, etc.

Stratagem

Pompidou received a total of more than 1.3 million euros from his Russian partner, to which 586,000 euros should have been added in the fall. “The payment of this sum has been suspended, as has the whole program, we explain to Beaubourg, given the situation in Ukraine. » Significant figures in terms of the meager envelope (1.8 million euros) available to the Parisian center for all of its annual acquisitions. If we relate them to the portfolio of Vladimir Potanin, on the other hand, they do not weigh heavily: Bloomberg ranks the businessman among the fifty largest fortunes in the world.

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