cover image Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, 30th Anniversary

Fondation Cartier Pour L'Art Contemporain, 30th Anniversary

Fondation Cartier. Cahiers D'Art (Thames & Hudson, dist.), $50 (240p) ISBN 978-2-86925-106-9

Alain Domineque Perrin, then-president of Cartier International, founded Cartier Fondation pour l'art contemporain in 1984 with a vision to "provide artists with a space of freedom," commission works with the option of selling them to fund further commissions, exhibit unknown artists together with a "superstar," and hold "an annual thematic exhibition %E2%80%A6 related to contemporary art or contemporary thought that has never been done by a museum before." This commemorative book celebrates the foundation's 30 years of exhibitions and concerts with extensive photographic documentation of artworks, artists, celebrity events, and foundation gardens and architecture, together with interviews with the foundation's movers and shakers. Perrin is adamant that the foundation is commercially separate from the larger company but the art and artists reflect his free-market, all-embracing viewpoint, running the gamut from exhibitions of Ferrari, Andy Warhol, Agnes Varda, and Cesar, Jean Paul Gaultier's Pain Couture (a clothing line constructed out of baguettes), and Beat Takeshi Kitano's colorful interactive installation for children to collaborations between David Lynch and mathematician Misha Gromov and Amazon shamans and Parisian artists. This book's design, lively and beautiful overall, embraces risk and innovation with mixed success, exemplified by crowded, oversized, overly ornate type and cunningly undersized folios of photographic footnotes interspersed throughout the text. (Jan.)