The Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris has its next show of Modern masterpieces in its sights. The private museum, backed by the billionaire LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault, is planning a major exhibition drawn from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York next autumn.
Arnault’s long-standing adviser, Jean-Paul Claverie, told Le Monde newspaper at the end of October that the Vuitton museum “dreams” of bringing Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) back to the city where it was created. The painting, which last left MoMA in 1988, is unlikely to travel, but the Vuitton foundation’s borrowing power cannot be overestimated.
Its current show, Icons of Modern Art: the Shchukin Collection (until 20 February), reunites 130 works that have been long divided between the State Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg and the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow. In 2015, MoMA lent works by Kandinsky, Brancusi and Léger to the foundation’s debut show.
