In April 1979, the legendary French singer Serge Gainsbourg showed a TV crew around his home in Paris. He lived in a townhouse, a hôtel particulier, at 5 bis Rue de Verneuil on the Rive Gauche, an eight-minute saunter from the Pont des Arts. He gestured towards the Salvador Dalís and the many photos of Jane Birkin, the two pianos, the black walls and white marble floors, the overflowing ashtrays. “Well, this is my house,” he said in a televised visit in 1979. “I don’t know what it is: a sitting room; a music room; a mess; a museum…”
In September 2023 the property, owned by his daughter Charlotte Gainsbourg and left entirely untouched for 32 years since his death in 1991, opened to the public as exactly that: a shrine to the mystery man. An attendant museum, bookshop and bar, Le Gainsbarre, opened across the road at 14 Rue de Verneuil, expanding the visitor experience with bountiful archival material and mementos.
‘You could still smell the cigarettes’
People had long tagged the wall outside the house with graffiti of the singer smoking his Gitanes. Now they queued up to go inside. In an interview at the time, Charlotte noted that you could still smell the cigarettes in the space: “For 32 years, I preserved the house very well—no one went inside.” If she had kept it so carefully, it was because it was all she had left of her father, she said.
More than 120,000 visitors have since made the pilgrimage, hailing the magic of walking through the living room and the tiny kitchen, the bathroom with its gigantic light fixture, the bedroom with its black velvet bed covers.
Tickets for 2025 went on sale in October, and none are available for the rest of 2024. There are fears, however, that this may not last for long. On 18 September, the company that runs Maison Gainsbourg went into redressement judiciaire (judicial restructuring), due to unpaid bills totalling €1.6m.
The project came about through a partnership between Charlotte Gainsbourg and the art collector and property developer Dominique Dutreix. They jointly set up a company, the Société d’Exploitation de l’Hôtel Particulier de Serge Gainsbourg et ses Annexes (SEHPSGA), with Gainsbourg providing the property and its objects and Dutreix the funds.
The opening date was scheduled for 2021, with the house and museum to be operated by the cultural retail provider Arteum. The fashion house Saint Laurent came on board as an official partner and financial contributor. As part of the partnership, Saint Laurent redesigned a version of Gainsbourg’s fabled one-button women’s jacket with tennis stripes, the Veste Serge Gainsbourg, which was available for €2,590 as a limited edition from both the fashion house and the museum’s gift shop.
The opening was delayed by 18 months. Work on the house stalled when contractors stopped being paid. In March 2023, following a lawsuit brought by Gainsbourg and SEHPSGA against Dutreix, the Paris commercial court found that Dutreix had breached French commercial law and ordered him to reimburse €1.5m to the Maison Gainsbourg. He has reportedly not paid out, citing bankruptcy.
Legal proceedings under way
In a statement, Arteum confirmed that legal proceedings are at present under way against Dutreix “to obtain recognition of his obligations, especially financial ones”. It said that the museum’s financial distress is linked to the debts incurred around the opening of the museum.
However, in an interview with the French newspaper Les Echos, Dutreix refuted accusations of embezzlement. He said he is preparing to launch a counter-suit and accused Charlotte Gainsbourg of wanting to push him out. He has also said that he wants his shares in the museum to be expertly valued. Dutreix did not respond to a request for comment from The Art Newspaper.
The singer in a characteristic pose, Gitanes in hand
© Claude Truong-Ngoc/Wikimedia Commons
Arteum insists that, despite the judicial restructuring, the firm is on course to achieve solvency, meeting its 2024 targets of close to €4m in sales. In a statement, its president-founder, Lorraine Dauchez, said that “the success of Maison Gainsbourg since its opening is proof of its long-term viability”.
In the same statement, Charlotte Gainsbourg reiterated her commitment to seeing the project through what she calls “the difficult situation”. “Maison Gainsbourg is my most precious life project. The public’s enthusiasm and emotion since its opening has confirmed my belief that the best is yet to come for Maison Gainsbourg.”