Contemporary art in France
Major state projects, private foundations and new voices have made France one of the central stages of contemporary art.
When François Mitterrand became president in 1981, culture gained new weight in politics. The culture minister Jack Lang doubled the budget, regional collections of contemporary art were established and Paris acquired a series of monumental new buildings. The glass pyramid at the Louvre, the Musée d'Orsay and the Grande Arche at La Défense changed the face of the city. Art was to be a matter for the state and reach the whole country. At the same time the investments stirred debate, as when Daniel Buren’s striped columns were placed in the historic courtyard of the Palais-Royal.
French artists such as Christian Boltanski, Annette Messager and Sophie Calle worked with memory, identity and narrative, often using photographs, objects and text. In the 1990s the critic Nicolas Bourriaud coined the term relational aesthetics for art that creates encounters between people, and Pierre Huyghe, Philippe Parreno and Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster became internationally known. The Palais de Tokyo, which opened in 2002, became an experimental stage for the new art.
In the 21st century private collectors such as François Pinault and Bernard Arnault have built large museums in Paris. At the same time questions of colonialism, migration and identity have moved to the centre, and France has begun returning artworks to African countries. The fire at Notre-Dame in 2019 and the rapid restoration showed how much cultural heritage matters. Artists with roots in former colonies, such as Kader Attia and Zineb Sedira, have offered new perspectives on the country’s history.