The Parisian institution received 1.3 million euros from the Vladimir Potanine Foundation, second fortune in Russia. Funding that embarrasses in the context of war in Ukraine
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Passing in Paris a few years ago, Vladimir Medinski visits the Center Pompidou incognito. The Minister of Russian Culture, in post from 2012 to 2020, pouts. 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 of the Moscow Blue Noss duo, dating from 2005, shows two soldiers kissing full mouth, in a birch forest. Not far is a reproduction of the Lenin mausoleum, produced in 2008 by Yuri Avvakumov, with dominoes. Not really to the taste of chief propagandist: “Fortunately we are rid of all this shit!”, Maugrée Medinski – he oversees the Russian delegation responsible for negotiating peace with the Ukrainians today.
Since the start of the war, on February 24, this collection also embarrassed teams from the French contemporary art center. Because it was formed with the help of the Potanine Foundation, led by the second richest man in Russia according to Forbes magazine , the Oligarch Vladimir Potanine. Built in 2015, this collaboration enabled the Center Pompidou to acquire nearly 550 works, designed by Russian or Soviet artists, between the 1950s and 2000s. Some were offered by the Potanine Foundation, the others by around forty donors – Private collectors, artists, heirs … Most were exhibited on the fourth floor of the Parisian building, as part of a course entitled “Kollektsia! Contemporary art in the USSR and Russia 1950-2000”, from September 2016 to April 2017.
The Russian Foundation has notably funded 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 assembly of the exhibition, indicates the Center Pompidou. Another part of the budget, the amount of which we ignore, was taken care of directly by it.” From In early 2017, the two institutions “deepen” their links: conference cycles, various publications, exchange programs for young curators …
Stratagem
Pompidou received a total of more than 1.3 million euros from his Russian partner, to which should have been added 586,000 euros in the fall. “The payment of this sum has been suspended, as is the entire program, we explain in Beaubourg, given the situation in Ukraine.” Constant figures in terms of the skinny envelope (1, 8 million euros) available to the Paris center for all of its annual acquisitions. If they are brought back to the portfolio of Vladimir Potanine, on the other hand, they do not weigh heavy: Bloomberg classifies the businessman among the fifty largest fortunes in the world.
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