This summer, on the evening of July 26, during the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, Axelle Saint-Cirel, a 29-year-old mezzo-soprano draped in the colors of the French flag, climbed a ladder all the way up to the glass roof of the Grand Palais, the century-old Paris monument.
Amid a sudden downpour, before tens of millions of television viewers, Saint-Cirel delivered a pitch-perfect performance of the French national anthem, “La Marseillaise,” miraculously avoiding any wardrobe malfunctions or makeup smears, even though she was drenched by the end of her performance. When she was finally off camera, she recalled in a phone interview, she allowed herself to blink — and felt a trail of mascara dribble down her face.
Saint-Cirel described the experience as transformative.
“As a monument, the Grand Palais has changed my life: It has allowed me to have a vision of the world that’s so much bigger than the one I had before,” Saint-Cirel said. “I’m a very ambitious person. I work very hard. But there are so many artists who work very hard, and who don’t get opportunities such as this one.”
When she walks past the Grand Palais nowadays, she reflects. “I can’t believe that there was a human being on top of it, and that human being was me,” she said.
Inaugurated in 1900 and now one of Paris’s most loved monuments, the Grand Palais has reopened its central, domed space (“la nef,” or the nave, with a 480-foot-high cupola) as part of a $500 million redevelopment. After hosting the Paris Olympics’ fencing and taekwondo championships, that nave is hosting Art Basel Paris, the French offshoot of the world’s leading art fair franchise, open to the public Oct. 18-20.
Art Basel Paris, which began in 2022 (under the name Paris + by Art Basel), replaces FIAC, a fair that was founded in 1974 and was long held in the Grand Palais.
“The Grand Palais is an iconic building with a stunning glass-dome ceiling and so much wonderful natural light, which is very unique for an art fair,” Rachel Lehmann, the co-founder of the New York-based Lehmann Maupin art gallery, wrote in an email. Lehmann Maupin regularly exhibited at FIAC and will have a booth at Art Basel Paris.
The architecture of the building “really complements the art, and captures what makes Paris so singular,” Lehmann said.
Built in just three years and inaugurated as part of the 1900 Paris world fair, the Grand Palais, a steel-and-glass monument, has a floor space covering 775,000 square feet (exceeding the footprint of the Palace of Versailles). More steel went into its construction than into that of the Eiffel Tower.
Later this year, the Grand Palais will host Paris Photo, the photography fair; FAB Paris, an art and antiques fair; and a giant skating rink. This winter, it will also be taken over by an immersive installation — a giant web of wool — by the Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota.
The Grand Palais’s director, Didier Fusillier, who was appointed last year, recalled that the monument was the place where many people saw the hot-air balloon and the moving walkway for the first time.
“No one had ever seen anything like it before,” he said. “I would very much like to take the Grand Palais back to its origins, and to the reason why it was built: as a vast exhibition hall” with “a spectacular side to it.”
Over the years, the Grand Palais has been spectacular in many instances — and less so in others.
Major movements in the history of fine arts and decorative arts were born on that very spot.
In 1905, during the Salon d’Automne arts festival, a roomful of paintings by the artists Henri Matisse, André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck caused such a scandal that the French president refused to inaugurate the event. The room was nicknamed “la cage aux fauves” (“the cage of wildcats”). The nickname has stuck to that group of artists and extended to their important art-historical movement: Fauvism.
In another cultural milestone, the Grand Palais in 1925 hosted an international exhibition of decorative and industrial arts that gave birth to what is now known as the Art Deco style.
But there are also deeply somber chapters in the history of the building.
Between 1914 and 1918, the Grand Palais became a vast military hospital, with sanitation put in to accommodate as many as 2,000 patients.
During the Nazi occupation of Paris, it served as an exhibition venue, but also hosted the offices of members of the Vichy collaborationist government, and contained a parking garage for German trucks. The building caught fire during the liberation of Paris in August 1944, and sections of it were destroyed, though not the glass roof and the steel frame of the nave.
By the 1960s, the Belle Epoque monument was so out of fashion that it came very close to being knocked down: When the culture minister at the time, André Malraux, commissioned the architect Le Corbusier to design a modern art museum, Le Corbusier pushed for that museum to replace the Grand Palais.
Fortunately for the Grand Palais, Le Corbusier died before he could proceed. Instead, Malraux in 1966 inaugurated new art galleries inside the Grand Palais, where a Picasso blockbuster (attended by the artist himself) drew 800,000 visitors that year.
In more recent times, the Grand Palais was the spectacular setting for fashion shows by Chanel and its legendary designer Karl Lagerfeld (who died in 2019). Lagerfeld transformed the monument into a space station (with a rocket bearing the Chanel logo), a polar landscape (with an iceberg imported from Scandinavia), an airport terminal and a supermarket (with shelves stuffed with jars and cans). Those fashion shows were so striking that Prince attended one in October 2009 and decided to give two performances on site a few days later.
The architect François Chatillon, who is leading the current redevelopment, said the French government decided on it less than four years ago, so hundreds of millions of dollars of building works are being carried out in a short space of time. The building and all of its wings are not expected to open completely until 2026, he added.
“The number one priority has been to reopen all of the spaces, and give back to the Grand Palais its architectural unity, its circulation areas, and its natural light,” Chatillon said.
Once the Grand Palais is fully open, “you will discover spaces that had been blocked off, separated from each other, and mezzanined for the last 60 years,” he said, referring to the way the space had been split up. These will finally be interconnected, giving visitors a much more holistic sense of the Grand Palais architecture.
Importantly, he said, the Palais de la Découverte — a science museum at the back of the monument, which has had a separate entrance and operated independently — will become an integral part of the Grand Palais, and its two grand staircases will once again be bathed in natural light.
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