Chris Dercon was surrounded by movement.
Curators swirled about him, art handlers lifted wooden crates and construction workers floated above him on cranes. As he strode through the Fondation Cartier’s 86,00-square-foot new home across from the Louvre in central Paris, his long black trench coat fluttered behind like a cape.
Dercon, who is the Fondation’s managing director, stopped in the building’s atrium and pointed toward the ceiling, where a gentle rain had just started falling on huge glass skylights. “Look at that,” he said. “The raindrops and little leaves. When the sun shines, they throw these natural patterns and shadows on the floor. It’s so nice.”
Then the 67-year-old was off again, taking the stairs two by two.
Dercon has been in near-constant motion during a nearly 40-year career in the arts. He is known for his bold and flashy leadership, dramatic gestures and frequent moves between major institutions, often with overlapping tenures and headline-grabbing departures.
These shifts have not always gone over well with the public or the press. The French newspaper Le Monde has called him “disruptive.” When he was selected to run the Volksbühne theater in Berlin, some 40,000 people signed a petition against his tenure, protesters occupied the building and somebody left feces in front of his office.
Big names in the art world came to Dercon’s defense, including the artist Ai Weiwei, the Tate director Nicholas Serota, and the architect Rem Koolhaas.
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The post A Bold New Museum for a Flamboyant Leader appeared first on New York Times.
