A century or so ago, Paris was the undisputed epicenter of the international art world, the birthplace of the avant-garde. The city teemed with talents from all over — Pablo Picasso, Amedeo Modigliani, Marc Chagall — who populated its artist colonies, cafes and brasseries, and made it a vibrant cultural hub.
Today, Paris is one of multiple art centers in the world. Yet it is experiencing a cultural renaissance, and reclaiming its place on the contemporary art map.
Though France is still only the world’s fourth-largest art market, with a 7 percent share (according to this year’s Art Basel and UBS Art Market Report), that share is growing. Driving the expansion are the rise of new privately funded art foundations in the French capital; the opening of first-ever Paris outposts by major international galleries; the influx of international artists drawn to the city’s relative affordability; and the departure of Britain from the European Union, known as Brexit.
“Paris is extremely lively at the moment: It’s clearly a city that’s regaining its appeal,” said Catherine Grenier, director of the Fondation Giacometti, which is dedicated to managing the estate and legacy of the sculptor Alberto Giacometti. “It’s been a long time since Paris was so active in the visual arts.”
Ms. Grenier explained that the “monopoly” that New York and London once had on the international art world has now loosened, allowing for other art scenes. Paris, “which had been somewhat eclipsed,” is today in a “privileged position,” she added.
The Fondation Giacometti plans to bolster Paris’s cultural standing further by moving in 2027 to new headquarters on the Place des Invalides, where it will set up a Giacometti museum, with several exhibition spaces, a research center and an art school.
Another sign of Paris’s growing allure is the opening this fall of the Hauser & Wirth gallery’s first-ever Paris outpost. One of the world’s top four mega-galleries, Hauser & Wirth is moving into an elegant 19th-century hôtel particulier (mansion) near the Avenue des Champs-Élysées and inaugurating the space with a solo exhibition by the African American painter Henry Taylor (whose retrospective coincidentally opened earlier this month at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York).
Hauser & Wirth’s president and co-founder Iwan Wirth said it had always been a dream to open in Paris, “a romantic place,” and that the gallery had been “looking for many years for the right space and for the right moment.”
“Artists want to be in Paris. They feel inspired by Paris,” he said, noting that many of the roughly 90 artists represented by his gallery had never had a commercial gallery show in Paris.
He emphasized that Brexit had no part in the decision to take the Paris space, and that Hauser & Wirth maintained its two large gallery spaces in London’s Mayfair district, as well as a firm commitment to the U.K. as a major operational base. Paris and London are “complementary,” he said.
He did acknowledge, however, that London had “lost a lot of talent and energy” because of Brexit, and that Paris happened to be “the great beneficiary.”
As an example of the hurdles that Brexit has thrown up, he said, Hauser & Wirth is now having “great difficulties” recruiting staff for its London galleries from the European continent, so “the pool of people that we can work with has suddenly been reduced.”
And with Britain now separated from the European Union by a hard border, the waiting time at customs for London-bound trucks was enormous, he said. As a result, artworks sometimes had to be flown in, which is much more costly.
To be sure, Paris spent the better part of the last three decades “in the shadow of London,” as the international dealer Thaddaeus Ropac recalled. Mr. Ropac has a major foothold in both cities, having opened a vast and elegant London space in Mayfair in 2017 — less than a year after the British voted in a referendum to leave the European Union.
Mr. Ropac remembered that in the 1980s, after the opening of the Pompidou Center in 1977, the spotlight had been on Paris. By contrast, London was “a rather dreary place,” with few artists of note, a small network of galleries and a “very limited market.”
Everything started changing in the late 1980s as a generation of talents known as the Young British Artists — “so new, so fresh, and so carefree,” Mr. Ropac said — were catapulted to fame and fortune thanks to the “Freeze” exhibition in 1988 curated by one of them, Damien Hirst.
The artists and their works made tabloid headlines as they won or were shortlisted for the Turner Prize. This explosion of eye-catching activity “took oxygen away from Paris,” he added. By the time Tate Modern opened in 2000 in a former power station on the southern banks of the Thames River, London “was able to position itself at the forefront of art production, presentation and communication.”
France, however, has experienced an awakening recently with the birth of vast private art foundations that have given Parisians what they weren’t getting enough of: a steady dose of high-caliber contemporary art exhibitions. First came the Fondation Louis Vuitton (established in 2014 by the billionaire Bernard Arnault, chief executive of the luxury conglomerate LVMH), followed in 2021 by the Bourse de Commerce — Pinault Collection (by the billionaire François Pinault, founder of the luxury group Kering).
Their forerunner was the Fondation Cartier, set up in 1984, which played a pioneering role in promoting contemporary art in Paris. It is set to move soon into a new headquarters across from the Louvre.
This combination of factors has led to “a strong buildup of Paris as an incredible center” for art, Mr. Ropac said, adding that it was “nonsense” to think that “the success of Paris is basically Brexit.”
Paris also has more affordable housing and studio space, which means that artists can live in the center of the scene and mingle and collaborate more easily, said Marco Brambilla, a film and digital artist who moved from London to Paris last year and whose video collage (about the birth of Las Vegas and the death of Elvis Presley) was recently presented at the opening of the Sphere entertainment venue in Las Vegas.
“It has become so expensive to live anywhere central in London that you find that the lifestyle is not within reach for people who work in the arts,” said Mr. Brambilla. He said Paris was benefiting from “a confluence” of factors including a growing collector base, strong government support for culture, and corporate spending on private institutions. This combination “creates an energy” that “makes the city more relevant right now,” he said.
Ultimately, however, Mr. Ropac advised against overestimating Paris, and said London was definitely still “critical.” As evidence, he pointed to the continued success of Tate Modern as a center of modern and contemporary art.
“I wouldn’t write off London at all,” he added. “I think these two cities can almost perfectly coexist.”