A tale of two philanthropies: why private foundations differ in London and Paris – The Art Newspaper

Despite new tax regimes unsettling its rich, London’s private philanthropy landscape has gained two promising additions this month. In a grand Georgian townhouse on Bedford Square, YDP (Yan Du Projects) sees the eponymous Chinese patron launch an exhibition venue and artist residency for Asian and Asian diasporic art. A 15-minute walk away, behind a neo-Baroque façade in Fitzrovia, is Ibraaz: a space for art of the “global majority”, funded by the Tunisian investment banker Kamel Lazaar and run by his daughter, the curator and former Sotheby’s specialist Lina Lazaar.

“‘Global majority’ is an intentionally broad term,” Lina Lazaar says. “There are no limits really as to where it ends.” She hopes to embed a sense of “hospitality and open-endedness”, across Ibraaz’s four floors. In a former ballroom, Ibrahim Mahama’s Parliament of Ghosts installation of salvaged armchairs upholstered in African wax-print cloth is “an invitation for all to convene”, she says. Upstairs, a library compiled by the Otolith Group is filled with texts by radical leftist and post-colonial thinkers like Karl Marx and Kwame Nkumrah, announcing a serious, progressive politics; the bookstore is presently devoted to Palestinian authors.

Yan Du similarly aims to foster a sense of community and artistic inquiry: “I didn’t set out to establish a beautiful exhibition space, but a place for experimentation.” YDP, she explains, sits alongside her existing foundation, Asymmetry, focused on funding Sinophone researchers and curators.

With their focus on diversity and identity, Du and Lazaar—both in their early 40s—exemplify a newer generation of patrons dedicated more to social impact than private legacy building. As foreign philanthropists, London is a natural home for such ventures: Lazaar points out that she is part of the 41% of Londoners who are born outside the UK, and the 60% who identify as not white British.

It is not just foreigners, but their wealth, too, that finds a home in London. Since the abolition of foreign exchange controls in 1979, overseas capital and the arts funding it brings forth have played a central role. A key example is the private foundation Delfina, started in the 1980s by the Spanish philanthropist Delfina Entrecanales, whose influential residency programme has been supported by Lazaar and Du. “London is attracting philanthropic initiatives like YDP and Ibraaz because we have captive audiences. Our pluralism is structural, not superficial,” says Delfina’s director, Aaron Cezar. “While the UK has a chequered history of colonisation and empire, the level of discourse in regard to its decolonial and diasporic conditions is more advanced here than most other places.” What this diversity has led to, Cezaar continues, is an “arts ecology that is varied, balanced and porous”.

Power projects

While London’s patchwork network of private foundations is defined by smaller, and increasingly identity-led, projects, in Paris, a much grander vision of giving has taken form. This month, the French capital receives another vast private art museum headed by a luxury brand, courtesy of the Fondation Cartier, which has relocated to a Haussmann building that spans an entire city block opposite the Louvre. At 8,500 sq. m, Cartier’s new space is now larger than the Fondation Louis Vuitton, funded by France’s richest man, Bernard Arnault, but still eclipsed by the 10,500 sq. m Pinault Collection at the Bourse de Commerce.

These three art spaces—along with the smaller venture by Galeries Lafayette department store, Lafayette Anticipations—represent the now-dominant model of cultural philanthropy in Paris: huge private museums established by luxury goods companies, which are injecting enormous sums into the arts and promoting their brands in return.

Their existence can be explained by a mutually beneficial arrangement between France’s powerful luxury goods companies and the state, via a remarkably organised corporate philanthropy framework. The Cartier Foundation, established in 1984, is credited with sowing the seeds of this model, while the 2003 Aillagon Law, which implemented major tax breaks for companies investing in public culture projects, catalysed the process: France’s corporate donations increased from €1bn in 2004 to more than €4bn in 2023.

Martin Bethenod, the former managing director of the Pinault Collection, tells The Art Newspaper that laws such as Aillagon have had a “huge impact” on France’s art sector. So has the will of its public servants: he points out that Paris’s mayor, Anne Hidalgo, was central in securing the Bourse de Commerce space for Kering owner Francois Pinault, in a bid to return the billionaire’s collection from Venice to Paris and assert the city’s cultural dominance. Bethenod also emphasises how the huge acquisition budgets for these foundations have helped to “uplift the art market, benefitting artists and gallerists from emerging to the established”.

London vs Paris

London has not seen this level of patronage as singular and self-aggrandising since Charles Saatchi, the mega-collector credited with helping catapult Britain’s art scene in the 1990s. Certainly, little is being done to foster such outsized forces today; consider that the UK’s largest luxury goods brand, Burberry, has recently chosen to sponsor a gallery at the Victoria & Albert Museum, rather than opening its own space. As Cezar points out, the UK lacks France’s “top-down” approach, and there is “little in the way of corporate giving structures, despite dwindling public funding”.

The difference in the patronage structures is further explained by Scott Stover, a philanthropy expert based in Paris. While France has focused more on corporate donations, due to the centralised nature of its cultural patronage “dating back to Louis XIV”, the UK has developed a far greater network of individual giving—the result of its public museums having faced spending cuts for more than three decades, which has led them to adopt US-style fundraising models. He says: “UK institutions have been more friendly to private patrons than in France, which is still more distrustful of private money.”

Generational attitudes factor, too. While Paris’s museums place collections at the centre, London’s spaces are more untethered from their founder’s art purchases. As Du remarks, the notion of opening a space to house your collection “is a rather classic form of patronage—I’m looking for a new model”. The art industry adviser May Calil puts it more bluntly: “In London, it’s simply not cool to show off your collection the way it is in Paris.”

The benefits each model presents for the arts are keenly debated. Bethenod points out that the French private foundations are able to stage “the most exciting shows that no public institution could dream of”. Who, after all, can compete with Fondation Louis Vuitton’s largest-ever monographic shows of artists like David Hockney and Rothko?

But while the carte-blanche handed to artists by a small handful of French private museums has raised the bar for the grandeur of exhibition making, whether it is fostering a sustainable ecosystem is called into question. Calil suggests that in London, patrons are focused on developing arts at a more human scale, which might be more beneficial in the long run. “Yan is heavily invested in fostering connections. Lina speaks of Ibraaz being a collaboration— consider how as you enter the space you are met with two spaces to convene, a bookstore and a cafe. I’m not sure if it would matter to Pinault or Arnault if their spaces were void of people.”

Stover meanwhile points out that the much larger scale of the French projects means they will likely have greater longevity. He refers to Anita Zabludowicz, a major force among London patrons, who closed her influential London foundation in 2023 following criticism over her links to the Israeli state.

One measure of success for both models might be their ability to generate new patrons. YDP’s model has been cited as directly inspiring another foundation soon bound for the UK: Upé, the forthcoming foundation focused on Baltic art headed by tech entrepreneur Justas Janauskas. Meanwhile, The Art Newspaper has learned of another foundation coming to London soon: that of the British billionaire Simon Nixon, which will focus on exhibitions.

Stover emphasises that while the models differ, the UK and French foundations are both responses to the same reality: diminishing public funding. And whether led by commitments to virtue or corporate enrichment, the arts on either side of the Channel are increasingly in the hands of a few private actors—a matter not of preference, but fact.