Francois Pinault: Red tape

London, May 11: A French billionaire is to move his modern art collection to Venice after claiming that unnecessary bureaucracy had destroyed his dream of creating a ?150-million rival to the Tate Modern and the Guggenheim on an island on the Seine.

Francois Pinault, one of France’s richest men with a business empire stretching from Gucci and Christie’s to the Chateau Latour vineyard, has struggled for five years to establish the country’s biggest privately funded museum on the site of the old Renault works on the island of Seguin.

Instead, to a chorus of indignation from French newspapers, he will now house his collection in the 18th century Palazzo Grassi on Venice’s Grand Canal.

Explaining his decision in Le Monde, Pinault said he was acting with “immense disappointment and great sadness”.

But he complained of facing years of delay before he could realise his hope of giving France a “temple to contemporary art” on the Seine just west of Paris.

“Eternity is the time of art, not of those projects that seek to serve it,” he wrote, making little attempt to conceal his exasperation at the collapse of his project.

Designed in the shape of an ocean liner by the award-winning Japanese architect Tadao Ando, the complex would have housed Pinault’s collection of 2,500 items including paintings, sculpture and videos.

Although his idea has always been to display his art to the public, mystery surrounds the actual content.