An impression of the new Frank Gehry structure in Arles

Arles and the Luma Foundation

Arles is a city of obvious, exotic attractions: ancient Roman buildings, brilliant blue skies, winding streets and brightly painted houses, market stalls heaped with dusty green artichokes and perfect cheeses, the Camargue’s wild delta landscape right on its doorstep. Vincent Van Gogh, inspired by its dazzling light, made more than 30 paintings and hundreds of drawings in Arles from 1888 to 1889.

“I was wondering if I should move my office here,” mused 85-year-old Canadian-born, California-based architect Frank Gehry, when he was here in early April for a stone-laying ceremony for a new building. “Los Angeles, where I live, is a car town. You come here and see the quality of life in the streets and the cafés, and it’s pretty idyllic, a living city.”

Behind the prettiness and the history is a southern French town where the books don’t always balance. Unemployment, at 11-12 per cent among its population of 54,000, is above the national average. In 1986, the SNCF rail yard was decommissioned, leaving a large site of empty post-industrial sheds, and a large hole in the town’s job opportunities. Tourism fills some economic gaps: there are 600,000 visitors a year. In April, the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, a $15m project to which the Van Gogh Institute in Amsterdam will lend at least eight canvases a year, also opened. It estimates that 80,000 people will pass through its shiny new glazed atrium in its first year.

The president of the Fondation Van Gogh is Swiss ornithologist Luc Hoffmann, beneficiary of the Hoffmann-La Roche pharmaceutical fortune, who first came to the Camargue in 1947, and has done much to protect the area’s unique wetlands. His daughter Maja, 58, herself president of the Fondation Van Gogh’s artistic committee, is following in his philanthropic footsteps, albeit prioritising art over wildlife. Although she owns properties all over the world (a 19th-century former school house in New York, an Adam mansion in London, a cottage on Mustique, a Marcel Breuer villa in Zurich) and was born in Switzerland, she considers herself Arlésienne. “We moved here when I was one week old,” she said. “It’s where I grew up. The big skies are something I think about wherever I am.”

In July 2013 Maja Hoffmann’s Luma Foundation was granted permission to develop the 20-acre former SNCF site – called the Parc des Ateliers in reference to the huge 19th-century sheds where trains were once made and repaired – into a radical new art campus. The Luma Foundation – set up in 2004 and named after her teenage children Lucas and Marina – has helped a range of art and environmental projects including the cultural programme of London’s Olympic Park. The Arles project will cost €100m and be finished when Gehry’s glittering cluster of stainless steel-clad blocks is completed in 2018.

But at the stone-laying ceremony on April 5, the communist mayor Hervé Schiavetti’s rousing speech – ending Vive la gloire arlésienne, Vive Frank Gehry! Vive Maja Hoffmann! – didn’t resonate well with everyone in the town. François Hebel, for example, who had overseen the past 13 editions of the city’s highly successful Rencontres, a festival of photography that takes place throughout the town every July to September, resigned from his directorship of the event earlier this year after Hoffmann announced that her Luma Foundation would be taking over the site.

“Seven years ago, I suggested to Maja Hoffmann that she buy these ateliers to refurbish them for Les Rencontres d’Arles,” he told web reporter Molly Benn in March. “But in 2009 she changed her mind and came up with the project of a contemporary art centre. She wanted, little by little, to expel Les Rencontres.”.....Continue Reading

> via FT