"It's a sort of vanity, a memento mori," Pinault said an interview with Paris-Match, adding drolly: "It's one of the possible answers to Where Are We Going?"
The rest of the exhibition fills two floors of the palazzo, where Ando has created self-contained spaces for individual artists and for group displays. And while some rooms are small, their windows face the courtyard or the canal, giving, for instance, three large Rothko oils ample breathing space.
The third floor, which dwells on Minimalism, gives its front gallery to six fine Judd sculptures, which look very much at home. Cy Twombly, Robert Ryman, Dan Flavin and Brice Marden also have their own rooms and, from Pinault's large collection of Arte Povera, there are works by Mario Merz, Jannis Kounellis, Pier Paulo Calzolari, Giuseppe Penone and Michelangelo Pistoletto.
The front gallery of the second floor is devoted to the eclectic art of Hirst, including two of his sliced cows preserved in formaldehyde, a steel cabinet lined with colored pills called Infinity, and The Fragile Truth, shelves covered by boxes of medicine. Gingeras has borrowed the show's title from Hirst's cabinet with animal skeletons, called Where Are We Going? Where Do We Come From? Is There A Reason?
Also presented alone are Koons and Sherman (with disturbing photographs of the genitalia of strange mannequins), while Mike Kelley, Paul McCarthy and Charles Ray confirm Pinault's interest in American art. More unexpected, though, is Maurizio Cattelan's Him, a schoolboy-size figure kneeling and looking into the corner of a room: closer inspection reveals Him to be a miniature Adolf Hitler.
Pinault has explained that he likes to collect artists in depth, while occasionally selling isolated works to strengthen other parts of his collection. (In June, he sold Robert Rauschenberg's Rebus to the Museum of Modern Art in New York for around US$30 million.) But Gingeras noted that he was also continually "pushing toward things he doesn't know."
Clearly, it helps to be rich. In the catalog, Pinault recalls the first painting that "deeply affected" him: "I took the painting home with me." And, fascinated by a Mondrian, "I bought it." But now, since he has handed the reins of his corporate empire to his son, Francois-Henri, art consumes his life. "Living with artworks has led me to question myself more," he writes, "to avoid being a prisoner of my convictions, to break with the comfort of habit."
Aillagon, who is charged with planning the Palazzo Grassi's future shows, said they will reach outside Pinault's collection. This fall, for example, the palace will present Picasso and the Joie de Vivre, followed next year by an exhibition exploring creativity in 1967 and an Arte Povera show, which will rely on Pinault's holdings.
Every two years from 2008 through 2016, Aillagon is preparing major exhibitions addressing Europe's relations with the world through the ages, starting with Rome and the barbarians and continuing with Christianity and Islam and successively with Europe and the Americas, the Far East and Africa.
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