The Groove 247 - Paris from the Salon to the Grand Palais
Welcome to the 247th issue of The Groove.
I am Maria Brito, an art advisor, curator, and author based in New York City.
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PARIS FROM THE SALON TO THE GRAND PALAIS
Gagosian’s booth under the glass dome of the Grand Palais last week at Art Basel Paris where a Peter Paul Rubens was in dialogue with Pablo Picasso, John Currin, Jenny Saville and many more contemporary artists.
Paris didn’t put on a fair last week; it staged an argument with history under a glass dome.
I’ve been coming to Paris every year since the ’90s, and the change in the art space is real. Art Basel Paris launched under a temporary tent called Palais Éphémère (then branded Paris+) in 2022. Now, in its fourth edition (and its second at the Grand Palais), the fair has recharged the city’s artistic energy with propulsion jets at a moment when Brexit has hurt the U.K. in more ways than David Cameron and the voters who backed it could have imagined.
Paris isn’t playing a supporting role to London anymore; it’s behaving like the city that wrote the modern playbook.
Gagosian literally hung a $9M Rubens painting called The Virgin and Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (c. 1611–14), in its booth, beside contemporary paintings by John Currin, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Jenny Saville. The message was unmissable: this city speaks across centuries, and it is buying prime material.
Here’s the bigger story: Paris has done this before. It built the public stage for art in the 1700s, lost the crown to New York after WWII, and now, without pretending to dethrone New York, is back in the present tense.
Paris Built the Prototype and the Off-Ramps
Paris didn’t put on a fair last week; it staged an argument with history under a glass dome.
I’ve been coming to Paris every year since the ’90s, and the change in the art space is real. Art Basel Paris launched under a temporary tent called Palais Éphémère (then branded Paris+) in 2022. Now, in its fourth edition (and its second at the Grand Palais), the fair has recharged the city’s artistic energy with propulsion jets at a moment when Brexit has hurt the U.K. in more ways than David Cameron and the voters who backed it could have imagined.
Paris isn’t playing a supporting role to London anymore; it’s behaving like the city that wrote the modern playbook.
Gagosian literally hung a $9M Rubens painting called The Virgin and Christ Child, with Saints Elizabeth and John the Baptist (c. 1611–14), in its booth, beside contemporary paintings by John Currin, Jadé Fadojutimi, and Jenny Saville. The message was unmissable: this city speaks across centuries, and it is buying prime material.
Here’s the bigger story: Paris has done this before. It built the public stage for art in the 1700s, lost the crown to New York after WWII, and now, without pretending to dethrone New York, is back in the present tense.
Paris Built the Prototype and the Off-Ramps
If you’re looking for the ancestors of the modern art fair, start in Paris. The eighteenth-century Salon trained the public how to look at many different new artworks at the same time under the same roof. When that stage got conservative, avant-garde artists invented parallel platforms: the Salon des Refusés (1863) for “rejects”, the Société des Artistes Indépendants (1884) with no jury or prizes, and the Salon d’Automne (1903) to keep the pipeline open. Today’s main fair plus the satellite ones (Paris Internationale, Asia Now, 7 Rue Froissart) follow the model that Paris invented before electricity was fashionable.
By the early 1900s, the city was a live wire. Picasso arrives in 1900 and in 1907, Cubism splits the atom. Breton writes the Surrealist Manifesto in 1924, allowing unrestrained dreams to go global.
Paris was both official and insurgent: state exhibition and counter-exhibition often on the same boulevard. That’s why a cross-century hang feels natural here. It’s not nostalgia but muscle memory.
The Stream Shifted West
War scattered artists and patrons. By the 1940s and 50s, Abstract Expressionism gave New York a new center of gravity: the museums toured it through Europe, critics canonized it, and the “capital” moved.
Paris never stopped mattering, but the world started flying to JFK. That’s the backdrop for every “Is Paris back?” headline: we’re always measuring against that postwar pivot.
The point isn’t to rewrite history. New York is still number one by depth and velocity. But Paris is clearly compounding again: not through nostalgia but momentum.
You can feel it when dealers bring museum-grade material because they know the city will meet them, not just photograph them. You don’t ship a Rubens (the insurance premium alone had me sweating) if you expect people to speed-walk past it. You ship a Rubens if you expect people to seriously look at it.
Paris, 2025: The Renaissance Is Real
Under the restored Grand Palais glass, Art Basel Paris is behaving like a serious anchor, with edited guest lists, earlier ultra-VIP previews, and booths staged like mini-museums. Around it, the city stacks its A+ programming: Fondation Louis Vuitton just opened the largest Gerhard Richter retrospective the world has ever seen (275 works across four floors) and possibly one of the best shows I’ve experienced in my life. At least 150 gallery shows in Le Marais, Matignon and Saint-Germain, double the amount of those in London. This is what a cultural environment looks like when it decides to be in the present tense again.
The receipts are there, too. According to the Art Basel & UBS 2025 report, France is now the fourth-largest art market worldwide (7% share) with about $4.2B in 2024 sales, more than half of the EU’s total by value, even in a softer global year. Translation for collectors: enough liquidity to surface top material, enough focus to keep it prime.
Even a jewelry heist at the Louvre couldn’t break the rhythm. The museum was back open by Wednesday, and I spent an afternoon with Jacques-Louis David. It was all edge, politics and and ethics, remembering that Paris’s native language is history performed in the now. That’s the city’s trick: it lets yesterday sit in judgment of today, and somehow both benefit.
So yes, the market matters. But what’s happening here is bigger than price action because everything is knitting itself tighter: galleries, museums, private foundations, and a public that still shows up.
Paris is staging past and present in the same breath, and this time it feels like oxygen, not hype.