Paris is currently enjoying not one but two Frank Gehry exhibitions: a major new retrospective at the Centre Pompidou, and a spot of navel-gazing at the brand-new Fondation Louis Vuitton, whose inaugural temporary show is all about the creation of the Fondation's instantly 'iconic' building (which, a la Guggenheim Bilbao, is already represented on metro signs by a silhouette of itself). In its promotional blurb, the Pompidou retrospective claims to be the first in Europe, but strictly speaking this isn't true: after opening in New York, the 2001 Guggenheim Gehry retrospective transferred to Bilbao for a run of six months. But the French can claim a European first in the sense that, unlike the ail-American team that put together the Guggenheim show, it was Gallic heavyweight Frederic Migayrou [who also put together Japan Architects 1945-2010, reviewed on the next page], with his compatriot Aurelien Lemonier, who curated this exhibition. So does their Old World viewpoint bring us a startlingly new way of seeing Gehry? The answer is no, but what they do give us is a solid, traditional, stately march-past of the architect's career. It's probably worth mentioning at this point that Gehry himself was involved in the preparations, so the chances that this would be anything other than the official version of the story were pretty slim.
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