Just a couple of months after Olympic fencers duelled in the newly renovated Grand Palais, Art Basel Paris opens its first fair there on Wednesday. “We’ve been in a transitional place [the Grand Palais Éphémère] for the past two years, building up to this truly inaugural edition in the most beautiful venue in the world: a place of history, a place of patrimony,” says Clément Delépine, director of Art Basel Paris.
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Weighty shows at Paris’s prestigious museums infuse the fair too. The Pompidou’s exhibition celebrating a century of Surrealism, for example, resonates in the booth of Paris-born Emmanuel Di Donna, who has operated a gallery in New York since 2010 and is one of 53 galleries new to the fair this year. From his stock of Surrealist works, he brings paintings by Yves Tanguy, Wifredo Lam, Agustín Cárdenas and Alicia Penalba (prices from about €40,000 for Penalba to over €4mn for Lam). These include Tanguy’s relatively early “Le Bateau” (1925-6), with stylised steam emerging from the boat’s three flattened funnels.