The man who saved Venice's treasures

François Pinault, the French former timber merchant who with his billions has quietly turned the European luxury goods sector into his personal fiefdom (Gucci, Yves St Laurent, the Chateau Latour vineyard, Christie's auction house, etc, etc), this week extends his reach to Venice when the first selection of his vast collection of modern art opens in a palazzo on the Grand Canal.

Venice will never forgive the first French invasion, when the arrival of Napoleon in 1797 brought the curtain down on the Venetian Republic. But they are delighted to have M. Pinault.

For more than 20 years, Palazzo Grassi, built in the Republic's twilight years, was the cultural flagship of the Agnellis, the Fiat dynasty, and the host of many distinguished exhibitions. But when they put it on the market last year, many feared the city would lose one of its most important cultural nodes and gain yet another flashy hotel.

But François Pinault, on the rebound from a long and frustrating attempt to turn the site of an old Renault car factory on an island in the Seine into his own art museum, came to the rescue. He bought an 80 per cent share in the building, and at incredible speed has turned it into the most ambitious new art museum to open in the city since Peggy Guggenheim set up shop decades ago on the other side of the Grand Canal.

The transformation of the interior of the palace by the Jap-anese minimalist architect Tadao Ando took ive months. On Sunday, the made-over Palazzo Grassi throws open its doors to the Venetians with an inaugural exhibition entitled (in English), "Where are we going?"

Whether the Venetians will like what they find is an open question. Yes it is art of a kind, but is it Venice? At the press preview yesterday, roaming through room after room of large minimalist paintings hung on tall white partitions that hide the period walls, one local man said with a look of pained disbelief: "They have completely denatured the palazzo. There's nothing Venetian about it any more. They would have been just as well doing this show in a garage."

The shock effect, of course, is deliberate; what would be modern about modern art if it did not stop you in your tracks? The effect starts at the canal-side entrance, which is now dominated by Balloon Dog (magenta), a huge poodle apparently made from magenta-coloured balloons, though actually constructed of steel, by Jeff Koons.

The palazzo's high classical façade is illuminated after dark by a cobweb of lights designed by the Danish artist Olafur Eliasson; through the grand portico, past large two comical multi-coloured resin puppets by Takashi Murakami, you come face to face with another giant Koons, a massive, red, balloon-like heart dangling from the ceiling as if lighter than air, though it weighs a ton and a half.

Inside, one pads across a floor of coloured Carl Andre tiles (the infamous Tate Gallery "pile of bricks" man) up stairs under a storm of floating, pink, suspended spermatozoa, to be confronted at the landing by a "portrait" of the padrone, M. Pinault himself: a thermographic image of his skull and humerus bones, arranged in a piratical skull and crossbones, "hardly an obvious way of flattering a contemporary Maecenas and Medici", as the catalogue puts it.

François Pinault was already wealthy when he got hooked on art. His first love was conventional, a painting of an old Breton woman. "I liked this painting; it touched me," he says. "The more I looked at it, the more I had the impression of perceiving a mystery, which issued, I assumed, from the ineffable spirit of the artist. I took the painting home."

But M. Pinault's real epiphany came years later, when in 1991 his eyes were opened to the world of the New York minimalists.

The painter Robert Ryman, M. Pinault says, "opened the doors of the minimalist universe, showing me a place where the mind was liberated from the insignificance of details and led into a communion with the essence of existence. I admired these artists, their refusal to compromise, their audacious attitude, and their provocation". He took mountains of them home.

And here they are, on the Palazzo's top floor, against walls "denatured" by Tadao Ando, room after room of canvases covered with almost nothing. In the press kit, it is described, oddly, as "a personal portrait of the collector himself".

Alison M Gingeras, the 32-year-old Pinault poached from the Guggenheim in New York as curator, said: "There is a narrative to the show. You understand that he's not a passive collector or someone who does it as a part-time hobby; he's someone who does it as a central part of his life."

Seasoned modern art hands are yawning at the domination of this show by familiar names. The people are likely to be more impressed, after they get over the fact that it has got nothing to do with Venice (and little to do with France). M. Pinault is a true enthusiast, and it is infectious.