François Pinault is a French businessman and art collector who built a retail empire known for its high-end merchandise. He founded the luxury conglomerate Kering as well as the investing firm Artémis. He stands at the 32nd position in the list of billionaires of 2021 by Forbes and has been ranked at 25th position in the Bloomberg's index.
François Pinault was born on August 21, 1936, in Les Champs-Géraux, a commune in Brittany's northwestern region. His father worked as a timber merchant.
Pinault began his career working for his father's timber company before founding Société Pinault, a plumber and building products company, in 1963. (reorganized as Pinault SA in 1988).
Pinault grew up in the countryside of France, where he began his career working for his family's lumber company. At the age of 16, he left the College Saint-Martin in Rennes, where upper-class students taunted him about his rustic dialect and peasant origins. During the Algerian conflict in 1956, he enlisted in the military. Following that, he returned to the family firm, which he had sold after his father died.
He married Louise Gautier in 1962. François-Henri, Dominique, and Laurence Pinault were their three children but later got divorced. Pinault married Maryvonne Campbell, an antique trader in Rennes who introduced him to the world of art, in 1970 after the pair separated five years earlier. This is when he made his first art acquisitions.
Pinault bought department retailer Au Printemps SA in 1992 and became Pinault-Printemps-Redoute in 1994 after buying mail-order company La Redoute (renamed PPR in 2005). He added a diverse range of companies through his holding company, Artémis SA, which he created in 1992. Pinault's purchase of a nearly 30% investment in Christie's, a British auction house, in 1998 signified his turn toward high-end brands—and confirmed his interest in art.
Pinault developed luxury goods merchant Gucci Group NV into a premium-brand conglomerate after purchasing a majority share in the company in 1992. Samsonite luggage and a ski resort in Vail, Colorado were among his American interests. Pinault then bought Boucheron, a French jewellery company, in 2000, Balenciaga in 2001, and Alexander McQueen, a British design house, in 2002.
Pinault passed over control of his businesses to his son, François-Henri, in May 2003. PPR's Chairman, François-Henri Pinault, continued to consolidate the luxury industry by acquiring additional brands. PPR changed their name to Kering in 2013. Sales for the group totaled 13.66 billion euros in 2018, increasing 26.3 percent from the previous year.
Pinault was also an ardent art collector, having amassed over 3,000 works by the early twenty-first century. After failing to create a museum in France, Pinault purchased the Palazzo Grassi in Venice in 2005 and began exhibiting a small portion of his collection there the following year, including pieces by Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons. Pinault and the Palazzo Grassi were chosen in 2007 to build a modern art museum on the Grand Canal's Punta della Dogana, a disused Venetian customs house.
The museum, which opened in 2009 and featured a number of paintings from Pinault's collection, has an interior built by Japanese architect Ando Tadao.
The Pinault Collection museum, which the French billionaire François Pinault has dreamed of opening to display his renowned contemporary art collection in Paris opened on May 22, 2021.
