Perrotin and his artists offer 23 works to the Centre Pompidou

Donating works to a public institution is a fairly natural gesture for private collectors – and it is one of the essential means of enrichment for large museums that rarely have the means to match their ambitions (approximately 2 million euros of annual acquisition budget for the National Museum of Modern Art). The action of gallery owners in this sense is less well known but it includes some significant examples such as the donation by Yvon Lambert in 2012, now exhibited in Avignon, or those made between 1973 and 1989 for the Centre Pompidou by Daniel Cordier, secretary of Jean Moulin, resistance fighter and dealer, which total more than 500 pieces, preserved and shown for the most part at the Abattoirs in Toulouse. The National Museum of Modern Art has regularly benefited, for a long time, from donations from gallery owners.explains its director, Xavier Rey. To take a broad time frame, this goes from the donation of Louise and Michel Leiris in 1984 to that of the Durand-Desserts, carried out in several stages and finalized in…