Guillaume Cerutti is stepping down from his position as the president of the Pinault Collection after only 13 months in the job. There has been no official statement and no explanation for his departure, which was first reported by the investigative publication Glitz and confirmed to The Art Newspaper by a Pinault Collection spokesperson on Thursday 26 March.
The former chief executive officer of Christie’s left London for Paris in February 2025 to take up the role at the Pinault Collection, the private collection of French billionaire François Pinault. The Pinault Collection comprises more than 10,000 works as well as museums in Paris and Venice. It also has a controlling stake in the luxury goods conglomerate Kering.
Guillaume Cerutti, 60, has worked for Pinault in a variety of capacities over the past decade. He still chairs the boards of Christie’s auction house as well as Stade Rennais Football Club, both of which are owned by the holding company Artémis, founded by Pinault in 1998.
Cerutti and Pinault declined to comment on the reason for the move when approached by The Art Newspaper. Cerutti, however, departs a crowded hierarchy within the relatively slim structure of the Pinault Collection. At the top of the pyramid, François Pinault is “président d’honneur”, or honorary president, however, even at the age of 89, he is still quite active in the life of the collection and the museums, with the assistance of his long-time advisor Jean-Jacques Aillagon. Pinault is expected in Venice this Friday to attend the openings of the exhibitions at the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta della Dogana.
The curator Emma Lavigne, meanwhile, is director general, having overall oversight of the museums in Paris and Venice. Bruno Racine heads the Venice venues, Palazzo Grassi and the Punta Dogana Museum. And Anne Poperen serves as the administrative and financial director.
The Pinault Collecton spokesperson said there were no plans to appoint a new president of the organisation or an interim.
Cerutti, a former high-level civil servant, was described by one of his mentors, Jean-Paul Cluzel, as a “Rolls Royce intellectual”.
He started at the France’s ministry of economy and finance where, in his 20s, he wrote reports which shaped the funding of cinema in France and the fate of the then- new opera house.
At the age of 30, he was called on by Jean-Jacques Aillagon, then the chair of the Centre Pompidou, to become the institution’s managing director. When Aillagon became France’s minister of culture, Cerruti joined him as his chief of staff, serving in the role from 2002 to 2004.
In 2007, he became the chief executive officer of Sotheby’s France, which he propelled from fourth to first in terms of auction house sales in the country. In 2011, took over as deputy chairman of Sotheby’s Europe. In 2016, François Pinault hired him as Christie’s president for Europe, Middle East, Russia and India. One year later, he was promoted to chief executive officer, in which position he oversaw major events such as the sales of the Salvator Mundi in London and the Peggy and David Rockefeller’s collection in New York.