How Chanel Is Supporting Artists With Its Unconventional Culture Fund

She may have been superstitious, but Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel never needed a crystal ball to see the future, or to make it happen.

She started the trend for sun-kissed skin, took inspiration from maids’ uniforms and nuns’ habits for her little black dresses, and dressed women in tweeds and tailoring that allowed them to twist, turn and move freely.

In the case of art, she was blind to the barriers between disciplines, and befriended avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Igor Stravinsky; Sergei Diaghilev; Salvador Dalí; Pablo Picasso; Man Ray, and Marcel Duchamp.

She designed costumes for Jean Cocteau’s plays, and anonymously donated hundreds of thousands of French francs to guarantee the 1920 production of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” a controversial, Modernist ballet performed by Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes.

Such was her love of artists, and the arts, that it’s the theme of a new exhibition, “Coco Chanel: Beyond Fashion,” at Centro Cultural de Cascais, near Lisbon, Portugal. The show, which runs until Nov. 3, examines how Chanel and her artist friends fed each other’s ambitions — and imaginations.

“I want to be a part of what is next,” said Chanel, who cared little for convention, and thrived on the excitement of what the future could bring.

Chanel’s owners and original backers, the Wertheimer family, have taken to heart Mademoiselle’s embrace of the arts — and the avant-garde — tapping Yana Peel as the company’s first global head of arts and culture in 2020, and launching the Chanel Culture Fund a year later.

A philanthropist and former chief executive officer of the Serpentine Galleries in London, Peel leads the fund, which supports artists, and works with curators, museums and institutions on what she describes as “long-term, transformational” projects.  

Peel started quietly, with a focus mainly in Asia, but her projects are moving westward, to London, Chicago and Venice. Of late, Chanel has been working closely with the National Portrait Gallery, and earlier this year the brand returned to the Art Biennale in Venice for the first time since 2008.

The fund has also recently partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on a project called Contemporary DNA, which aims to highlight artists from the Global South.

The fund’s aim is to extend the vision of “the Gabrielle and Stravinsky moment, support artists and create the conditions to dare,” which is such a rare thing, says Peel from the Chanel offices at the Time & Life building in London’s Mayfair.

“Often, the metabolism of arts is so frenzied. Artists and institutions are often looking for support quarter by quarter, show by show, project by project,” says the glamorous, high-energy Peel, whose priority is to buy creatives — and curators — time to create, research, discover — and future-proof their institutions.

Peel wants the fund to work locally, with discretion, and in a “nontransactional, noncommercial, enduring and authentic” way. Chanel won’t ask the artists it supports to design a bag, create the backdrop for a runway, or sit front-row at a fashion show.

A Focus on Public Projects

Chanel isn’t planning on building museums, either.

While other luxury groups and their billionaire owners may hire fancy architects and erect spaces to showcase their private collections, Chanel is taking a more business-to-business approach and focusing on public, art-for-all projects.

As always, the strategy is about the Chanel brand rather than the Wertheimers, the creative director, or the C-suite managers.

“The brand is strong,” said Bruno Pavlovsky, president of fashion and president of Chanel SAS, in June, adding that Chanel is in no hurry to find a new creative director following the abrupt departure of Virginie Viard earlier this year after a decades-long career at the company.

Peel has been leveraging that soft power to help artists and institutions around the world with specific, and site-based projects, ranging from brick-and-mortar renovations to bolstering the number of women artists and curators at various institutions.

Earlier this year, Chanel extended its partnership with the Power Station of Art, or PSA, in Shanghai, with plans to fund a comprehensive upgrade of the third floor, which will be named the Espace Gabrielle Chanel. 

The floor, which spans more than 10,000 square feet, will include China’s first public contemporary art library; an archive of Chinese contemporary art; an exhibition space; a small arts theater, and a riverside terrace.

(The blockbuster exhibition “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto” landed at PSA in July, part of its worldwide tour. It will remain open until late November.)

The Chanel Culture Fund has also been working with Hong Kong’s M+, naming Silke Schmickl as Chanel lead curator of Moving Image.

In late 2023, the fund partnered with the Leeum Museum of Art in Seoul on a long-term public program called Idea Museum. Since then there have been symposiums, film screenings and reading seminars reflecting the museum’s core themes of inclusivity, diversity, equality and access.

Closer to home, Chanel has struck multiyear partnerships with the Centre Pompidou in Paris; London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam.

At the Pompidou, Chanel is helping to develop new research partnerships aimed at advancing thinking on ecology, city design and sustainability. Chanel has been working to increase the number of works by women artists at the Rijksmuseum, and at the National Portrait Gallery.

At the NPG, it has installed a Chanel Curator, Dr. Flavia Frigeri, and last year supported “Yevonde: Life and Colour,” the largest-ever exhibition of photography pioneer Yevonde Middleton’s work.

The gallery had acquired Middleton’s tricolor separation negative archive in 2021, and the Chanel fund later supported its research, cataloguing and digitization. That work led to the mounting of the exhibition last year.

Tristram Hunt, director of the Victoria and Albert Museum, where “Gabrielle Chanel. Fashion Manifesto” had a successful run last year, says Peel “has leveraged the creative authority of Chanel to ensure that diverse voices from across the cultural world are brought into conversation.”

Hunt adds that Peel’s “convening power, personal energy, and natural feel for the arts landscape has made a signal difference in London’s museum and gallery circles.”

One of Peel’s projects that’s even closer to home is “The Window,” a 24-hour public installation showcasing innovative digital art commissioned by Chanel. The Window adorns the facade of the Time & Life building, on the corner of Bruton and New Bond streets in London’s Mayfair.

The Window is a natural extension of the building’s own art, specifically the chunky Henry Moore stone sculptures that are arranged horizontally into a “screen” that faces the street. Moore’s idea was to give those Portland stone statues a dynamism, and make them look as if they were escaping from the building.

Peel took Moore’s idea to heart to create the ever-changing, digital screen.

“Henry Moore never had the technology to move his sculptures around in the way that he would have liked, but now we can get the most extraordinary screen. Every two months, we can commission an artist and give them visibility. It’s been a beautiful program that has allowed us to layer in future-facing themes,” she says.

The 2024 season of The Window opened with “Triglav of Berl-Berl,” a digital artwork by the Danish artist Jakob Kudsk Steensen. The artist scanned the marshes that lie near Berlin, creating a minutely detailed, 3D simulation of the flora, fauna and wildlife that live there. 

The Window has also featured “wet sunlight Paradis ‘pomme de terre’ 3D” by Petra Cortright, a nine-minute journey through a surreal, computer-generated panorama of landscapes — and outer space.

Last year, The Window showcased work by the Shanghai-based digital artist Lu Yang. The street-facing space came alive with animated installations inspired by Japanese manga and gaming subcultures, a way of looking at gender representation in China.

Busy at the Biennale

The Chanel Culture Fund is having a moment at the 60th edition of the Art Biennale in Venice, where it is supporting the multimedia artist Julien Creuzet.

Born in Paris and raised in Martinique, Creuzet is the first person of Caribbean descent and the first artist from the French overseas territories to represent France at the Venice Biennale, which runs until Nov. 24.

The fund’s support of Creuzet marks the return of Chanel to the Biennale for the first time since Zaha Hadid designed the 2008 mobile art pavilion for the brand.

It was 16 years ago that Hadid unveiled her contemporary art “container,” a gleaming white, UFO-like structure. She did the reveal alongside Karl Lagerfeld, Chanel’s iconic creative director who was a compulsive collector and lover of the arts.

In May, Chanel marked its Biennale moment with a dinner at Palazzo Malipiero in Venice. Guests included Creuzet, the winners of the 2024 Chanel Next Prize, and a host of philanthropists and friends of the brand such as Hunt, Sadie Coles, Nicholas Cullinan, Cornelia Guest, Maja Hoffmann, Jay Jopling, Vicky Krieps, Peter Marino and Hans-Ulrich Obrist.

“Art is the greatest form of hope, and offers the greatest potential for shared meaning,” said Peel at the dinner as she raised a glass to the brand’s guests.

The prize, which takes place every two years and is named for Coco Chanel’s desire to remain a step ahead, is awarded to international, contemporary artists who are “redefining their disciplines.”

Each of the 10 winners receives 100,000 euros in funding to realize their most ambitious artistic projects. The prize is open to artists of all ages, genders and nationalities, and the grant recipients also receive mentoring from Chanel’s art partners.

The Chanel Culture Fund has also been working with institutions in North America, including the Toronto International Film Festival. Cameron Bailey, the festival’s CEO, says Peel has been “shining a light on some of cinema’s most remarkable women for years.”

It has partnered with the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago on a project called Contemporary DNA, a multi-year, academic initiative aimed at spotlighting underrepresented artists from the Global South, which includes Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia, and Oceania.

Before the project came about, Peel remembers the Chicago curators telling her there were so many pieces in the collection that had never been highlighted or celebrated. The museum had long been eager to hire curators specialized in the Global South so the art and objects could finally get the attention they deserved.

Peel points out the museum didn’t need new acquisitions. “It needed scholarship,” says Peel, who quickly got to work.

Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago now plans to welcome six Chanel Curatorial Fellows (chosen by Jamillah James, Manilow senior curator, and Nolan Jimbo, assistant curator) whose research will focus on the previously neglected region.

Madeleine Grynsztejn, Pritzker director of Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, says Peel has a “rare, overarching perspective on contemporary art and artists, and what museums need to be today, and into the future. She is absolutely unique in investing in the people and organizations who create culture, and giving us all free reign.”

Peel loves her job, and can’t stop strategizing, solving art world conundrums and convening fellow lovers of the arts.

Chanel, the Podcast

In 2021, during lockdown, she came up with Chanel Connects, a podcast series that looks at “what’s new and next in arts and culture.”

The latest season highlights some of the artists, curators and cultural movers at the Venice Biennale, such as the painter and filmmaker William Kentridge; the actress Vicky Krieps, and Frieze magazine editor in chief Andrew Durbin.

Earlier this year, together with the Aspen Institute, Peel organized the Chanel Cultural Leaders Forum for Art Partners, a private event that brought together members of the fund’s network to brainstorm and talk about future opportunities.

A Russian native, Peel was born in Saint Petersburg, and later moved to Canada with her family. She attended McGill University as an undergraduate, and earned a postgraduate degree in economics at London School of Economics before starting her career at Goldman Sachs.

Before serving as CEO of The Serpentine Galleries, Peel lived in Hong Kong, where she founded and served as the CEO of Intelligence Squared Asia, a global forum for live debate. She also co-chaired Para Site, the contemporary art center in Hong Kong, and one of the oldest art institutions in Asia.

Peel argues that her pivot from banking to the art world wasn’t such a big one. She paraphrases Oscar Wilde, who used to say that “when bankers get together for dinner, they discuss art. When artists get together for dinner, they discuss money.”

Coco Chanel would have agreed, and probably would have been a regular at both dinners, coming up with ways to keep her artist friends on the stage, at their writing desks, or in their studios, mapping out the future.