PRINTABLE VERSION HERE 

Last March, the IADS was interviewed by a French newspaper that wondered about the "recent incursion" of art into department stores. The journalist wanted to know whether this was a new way to lure customers or to offer them a novel type of luxury experience.

The question revealed a common misconception : the relationship between art and the department store did not begin with experiential retail, with Instagram, or with the contemporary art market's global expansion. It began at the inception of the format itself, in the 1870s, for reasons that were at once commercial, cultural, and societal: the need to offer an extraordinary experience to customers in the nineteenth century, the ambition to position the department store at the forefront of the avant-garde, and, in some countries, the imperative to replace cultural institutions that did not yet exist. Department stores did not wait for art to become a global market before making it part of their business model. They were there from the start.

What follows is a detailed examination of this history — from the founding gestures of the 1870s to the art foundations and museum partnerships of today — drawing on documented sources across five continents. It is addressed to the leaders of the department store sector, in the conviction that understanding this heritage is not a matter of nostalgia but of strategic clarity.

Born Together: Why Art Is in the Department Store's DNA

A shared origin with the museum

The modern department store and the modern public museum emerged in the same historical moment and share deep structural affinities. Both organise the display of objects within architecturally spectacular spaces; both choreograph a visitor's movement through carefully sequenced environments; and both rely on the power of visual staging to create desire, whether for knowledge or for acquisition. As historians argue, the "model rooms" of early department stores borrowed directly from museum display techniques, and the influence flowed in both directions.

Émile Zola captured this convergence when he described Le Bon Marché as a "cathedral of modern commerce" in Au Bonheur des Dames (1883). Zola's metaphor was not merely literary: it reflected the ambition of founders such as Aristide Boucicaut to create spaces that would elevate the act of shopping into a broader cultural experience, one that entertained, educated, and inspired.

Architecture as the first artistic statement

Before any painting was hung or any concert staged, the department store building itself constituted an artistic proposition. Le Bon Marché, designed by Louis-Charles Boileau, with Gustave Eiffel serving as consulting engineer, introduced an iron-and-glass structure of extraordinary ambition. Galeries Lafayette commissioned a neo-Byzantine dome executed in 1912 by the master glassmaker Jacques Gruber, whose stained-glass work also adorned El Palacio de Hierro in Mexico City. Across Europe and beyond, department stores deployed cupolas, monumental staircases, ornamental ironwork, and elaborate façades that placed them squarely within the vocabulary of civic and artistic architecture.

This was no accident. From the 1880s onward, the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris included the department store as a formal architectural programme in its competitions, confirming that the building type had earned a place in the artistic imagination.

The mechanisms of art integration

Beyond the building envelope, department stores developed a distinctive set of mechanisms through which art was woven into the retail experience. Four channels stand out.

The first was the store window as a space of artistic creation. The Viennese architect Frederick Kiesler theorised this practice as early as 1929 in Contemporary Art Applied to the Store and Its Display, while the American industrial designer Norman Bel Geddes conceived the windows of Franklin Simon in New York as a form of "street theatre." This tradition has recently been the subject of scholarly re-examination, notably through the exhibition Fresh Window at the Museum Tinguely in Basel (2024–2025).

The second was the integrated art gallery. Wanamaker's in Philadelphia opened a dedicated art gallery as early as 1881; Le Bon Marché, founded in 1852, established its own picture gallery in 1875; and Mitsukoshi in Tokyo created a formal art section in 1907. These were not marginal amenities: they occupied prominent floor space and were actively programmed.

The third was the cultural event as a service to clients. The Boucicaut introduced the concerts of the Harmonie du Bon Marché in 1873, alongside a reading room and a picture gallery, explicitly integrating culture into the customer proposition. In Japan, the Mitsukoshi Hall hosted kabuki performances, dance recitals, and public lectures, fulfilling a role that extended well beyond commerce.

The fourth, and perhaps the most significant in societal terms, was the democratisation of access to art. At a time when public museums were scarce — particularly outside major capitals — and commercial galleries catered exclusively to collectors, the department store opened art to a far broader audience. This function was especially pronounced in Japan, where the museum network remained embryonic until the post-war period, and in the United States, where department stores played a role in introducing modernist art and design to the middle-classes.

Strategic functions: prestige, differentiation, and flow

The integration of art into the department store has never been purely altruistic. From the beginning, it has served identifiable strategic functions that remain relevant today:

• Art confers prestige and social distinction. For the rising bourgeoisie of the 19 century, the department store's cultural programming — exhibitions, concerts, encounters with contemporary artists — offered a form of social legitimation. For today's high-net-worth clients, the presence of significant artworks continues to signal that a store operates at a level above purely transactional retail.

  th

• Art is also a powerful instrument of commercial differentiation. It separates the department store from more functional formats — the supermarket, the category specialist, the online marketplace — by embedding the shopping journey within a broader sensory and intellectual experience.
• Finally, researchers have identified two specific spatial effects that art generates within the store environment. The "fountain effect" describes the contemplative pause that an artwork or installation creates in the customer's path, slowing the pace and deepening engagement with the surrounding offer. The "shower effect" refers to the downward flow of visitor traffic from an upper-floor exhibition back through the selling floors, generating incremental exposure to merchandise.

A Consistent Commitment to the Avant-Garde: Department Stores and the Contemporary Art of Every Era

A common assumption is that department stores' embrace of contemporary art is recent, a response to the rise of experiential retail, social media, or the blurring of luxury and culture. The historical record tells a very different story. From the 1870s onward, in every decade and across every major market, department stores have consistently supported, exhibited, and commissioned the art that was most advanced in its time. This is not opportunism but a structural pattern.

1870–1910: embracing the avant-garde before the term existed

The earliest gestures were already bold. As described in the previous section, the Boucicaut gallery at Le Bon Marché (1875) did not confine itself to safe academic painting — it exhibited artists refused by the official Salon, aligning the store with the avant-garde before the term existed. By 1912, a gallery of decorative arts had been added, and in 1923, the store launched the Atelier Pomone, a dedicated furniture workshop aligned with the emerging modernist design movement.

La Samaritaine offered another demonstration that department stores sought out the most advanced architectural language of their time. When Ernest Cognacq commissioned the architect Frantz Jourdain to design the store's new building in 1905, the result was a manifesto of Art Nouveau applied to commercial architecture — polychrome ceramic façades, exposed iron structure, and decorative programmes that placed the store at the cutting edge of contemporary design. A second phase, completed in the 1930s by Henri Sauvage, added an Art Deco riverside façade of equal ambition. The Cognacq-Jay were also art collectors; their holdings eventually formed the Musée Cognacq-Jay, a public museum in the Marais.

In the United States, John Wanamaker's Philadelphia gallery (opened in 1881) imported French painting directly from the Paris Salons — a sustained acquisition programme documented in the Smithsonian Archives over more than three decades.

In Japan, the trajectory was different in origin but equally forward-looking. Mitsukoshi organised its first art exhibition in 1904, featuring works by the painter Ogata Kōrin. A formal art department was established in 1907, and in 1908, the Osaka branch hosted what is recognised as the first modern art exhibition held in a Japanese department store. This was not an imitation of the West but an expression of the Meiji-era ideology of Bunmei Kaika — "Civilisation and Enlightenment" — which positioned department stores as institutions capable of bridging progress and cultural preservation.

1920–1940: modernism enters the selling floor

The interwar decades represent perhaps the most striking chapter in this history. Department stores did not merely exhibit modern art — they became active vectors for its dissemination to audiences that no museum or gallery could reach. In New York, the Wanamaker's Belmaison Gallery (1921–1925) exhibited Picasso, Matisse, Léger, and Braque alongside American artists. At Lord & Taylor in 1928, Dorothy Shaver drew more than 300,000 visitors to a full-floor Art Deco exhibition, including works by Picasso. At Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh (1929), ten monumental frescoes celebrated "Art in Industry." These programmes are examined in detail in the following section: what matters here is the pattern — in every case, the department store was engaging with the most advanced art of its moment.

The store window itself became a site of artistic confrontation. Salvador Dalí's surrealist windows for Bonwit Teller in New York (1936, 1939) — the latter ending in scandal, censorship, a shattered plate-glass window, and the artist's arrest — demonstrated that department stores were not exhibiting tame, decorative art. They were taking real risks with the avant-garde.

In Paris, the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs — the event that gave Art Deco its name — featured dedicated pavilions from Le Bon Marché, Galeries Lafayette, and Le Printemps. Their presence alongside national delegations confirmed that department stores were recognised participants in defining contemporary design, not mere retailers of it.

In Canada, a lesser-known but well-documented chapter unfolded in Montréal, where department stores played an essential role in the city's artistic life between 1900 and 1945. Henry Morgan & Co. organised exhibitions of etchings by Whistler, Zorn, and Millet as early as 1909. Ogilvy's, T. Eaton Co., and Dupuis Frères followed with their own programmes, functioning as cultural relays in a city still building its institutional infrastructure.

1950–1999: the institutional turn

In the post-war decades, the relationship between department stores and contemporary art deepened into something approaching institutional permanence — most dramatically in Japan, but with significant parallels in Europe and the United States.

Japanese department stores entered what can only be described as a golden age of cultural programming. Takashimaya exhibited Picasso as early as 1950. Mitsukoshi, Isetan, Hankyu, Odakyu, Keio, and Tobu all maintained integrated art galleries and mounted frequent exhibitions of both Western and Japanese masters, functioning in practice as the country's primary network of accessible art venues at a time when the public museum system remained limited. The most ambitious expression of this model was the Seibu Museum of Art (1975–1999), which operated at a genuine museum standard for a quarter of a century — a case examined in full in the following section and in the portrait of its founder, Seiji Tsutsumi.

In France, Galeries Lafayette inaugurated the Salon de Mai within the store as early as 1946, where the public could discover Nicolas de Staël and Giacometti — establishing a commitment to contemporary art exhibition that would deepen over the following decades.

In the United States, the tradition continued through new forms. At Bonwit Teller, Gene Moore's practice of hiring struggling young artists as window designers gave early public visibility to Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Andy Warhol. At Barneys New York, Simon Doonan's arrival as creative director in 1986 made the store's windows one of New York's most visible platforms for contemporary art. These episodes, which deserve detailed examination, are presented in the following section.

2000 to the present: the avant-garde as declared identity

The twenty-first century has seen an intensification, not an invention, of this relationship. What has changed is not the impulse but the scale, the institutional form, and the visibility.

Le Bon Marché launched its annual cartes blanches programme in 2016 — full-store artistic takeovers by leading international artists from Ai Weiwei to Daniel Buren. Galeries Lafayette opened Lafayette Anticipations in 2018, a production-oriented foundation for contemporary creation. Selfridges established The Art Block, a permanent sculpture destination curated by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Each of these programmes is examined in detail in the following section.

In New York, Bergdorf Goodman has sustained one of the most visible ongoing commitments to art in American retail. Under the creative direction of David Hoey since 2004, the store's holiday window programme has become an annual cultural event in its own right, while rotating exhibitions on the seventh floor have provided a dedicated gallery platform within the store. In 2025, Bergdorf Goodman formalised a partnership with Salon Art + Design, further anchoring its position at the intersection of retail and the contemporary art market.

New formats have emerged that dissolve the boundary between store and gallery entirely: Dover Street Market (founded 2004 by Rei Kawakubo), Colette in Paris (1997–2017, more than 200 gallery exhibitions), 10 Corso Como in Milan, K11 Musea in Hong Kong and PARCO in Japan all represent variations on a model in which the department store is, by design, a cultural institution. These are documented in the following section.

A global phenomenon, not a Western exception

One of the most compelling aspects of this history is its geographic breadth. The integration of contemporary art into the department store is not confined to Paris, New York, or London. It has manifested with equal conviction — and often greater institutional depth — in Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Hong Kong, Montréal, Mexico City, and Milan. Each market has inflected the model according to its own cultural logic: in France, through architectural monumentality and bourgeois cultural performance; in the United States, through the store window as democratic public art and the opening of cultural space to women; in Japan, through the most deeply integrated model of all, in which the department store functioned for decades as a genuine substitute for the public museum; in Canada, through the department store as cultural relay in a city forging its artistic identity; and in the United Kingdom, through the synthesis of American retail spectacle with established British cultural institutions.

Landmark Exhibitions and Artistic Programmes Across the Twentieth and Twenty-First Centuries

Our thesis is that department stores have consistently championed the contemporary art of their time, from the 1870s to the present day. What follows is the detailed record — a survey of the most significant exhibitions, commissions, and artistic programmes that department stores have mounted across the major retail markets over more than a century.

The United States: the department store as incubator of modern art

In the U.S., department stores did not merely exhibit established artists — they provided critical early platforms for artists who would go on to reshape twentieth-century art.

The case of Bonwit Teller in New York deserves detailed examination because it encapsulates the phenomenon in its purest form. Gene Moore, the store's art director from the late 1930s onward, made a practice of hiring struggling young artists to design store windows — offering them both income and public visibility at a moment when neither was available through conventional art-world channels. In the mid-1950s, two young artists, Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, worked as Bonwit Teller's window designers under the shared pseudonym "Matson Jones." In 1957, Johns exhibited his painting White Flag on Orange Field in a Bonwit Teller window — its first public showing. That same year, Rauschenberg displayed a modified version of his Untitled (Red Combine Painting) in the same context. In 1951, Moore had hired Andy Warhol to create works for the store's windows. A decade later, in 1961, Warhol hung five paintings based on comic strips and advertisements behind Bonwit Teller's mannequins — an event widely regarded as his first act of public recognition as a fine artist, and a foundational moment in the emergence of Pop Art. James Rosenquist, who would become another leading figure of the movement, also designed Bonwit Teller windows before his gallery career began. The store's earlier engagement with the avant-garde was no less bold: Salvador Dalí's surrealist windows in 1936 and 1939, the latter of which ended in his arrest after he smashed the plate glass in protest against the store's censorship, remain among the most famous episodes in the history of art and commerce.

This pattern — the department store as a place where future art-historical significance was first made visible to the public — was not limited to Bonwit Teller. At Lord & Taylor in 1928, Dorothy Shaver transformed an entire floor into an Art Deco exhibition featuring works by Picasso. At Kaufmann's in Pittsburgh in 1930, ten monumental frescoes by Boardman Robinson, depicting "Art in Industry," encircled the first floor. At Marshall Field's in Chicago, the store maintained art exhibitions for several decades in the early twentieth century; its Walnut Room, completed in 1907, featured a Tiffany glass ceiling composed of more than 1.6 million individual pieces — a work of decorative art on a scale that few museums could match.

In the twenty-first century, American department stores have continued to engage with contemporary art through evolving formats. At Barneys New York, the tradition initiated by Simon Doonan culminated in projects such as the 2014 collaboration with Alex Katz and the Art Production Fund, which produced a fifty-six-foot frieze of eighteen black-and-white female figures displayed across the store's windows. At Bergdorf Goodman, the 2014 programme "Art Matters! Ten Artists for Ten Spaces," co-curated by Linda Fargo and Kyle DeWoody, commissioned site-specific installations throughout the store, including Peter D. Gerakaris's Rappaccini's Origami Terrarium. In 2025, Bergdorf Goodman formalised a partnership with salon Art + Design, anchoring its position at the intersection of luxury retail and the art market. At Saks Fifth Avenue, a "Fine Art Collection" was launched in 2024, offering more than 100 limited-edition contemporary prints — by artists including Sol LeWitt, Alex Katz, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and Donald Sultan — through pop-up gallery spaces in stores from New York to San Francisco. At Bloomingdale's, the 2025 "Just Imagine" campaign with the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Ilori brought his distinctive colourful visual language into the store's windows and interiors.

France: from in-store gallery to dedicated foundation

The French trajectory is distinctive in its progression from early in-store galleries to full-scale institutional commitments — a movement that has accelerated dramatically in the twenty-first century.

Le Bon Marché has pursued the most sustained and visible programme of any European department store. Since 2016, the store has hosted an annual carte blanche each January — a full-store artistic takeover by a leading international artist, timed to coincide with the historic "mois du blanc" (home linen sale month) that Aristide Boucicaut himself invented in 1873. The roster to date constitutes a survey of major contemporary art: Ai Weiwei (2016), whose installation "Er Xi" (Child's Play) included a sixty-five-foot dragon and twenty illuminated silk-and-bamboo creatures suspended above the cosmetics department, fabricated by twelve kite-makers from Shandong province; Chiharu Shiota (2017); Leandro Erlich (2018); Joana Vasconcelos (2019); Oki Sato of studio Nendo (2020); Prune Nourry (2021); Mehmet Ali Uysal (2022); Subodh Gupta (2023); Daniel Buren (2024), whose "Aux Beaux Carrés" deployed more than 1,500 polycarbonate squares beneath the glass ceiling, with his signature 8.7-centimetre black-and-white stripes extending across escalators and columns; Ernesto Neto (2025), who suspended a twenty-eight-metre crocheted serpent from bamboo arches under the glass roof; and Song Dong (January 2026, the programme's eleventh edition), who transformed the main store windows into individual installations and created two immense chandeliers flanking the central escalator. This programme operates at a scale and with a curatorial seriousness that is comparable to that of many contemporary art institutions. The store also maintains a permanent collection of contemporary art assembled since 1989 and a design collection, both displayed throughout its selling floors, and offers monthly guided cultural tours.

Galeries Lafayette have followed a parallel but institutionally distinct path. The "Galerie des Galeries," a dedicated 300-square-metre exhibition space within the boulevard Haussmann store, has operated since 2001, presenting three to four exhibitions per year of French and international contemporary art, fashion, and design. In 2023, the artist Kimsooja installed "To Breathe" beneath the store's historic dome: a diffraction film that transformed the 1912 Jacques Gruber glass cupola into an infinite spectrum of projected colour, accompanied by an audio component composed of the artist's own breathing rhythm — the first immersive light installation of its kind in Paris. In 2026, the group launched "Pour Toujours," a carte blanche to four artists — the sculptor Gloria Friedmann, the photographer Birgit Jürgenssen, the Cypriot artist Christodoulos Panayiotou (on the main dome), and the American conceptual artist Lawrence Weiner (on the terrace) — confirming the ambition of its cultural programming.

The most significant institutional step, however, has been the creation of Lafayette Anticipations (the company’s foundation), which opened in 2018 at the Marais area of Paris, in a building rehabilitated by Rem Koolhaas's OMA. Unlike an in-store gallery, Lafayette Anticipations is a production-oriented foundation with a dedicated budget, commissioning and exhibiting new work by international artists including Lutz Bacher, Katinka Bock, Martin Margiela, Cyprien Gaillard, and Mark Leckey. This represents an evolution from exhibition to production — from showing art to making it possible.

The broader cultural recognition of this history was confirmed in 2024, when the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris mounted "La Naissance des grands magasins" (April–October 2024), followed by a presentation at the Cité de l'Architecture (October 2024–March 2025), of which the IADS was a partner. The decision by France's leading design museum to devote a major exhibition to the department store as a cultural and artistic phenomenon — and to seek the sector's own international association as a collaborator — affirmed what this article has argued throughout: the relationship between art and the department store is not peripheral but constitutive.

The United Kingdom: Selfridges and the art of spectacle

Selfridges in London has built a sustained programme of art commissions and installations, starting when the store opened in 1909, with its first window displays paying homage to the French painters Fragonard and Watteau.

The contemporary programme is remarkable for both its scale and the calibre of artists involved. In 2003, the photographer Spencer Tunick staged "Be Consumed," in which 600 nude volunteers posed inside the Beauty Hall. In the same year, Barbara Kruger created a graphic campaign for a promotional campaign, deploying her iconic declarative typography across the retail environment. In 2012, Selfridges hosted a Yayoi Kusama × Louis Vuitton concept store, with the entire façade and interior overtaken by Kusama's signature polka dots and pumpkins, including a colossal figure of the artist on the façade. In 2022, 55 works by Victor Vasarely were exhibited in partnership with the Fondation Vasarely and Paco Rabanne. Other artists who have exhibited or created commissions for Selfridges include Tracey Emin, Marc Quinn, Banksy, Brian Eno, Fernando Botero, David LaChapelle, Joana Vasconcelos, and Sam Taylor-Wood.

The 2019 "State of the Arts" campaign further elevated the model. Nine artists — Darren Almond, Spencer Finch, Douglas Gordon, Chantal Joffe, Yayoi Kusama, Simon Periton, Michal Rovner, Conrad Shawcross, and Richard Wright — were given the Oxford Street windows as exhibition spaces, while "The Art Store" at the Corner Shop was developed in partnership with galleries including Gagosian, Pace, Perrotin, Victoria Miro, and White Cube.The department store and the commercial gallery system operated not in parallel but in direct collaboration.

The most structurally significant development, however, is The Art Block, a permanent sculpture destination at the centre of the Accessories Hall, designed by David Chipperfield Architects and curated by the Yorkshire Sculpture Park. Since its opening in 2018, The Art Block has hosted rotating six-month residencies, including Holly Hendry's "Phyllis" (2018), a nearly four-metre sculpture incorporating excavation material from the Crossrail project; Matthew Darbyshire's three-metre reinterpretations of classical deities (2018–2019); and Gray Wielebinski's "Exhibition" (2023), a monument inspired by Victorian public architecture.

Beyond Selfridges, Fortnum & Mason has hosted exhibitions from the Frank Cohen Collection of modern and contemporary British art, and Harrods maintains the Halcyon Gallery, a dedicated contemporary art space on its third floor.

Japan: the deepest integration

Japan's department stores represent the most profoundly integrated model of art and commerce in the global retail landscape.

The Seibu Museum of Art, which operated within the Seibu department store in Ikebukuro, Tokyo, from 1975 to 1999, stands as the apogee of this model. Founded by Seiji Tsutsumi, the museum opened with "The View of Japanese Contemporary Art," featuring twenty-seven artists, including Shusaku Arakawa and Tadanori Yokoo. Its programme over the following quarter-century was of genuine museum calibre: "30 Years of American Art" including Jasper Johns (1976); a Jasper Johns retrospective in collaboration with the Whitney Museum (1978); "Calder's Universe," also originating from the Whitney (1979); a major Man Ray solo exhibition (1990); and "Abstract Expressionism: The Golden Age of American Contemporary Painting" (1996). The museum assembled a permanent collection of approximately 800 works, now housed at the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa.

Seibu's influence extended well beyond its own walls. The broader "Culture Sezon" movement, shared with PARCO — founded in 1969 and developed as a platform for visual culture, theatre, and film — transformed an entire segment of Japanese retail into a cultural ecosystem. PARCO's visual identity was shaped by the graphic designer Eiko Ishioka, whose 1975 campaign featuring Faye Dunaway remains iconic. Today, PARCO continues to operate PARCO Museum Tokyo, Gallery X, and PARCO Theatre, while events such as "Shibuya PARCO Art Week 2025" demonstrate the model's ongoing vitality.

Takashimaya's contribution deserves particular attention for its engagement with the Japanese avant-garde. In 1956, the store hosted early exhibitions of the Gutai group — the radical post-war movement that anticipated Happenings and Fluxus. In 1958, Takashimaya Osaka mounted "International Art of a New Era: Informel and Gutai," a landmark exhibition curated in collaboration with the French critic Michel Tapié that placed the Japanese avant-garde in direct dialogue with European abstraction. In 1960, the "International Sky Festival" on the rooftop of Takashimaya Osaka suspended reproductions of works by American Abstract Expressionists and European Informel artists from balloons — a gesture of extraordinary audacity for a department store, or indeed for any institution.

Mitsukoshi, the pioneer, has continued its mission without interruption. The Mitsukoshi Nihombashi Art Gallery and the Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery host four to five exhibitions per week, spanning Japanese painting, international contemporary art, sculpture, and craft. Over the decades, the galleries have exhibited masters including Yokoyama Taikan, Tsuguji Fujita (Léonard Foujita), and Shoji Hamada.[xxvi] At Isetan in Shinjuku, the art gallery programme includes ongoing exhibitions of contemporary art in partnership with CADAN (Contemporary Art Dealers Association Nihon), while a 2021 retrospective, "80 Years of Design at Isetan," was produced in collaboration with the Eames Office.

New frontiers: Korea, Hong Kong, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy

The model has expanded well beyond the historical centres. In Seoul, the LOTTE Museum of Art, established within the Lotte Department Store in 2017, mounted "Daniel Arsham: Seoul 3024" in 2024 — the artist's first solo exhibition in Asia — while Shinsegae has opened the House of Shinsegae Heritage, a new exhibition space inaugurated with "Embracing and Delivering," devoted to the art of bojagi, traditional Korean wrapping cloth.

In Hong Kong, K11 Musea, opened in 2019 by Adrian Cheng of New World Development, represents perhaps the most radical contemporary expression of the department-store-as-cultural-institution concept. Conceived as a "museum-retail complex," K11 Musea integrates a permanent collection of more than 100 works by international contemporary artists — including Paola Pivi, Sterling Ruby, Joan Cornellà, and Adrian Wong — into its architecture and public circulation spaces. It is not a store with art in it; it is a space in which art and commerce are architecturally inseparable. Lane Crawford, also in Hong Kong, has adopted a lighter but consistent approach, with its 2025 Art Month In-Store Guide featuring collaborations with artists and designers including Ruan Hoffmann, Jaime Hayon, and Kristjana Williams.

In Amsterdam, De Bijenkorf launched "Room On The Roof" in 2015 — an artist-in-residence programme housed in the tower of its historic Dam Square building, initially in partnership with the Rijksmuseum. Residents have included the designer Maarten Baas (2015) and the artist Rutger de Vries, who exhibited works across seven De Bijenkorf branches.

In Berlin, KaDeWe has progressively inserted itself into the city's gallery ecosystem. In 2007, the artists Osko + Deichmann installed a 150-square-metre wheat field in the store's entrance hall. In 2025, "SCHAU, FENSTER im KaDeWe" was admitted to the official programme of Gallery Weekend Berlin — a signal that the art world now recognises the department store as a legitimate exhibition venue.

In Milan, La Rinascente has used its windows facing the Piazza Duomo as a platform for contemporary art commissions, notably Paola Pivi's "I am tired of eating fish" (2017), which placed feathered polar bears in eight vitrines during the Miart art fair.

The evolution of practice: from window to foundation

Taken as a whole, this record reveals not a static tradition but a clear evolution in how department stores engage with contemporary art. Four distinct phases can be identified.

First, the store window was an artistic medium — from Bonwit Teller's collaborations with Dalí, Johns, Rauschenberg, and Warhol to Selfridges' "State of the Arts" windows and Barneys' annual holiday commissions. The window was art's first point of entry into the department store, and it remains a vital format.

Then, department stores developed the integrated gallery — a dedicated exhibition space within the store itself. Le Bon Marché's picture gallery (1875), Wanamaker's art gallery (1881), Mitsukoshi's art department (1907), the Galerie des Galeries (2001), and Selfridges' Art Block (2018) all represent variations on this model.

The third moment was the museum within the store — an ambition realised most fully by the Seibu Museum of Art (1975–1999), which operated for a quarter of a century at genuine museum standard, and echoed today by the LOTTE Museum of Art in Seoul and Harrods' Halcyon Gallery.

The fourth, and most recent phase, is the independent foundation — a legally and physically separate institution created by a department store group to produce and exhibit contemporary art. Lafayette Anticipations (2018) is the leading example, but the pattern is visible in the K11 Art Foundation in Hong Kong and in the institutional partnerships that Selfridges has built with Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Frieze, and the ICA.

This progression — from window to gallery to museum to foundation — does not represent a replacement of one model by the next. All four coexist today. What it does represent is a deepening of commitment: from display to curation, from curation to production, and from production to institutional permanence. The department store's engagement with contemporary art has not merely persisted; it has matured.

The Great Dynasties: Department Store Founders and Families as Art Patrons

The preceding sections have documented a structural relationship between department stores and the visual arts — one that spans geographies, decades, and artistic movements. But structures do not create themselves. Behind the galleries, the foundations, and the exhibitions stand individuals: founders, heirs, and executives whose personal passion for art shaped the cultural identity of their stores and, in several remarkable cases, left a permanent mark on the museum landscape of their countries.

The founding generation: commerce as cultural ambition

The earliest department store founders did not merely tolerate art within their commercial enterprises. They actively sought it, collected it, and made it part of their personal and institutional identity.

Aristide and Marguerite Boucicaut, the founders of Le Bon Marché in Paris, were passionate collectors who understood that culture could elevate the department store beyond the transactional. Their establishment of a picture gallery for Salon rejects (1875) and of the Harmonie concerts (1873), described in Part I, was not a business decision in the modern sense — it was a personal conviction that commerce and culture were inseparable. After Aristide's death in 1877, Marguerite continued the cultural programme with equal commitment.

Ernest Cognacq and Marie-Louise Jaÿ, the founders of La Samaritaine, pursued a different but equally significant path. Over several decades, the couple assembled an important collection of eighteenth-century art — paintings, drawings, sculpture, furniture, and objets d'art — which they bequeathed to the City of Paris in 1928. That collection forms the Musée Cognacq-Jay, housed today in the Marais area. It is one of the clearest examples in retail history of a department store founder's personal collecting activity producing a permanent public cultural institution.

In the United States, John Wanamaker brought the same conviction to his Philadelphia store. The art gallery he opened in 1881 was an active programme of acquisition, not a decorative afterthought. His son Rodman Wanamaker deepened the commitment, financing the construction of the store's monumental organ — with 29,000 pipes, the largest playable instrument in the world — installed in 1911 and still operational today. Rodman was a recognised philanthropist whose ambition was to make the store a genuine centre of artistic and musical life.

Harry Gordon Selfridge, who opened his London store in 1909, conceived of spectacle and culture as foundational to the retail experience. He published The Romance of Commerce in 1918, articulating a philosophy in which commerce and aesthetics were inseparable. The cultural ambition he established — from the Fragonard-and-Watteau-inspired opening windows to the institutional partnerships of today — has been sustained and amplified by successive managements over more than a century.

Potter Palmer, who founded the Chicago store that would become Marshall Field's, married Bertha Honoré Palmer, who became one of the most significant art collectors in American history. Bertha Palmer assembled an Impressionist collection of extraordinary depth: twenty-nine paintings by Monet (including nine from the Haystacks series), eleven by Renoir, and works by Degas, Pissarro, and Cassatt. In 1893, she commissioned a major mural from Mary Cassatt for the Woman's Pavilion at the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. The Palmer collection, donated to the Art Institute of Chicago, forms the core of the museum's celebrated Impressionist wing — one of the finest in the world.

Collectors whose legacies became museums

Several department store figures produced collections of such scale and quality that they entered the permanent fabric of their countries' museum systems. The phenomenon is striking for its geographic breadth and for the calibre of the institutions that were shaped by these gifts.

Samuel Henry Kress, who built the S.H. Kress & Co. chain to 264 stores across the United States by the 1930s, devoted his fortune to assembling more than 3,000 works of European art, with a concentration in the Italian Renaissance. The collection included masterpieces by Giotto, Botticelli, Fra Angelico, Raphael, and Titian. In 1939, Kress donated nearly 400 works to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. After the war, the Samuel H. Kress Foundation distributed a further 700 Old Master paintings to eighteen regional museums. In total, the collection was dispersed across ninety institutions in thirty-three states — an act of cultural philanthropy without equivalent in the retail sector, which ensured that communities far from the major coastal cities could access works of the highest quality.

Percy and Edith Straus, whose family became sole owners of Macy's in 1896, assembled a distinguished collection of Italian Renaissance painting and sculpture, including works by Fra Angelico, Rogier van der Weyden, Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Hans Memling. In 1941, they donated the entire collection to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Stanley Marcus, president and chairman of Neiman Marcus, was a noted collector of art and rare books. He founded the Neiman Marcus Art Collection in 1951 and, with his wife Linda, built a significant collection of Southwestern art. The Dallas Museum of Art honoured his legacy with the exhibition "The Eye of Stanley Marcus" in 1994.

Multi-generational dynasties: the Moulin-Houzé family

Among all the families associated with department stores and art, the Moulin-Houzé dynasty of Galeries Lafayette stands apart — not only for the depth of its commitment but for its continuity across five generations.

Théophile Bader, who founded Galeries Lafayette, was himself a collector of Impressionist painting, establishing from the outset a link between the family's commercial enterprise and the art of its time. His descendant Ginette Moulin (1927–2025) sustained the tradition through the second half of the twentieth century, supporting artists of the second École de Paris — Serge Poliakoff, Jean Fautrier, André Lanskoy — at a time when their recognition was far from assured.

The most transformative figure is Guillaume Houzé, Théophile Bader's great-great-grandson. Houzé created the group's patronage directorate in 2010, established the “Fondation d'entreprise” Galeries Lafayette in 2013, and launched the Fonds de dotation Famille Moulin — a family endowment fund that now holds more than 400 works of contemporary art. He presides over Lafayette Anticipations, the production-oriented foundation whose programme and building are described in Part III. Under his leadership, the group has become a partner of the Centre Pompidou, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris+ par Art Basel, ANDAM, and the Villa Noailles. Houzé is himself a recognised collector, and his activity has been described in the French press as embodying an "authentic cultural identity" inseparable from the commercial enterprise.

What distinguishes the Moulin-Houzé dynasty is not merely longevity but escalation: each generation has deepened and institutionalised the family's engagement with art, progressing from personal collecting to in-store exhibitions, to a corporate foundation, to an independent production institution. It is a five-generation arc from Impressionism to the commissioning of new work by living artists — a trajectory that mirrors, in microcosm, the broader evolution traced in this article.

The Tsutsumi dynasty: two generations, one cultural revolution

In Japan, the Tsutsumi family produced what is arguably the single most consequential act of art patronage in the history of department store retailing.

Yasujiro Tsutsumi (1889–1964), the founder of the Seibu group, established the Takanawa Art Museum Foundation in 1962, housing a collection of paintings, Buddhist statuary, lacquerware, and Oriental ceramics. The museum operated in Tokyo until 1981, when it was relocated to Karuizawa.

His son Seiji Tsutsumi (1927–2013) transformed this inheritance into something far more ambitious. A published writer and poet under the pen name Takashi Tsujii, Seiji Tsutsumi was unique among department store executives in combining literary and artistic sensibility with commercial leadership on a national scale. He founded the Seibu Museum of Art in 1975, the Sezon Museum of Modern Art in Karuizawa in 1981, and the Saison Foundation in 1987, funded from his personal resources, to support the performing arts. The scale of these achievements — approximately 260 exhibitions, a permanent collection of some 800 works, collaborations with the Whitney Museum of American Art — is documented in Part III. What matters here is the man: a poet who ran a department store empire, and who believed that art was not an amenity for customers but a responsibility of commerce toward society.

In 2012, the Japanese government recognised Seiji Tsutsumi as a Person of Cultural Merit — an honour that acknowledged what the art world had long understood: that his contribution to the cultural life of Japan, delivered through the medium of a department store group, was of national significance.

Contemporary figures: the tradition continues

The pattern established by these founders and dynasties continues in the present generation — adapted to contemporary institutional forms but driven by the same fusion of personal conviction and commercial leadership.

Guillaume Houzé, discussed above, is the most prominent European example. At Le Bon Marché, Patrice Wagner, as CEO, has overseen the implementation of the annual carte blanche programme and the continued development of the store's permanent collection — ensuring that the cultural ambition initiated by the Boucicaut family in the 1870s, and sustained by LVMH since its acquisition of the store in 1984, remains a defining feature of the brand.

In Asia, Adrian Cheng, the founder of K11 and an executive of New World Development in Hong Kong, represents a new model: the entrepreneur-collector who conceives an entire retail-and-cultural complex as an integrated act of patronage. K11 Musea, described in Part III, is not a store that happens to contain art; it is a vision of what the department store might become when its founder's identity as a collector is made architecturally inseparable from its identity as a retailer.

In Japan, the tradition takes a more institutional form. At Mitsukoshi, the art department, established in 1907, continues to operate as both a gallery and a commercial intermediary in the art market. At Takashimaya, the company's historical museum documents the store's role in art and culture, while the Takashimaya Foundation maintains an explicit mission to support emerging contemporary artists and to compensate for the limitations of the commercial gallery system — a philosophy that positions the department store as a patron in the fullest sense.

Conclusion: A Strategic Asset, Not a Cost Centre

The relationship between department stores and the visual arts is not a marketing tactic, not a recent discovery, and not a luxury that can be dispensed with when trading conditions deteriorate. It is a constitutive dimension of the format — present at its origins, sustained across every major market, and carried forward by founders, families, and institutions over more than 150 years.

The department store and the public museum were born in the same historical moment and share the same structural logic: the staging of objects in architecturally ambitious spaces, designed to provoke desire, curiosity, and aspiration. From the Boucicaut gallery of Salon rejects in 1875 to Lafayette Anticipations in 2018, from Dalí's shattered window at Bonwit Teller to Ai Weiwei's takeover of Le Bon Marché, from Mitsukoshi's first exhibition in 1904 to K11 Musea's permanent collection today, department stores have not followed the art world — they have, at critical moments, led it, bringing the avant-garde of every era to audiences that established cultural institutions could not or would not reach.

The twenty-first century has seen this relationship cross a new threshold. What was once an in-store gallery or a patron's personal collection has become, in the most advanced cases, an independent foundation with a dedicated building and a production budget (Lafayette Anticipations), a permanent sculpture programme curated by a national arts institution (Selfridges and Yorkshire Sculpture Park), or an entire architectural complex conceived from the outset as a fusion of museum and retail (K11 Musea). At the same time, department stores have entered the commercial art market directly (Saks Fifth Avenue's fine art collection) and have been admitted into the institutional calendar of the art world itself (KaDeWe at Gallery Weekend Berlin). The boundary between the department store and the cultural institution is no longer blurred — in several significant cases, it has been deliberately dissolved.

For the leaders of the sector, the implication is clear. Art is not a cost centre to be optimised. It is part of the founding DNA of the department store — an inheritance carried forward, in the most successful cases, across generations by families whose personal passion became institutional identity. The Moulin-Houzé dynasty at Galeries Lafayette, Seiji Tsutsumi at Seibu, Bertha Palmer at Marshall Field's, Ernest Cognacq at La Samaritaine: these are not peripheral figures. They are central to what made their stores culturally significant — and, not coincidentally, commercially enduring. In an era when the department store must justify its existence against every other retail format, this history is not a sentimental indulgence. It is a strategic asset.

Appendix : A Practical Guide — Which Department Stores to Visit for Art

Paris

Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche remains the essential destination. Each January, a monumental carte blanche transforms the store. The permanent collection of contemporary art and design is visible year-round, and guided cultural tours are offered on the last Sunday of each month. Admission is free. Lafayette Anticipations (9 rue du Plâtre, Marais), the Galeries Lafayette foundation housed in a building by Rem Koolhaas, offers a production-oriented programme of contemporary art exhibitions. At the Galeries Lafayette Haussmann, the 1912 Gruber dome is itself a masterwork; temporary installations beneath it and the Galerie des Galeries on the first floor complement the architectural experience.

London

Selfridges offers The Art Block (contemporary sculpture, Duke Street entrance), Oxford Street windows regularly entrusted to leading artists, and institutional partnerships with major galleries. Fortnum & Mason hosts occasional exhibitions of modern and contemporary British art from the Frank Cohen Collection. Harrods maintains the Halcyon Gallery on its third floor.

Tokyo

Mitsukoshi Nihombashi operates an art gallery with four to five exhibitions per week spanning Japanese painting, international contemporary art, sculpture, and craft, alongside the Mitsukoshi Contemporary Gallery. Isetan Shinjuku features weekly contemporary art exhibitions in partnership with CADAN. PARCO Shibuya houses PARCO Museum Tokyo and Gallery X, dedicated to art and visual culture.

Elsewhere

De Bijenkorf in Amsterdam runs the "Room On The Roof" artist-in-residence programme. K11 Musea in Hong Kong, with more than 100 permanent works, offers a visit that is in itself a museum experience. La Rinascente in Milan presents regular artistic window commissions facing the Piazza Duomo. KaDeWe in Berlin participates in Gallery Weekend Berlin. The LOTTE Museum of Art in Seoul mounts international-calibre exhibitions within the Lotte Department Store.

Credits: IADS (Selvane Mohandas du Ménil)