Cartier Bubbles

CARTIER HISTORY

In 1981, Alain Dominique Perrin as CEO has founded the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain to bring Cartier into the twenty-first century, by forming an association with living artists. In 1986, the French Ministry for Culture appointed Perrin head of the « Mission sur le mécénat d’entreprise » (a commission to study business patronage of the arts). Two years later, Cartier gained a majority holding in Piaget and Baume & Mercier. From 1989 to 1990, the Musée du Petit Palais staged an exhibition of the Cartier collection, « L’Art de Cartier. »

Perrin founded an international committee in 1991, Comité International de la Haute Horlogerie, to organize its first salon, held on April 15, 1991; this has become an annual meeting place in Geneva for professionals in this field. The next year, the second exhibition of « L’Art de Cartier » was held at the Hermitage Museum in St Petersburg. In 1993, the « Vendôme Luxury Group » was formed as an umbrella company to combine Cartier, Dunhill, Montblanc, Piaget, Baume & Mercier, Karl Lagerfeld, Chloé, Sulka, Hackett, and Seeger.

In 1994, the Cartier Foundation moved to the Rive Gauche and opened headquarters in a building designed for it by Jean Nouvel. The next year, a major exhibition of the Cartier Antique Collection was held in Asia. In 1996, the Lausanne Hermitage Foundation in Switzerland exhibited « Splendours of the Jewellery », presenting a hundred and fifty years of products by Cartier.

In 2012, Cartier was owned, through Richemont, by the South African Rupert family, and Elle Pagels, a 24-year-old granddaughter of Pierre Cartier