Guillaume Cerutti is to take charge of the Palace of Versailles. French President Emmanuel Macron announced the appointment on Wednesday, 4 November, ending months of uncertainty over who would lead one of France's most prominent cultural institutions.

The post has stood vacant since February 2026, when Christophe Leribault departed to steady the Louvre after a difficult period there. Cerutti arrives with a career that has crossed the commercial and collecting worlds: he was recruited by François Pinault from Sotheby's in 2015 to run Christie's, and later moved to head the Pinault Collection itself.

That last role ended abruptly. Cerutti was dismissed as president of the Pinault Collection in March 2026, after only thirteen months in the job, reportedly with a substantial severance payment. Reporting in Le Monde suggested he had fallen out with Pinault, described as a ruthless cost-cutter who had tried to streamline the collection and slow its pace of acquisitions.

The appointment places a figure shaped by the auction market at the helm of a palace that is also a major museum and a symbol of French heritage. How Cerutti's commercial instincts translate to running a state institution will be watched closely, given the tensions that marked his brief tenure with Pinault. Versailles has been without permanent leadership for nine months, and the new president inherits an institution whose profile, visitor numbers and conservation demands make it one of the most scrutinised jobs in French culture. The same bulletin also noted that collector Ronald Lauder is holding back Klimt's The Black Feather Hat (1910) from the Neue Galerie, and that Pope Leo XIV received Bob Dylan at the Apostolic Palace on 4 November.