page_title: Fountains in Paris
section_title: Paris fountains (1945-2000)
hierarchical_section_title: Fountains in Paris / Paris fountains (1945-2000)
caption_attribution_description: English: A Sculpture/fountain in ParisFrançais&#160;: Fontaine des Polypores, Paris. Jean Yves Lechevallier
context_page_description: The Fountains in Paris originally provided drinking water for city residents, and now are decorative features in the city's squares and parks. Paris has more than two hundred fountains, the oldest dating back to the 16th century. It also has more than one hundred Wallace drinking fountains. Most of the fountains are the property of the municipality.
  In 2017, an investigation by the cultural heritage magazine La Tribune de l'art revealed that more than half of these fountains were not functioning.
  For the list of Paris fountains by arrondissement, See List of Paris fountains.
context_section_description: Only a handful of fountains were built in Paris between 1940 and 1980.  The most important ones built during that period were on the edges of the city, on the west, just outside the city limits, at La Defense, and to the east at the Bois de Vincennes.
  Between 1981 and 1995, during the terms of President François Mitterrand and Culture Minister Jack Lang,  and of Mitterrand's bitter political rival, Paris Mayor Jacques Chirac (Mayor from 1977 until 1995),  the city experienced a program of monumental fountain building that exceeded that of Napoleon Bonaparte or Louis Philippe.  More than one hundred fountains were built in Paris in the 1980s and 1990s,  mostly in the neighbourhoods outside the centre of Paris, where there had been few fountains before. The Fountain Cristaux by Jean-Yves Lechevallier in the new Front de Seine district, the Stravinsky Fountain, the Fountain of the Pyramid of the Louvre, the Buren Fountain and Les Sphérades fountain in the Palais-Royal, the Fontaine du Parc Andre-Citroen, the Polypores fountain and new fountains at Les Halles, the Jardin de Reuilly, and beside the Gare Maine-Montparnasse were all built under President Mitterrand and Mayor Chirac.
  The Mitterrand-Chirac fountains had no single style or theme.  Many of the fountains were designed by famous sculptors or architects,  such as Jean Tinguely, I.M. Pei, Claes Oldenburg and Daniel Buren, who had radically different ideas of what a fountain should be. Some of them, like the Pyramide de Louvre fountain, had glistening sheets of water;  while in the Buren Fountain in the Palais-Royal, the water was invisible, hidden under the pavement of the fountain.  Some of the new fountains were designed with the help of  noted landscape architects and used natural materials, such as the fountain in the Parc Floral in the Bois de Vincennes by landscape architect Daniel Collin and sculptor François Stahly. Some were solemn, and others were whimsical.   Most made little effort to blend with their surroundings - they were designed to attract attention.
  President Mitterrand and Culture Minister Lang were closely involved in many of the projects they commissioned.  Mitterrand personally selected the architect of the Louvre project, and Lang negotiated the design of the Stravinsky Fountain with the sculptors, reducing the number of colorful "nanas" by Niki de Saint-Phalle from two to one.
  Many of the fountains were built thanks to a change in the law for public financing of works of art, which required that one percent of the budget for the construction of a public building in Paris be devoted to artistic decoration.  This law, originally passed in the 1930s, was extended in the 1980s so that the funding could be used to build art works in the squares and other public areas around the new building.   The law was also amended so that the one percent applied to the Grand Projects of the Head of State, which allowed the construction of the fountains near the Pyramid of the Louvre.  A special fund, called the Le Fonds de la Commande Publique de l'État, was established to fund new works by living artists.  This fund paid for the Daniel Buren fountain in the courtyard of the Palais Royale, and the 'Bicyclettte ensevelie" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen,  and Horloges by the sculptor Arman, located in the Park of the Cite of Sciencds and Industry at La Villette.
  Several new parks were constructed during this period with fountains as their centrepieces.  These included the Parc de Belleville (1988), the historic source of the Paris water supply since the 12th century, where a new park was built, with a flowing stream, cascades, and water stairways, along with two basins with jetting fountains;  and Parc André Citroën (1992), on the banks of the Seine in the 15th arrondissement,  on the site of the former automobile factory, where a series of thematic gardens were created by architects Patrick Berger, Jean-Paul Viguier and Jean-François Joddry and landscape architects Alain Provost and Gilles Clément.  These different fountains shaped water into columns, 
caption: Polypores Fountain. Jean-Yves Lechevallier
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