ahead of the curve; Looking after one of Europe's most-coveted private collections, curator Alison Gingeras has become an international arbiter of art-world cool.(Interview)

Byline: Leslie Camhi

Faced with artists-wildly demanding, deeply unconventional-museum professionals tend to close ranks. Not Alison Gingeras. "I never wanted to be on the other side of the barricade," says the 33-year-old, who oversees French billionaire Francois Pinault's renowned collection of contemporary art, as well as his two new Venetian museums. "I always wanted to be on the artists' side of the fence," she explains. "You learn the most, in the end, from them."

Part girl next door, part elite tastemaker, Gingeras attributes her career to a series of serendipitous accidents. Art, the native New Yorker recalls over coffee at Balthazar, was the furthest thing she could find from molecular biology, her father's profession. Chic in a gray Marni jacket, she says she was studying primitive Flemish painting in Belgium before she caught the contemporary bug while touring the Brussels galleries. Back in New York, she became an assistant to Thomas Krens, the Guggenheim's maverick director. Suddenly she was helping organize major exhibitions, like one devoted to postwar European art from the Pompidou Center in Paris, which later hired her.

Last year, she organized the first overview of Pinault's vast holdings-works by 49 modern and contemporary masters, from Piero Manzoni to Jeff Koons-at the Palazzo Grassi, the eighteenth-century Venetian palace he purchased as a showcase for his art. A second building in Venice, Punta della Dogana, will serve as the collection's permanent home, while the palazzo will be devoted to temporary exhibitions, like Gingeras's more-focused presentation of sixteen contemporary artists, on view there through November 11. Pinault is still acquiring, but Gingeras says her job is "not just about going out on shopping sprees" (though one senses that's an enviable part of it). "I really work with him ...