We feel a little drunk before the slightest glass of wine.
Jean-Marie Rouart invited us to have lunch at his place, but barely in the square, the head is spinning to see so many paintings everywhere, in the entrance of the apartment, the living room, the office, the bedroom, next to his bed and above the TV, in the hallway, and even pictures in the toilet!
The 78-year-old academician, writer, political journalist and then director of Le Figaro littéraire for a long time, has hardly a square centimeter of free space on his walls.
These paintings of post-impressionism in the more contemporary period of his father, but always figurative, have always accompanied him, whose great-aunt was called Julie Manet, daughter of the artist Berthe Morisot and niece of Edouard. Manet.
With Jean-Marie Rouart, 78-year-old academician, writer, political journalist and then director of the literary Figaro for a long time, the walls are covered with drawings and paintings.
LP / Olivier Lejeune
The heir - who has no children - has just made a donation of twelve works signed by four artists: Henri Rouart (his great-grandfather, painter, collector and genius industrialist), Henry Lerolle (his other great-grandfather), Maurice Denis, and Augustin Rouart, his father, the most unknown of the line. “My father was the opposite of me. He had a social awkwardness, a little wild, touchy. He wanted to lead an artistic life without becoming an academic doggie. And I said very young that I would be elected to the Academy, ”smiles this great living, who has always lived among painting.
“At Julie's, there were thirteen Manets.
We would shoot it with a dart rifle and never get yelled at.
In the family, we loved painting in a mystical way, but we never talked about their price, he laughs like a big child.
It was not the moralizing French bourgeoisie.
There was the mass and the paintings of naked women.
I grew up in a tolerant Catholicism ”.
"My great aunt is everywhere in Orsay"
We just got out of the metro, and this facetious mage teleports us into a dynasty of artists dating back to Impressionism: “I was 22 when Julie died. Mallarmé and Renoir had been his tutors. The other grandchildren didn't care. I loved to listen to it. She told me lots of stories. Paul Valéry, who was also family, did not have a penny. In the entrance, we see four drawings of the poet, who handled the pencil almost as well as the rhyme.
All this family weight, he speaks of it lightly: “I have my grandmother at the Musée de l'Orangerie. “
Renoir's
Young Girl at the Piano
, that's her. And my great-aunt is everywhere in Orsay, ”he smiles. From his beginnings in journalism, he admits: “I entered Figaro thanks to Jean Renoir, who knew the boss. The filmmaker, son of the painter, also a friend of the family.
Too easy a life?
Mistrust.
Jean-Marie Rouart devotes unfailing loyalty to his father, a painter forgotten in this tormented lineage: “We lived sparingly in a small apartment in rue Montparnasse.
My father was broke, but still badly undermined.
There was a great distortion between us and other branches of the family ”.
Jean-Marie, perhaps marked by the failures of his father, who painted all his life in the shadows, never wanted to touch a brush, preferring the pen.
“As a child, I was told:
If you were good, on Saturday we will go to the Louvre.
Oh no !
".
Among the paintings of her father Augustin, a young woman in shorts lying on her bed: the portrait of her mother.
LP / Olivier Lejeune
Museums, very little for him. He has one at home. These twelve paintings, after their presentation from June to October at the Petit Palais, will return very quickly to his apartment: he keeps the usufruct, until his death. We understand, he has always lived with, like this portrait of his mother, a young woman in shorts lying on her bed, watched by a cat on the windowsill, a delicate harmony of yellow and blue. One of the most beautiful paintings of the father, but for him, the equivalent of a family photo: “Look, my father even painted me on my baby chair. These paintings were so human ”.
These works, for him who lives alone, are his, in every sense of the word.
To bequeath them is to offer them a little eternity.
And for the Petit Palais, as Christophe Léribault, its director, says, "it is important to revive a family dynasty which has counted in the history of painting in Paris".
Augustin Rouart, who died in 1997, had benefited before his death from a small exhibition in town hall for his 80th birthday, at the initiative of his son.
The father, cut off from the middle, did not even know which critic to invite.
Since then, Jean-Marie has bought several scattered paintings by Augustine, to bring the work together.
A legacy, and a filiation.
“Augustin Rouart, painting as a heritage”
, Petit Palais (Paris 8th arrondissement), www.petitpalais.paris.fr, from June 1 to October 3.
