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Death of Christian Boltanski, giant of contemporary art

2021-07-14T14:30:03.786Z


PORTRAIT - In 2019, the great French artist exhibited his world of familiar shadows and flickering lights at the Center Pompidou. The one who described himself as a painter when he had long since abandoned this medium, wanted to show his ghosts. He has just joined them at the age of 76.


He did not want a retrospective - at the top of the Center Pompidou, in gallery 1 on level 6, the one reserved for great artists (César, Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer) and art events.

This walk in space-time, conceived with Bernard Blistène, director of the National Museum of Modern Art, was in a way his self-portrait.

His works were there, like stills on a life both hard and full that Christian Boltanski has just left at the age of 76.

Painful like the war in which he was born, on September 6, 1944, and joyful like this post-war period in which he flourished.

A long 75-year film that ended in the snow of Quebec and the desert of the Chilean highlands, videos admired, from the Venice Biennale to the first BienalSur in Buenos Aires.

To read also:

Christian Boltanski: "At the beginning of a work, there is a trauma"

The so French artist was a charmer. The light and the play of shadows served as his visual signature. She was easily recognized through her meditative, melancholic works, bordering on Expressionism. Bad pupil, Boltanski has always believed in the virtues of emptiness, boredom, expectation, imagination, dreams. From there were born his parallel worlds, his ideas and his art. Word of a lonely child, of a young man brooding, of a late adult, of a man who flees from burials and cemeteries, inventor of the signs which embodied life (the “Archives of the heart”, initiated at the Maison rouge d 'Antoine de Galbert in 2008 and continuing on Teshima Island, Japan).

His father was a doctor, a Jew of Russian and Ukrainian origin, converted to Christianity.

Her mother, Catholic and Corsican, was the prototype of the strong woman (she hid her husband for eighteen months under the family floor during the Occupation).

He could have come out mortified and weakened.

On the contrary, he exuded a light lordly self-assurance and a frank taste for the things of life, from conversation to cooking.

"If I had been a pathological case, if I had not had good parents, they would have made me see a psychiatrist, they would have put me in boarding school or in an apprenticeship, and that would have ended in catastrophes",

Christian Boltanski told us in a lucid self-portrait.


"Do what you want"

“And since I had good parents, they didn't dramatize my school failures, they told me: 'Do what you want, stay at home if you want”, “If you want to draw, draw ”,“ If you want to paint on wood, we will buy you wood ”… I have been a teacher at Fine Arts all my life, I really liked it, because it is both a useful place and unnecessary. There are so few unnecessary places today, it's great that there is still a non-profitable place where we can talk about a spot of color, the color of the sky, etc. I only taught my students to wait and hope, ”

he explained to us. It was undoubtedly this capacity to live the present and to dream that made his black and white works very soft, so moving, universal, never overwhelming with reproaches or too severe injunctions.

»

At the Center Pompidou

(Paris 4th).

Tel: 01 44 78 12 33. Hours: Daily 11 am to 9 pm except Tue until March 16.

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Source: lefigaro

All life articles on 2021-07-14

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