2023-08-25 09:00:07
Find all the episodes of the series “A president, an artist” here.
It is unlike any of its predecessors or its successors. No name in literature, painting or theater is associated with his reign. For a long time he was considered a badass, a friend of the hustlers, a king of dirty tricks. Jacques Chirac let people say. He was going far, very far, connected to the signs fashioned by man since the dawn of time. In this enigmatic world of primitive arts, there is no bourgeois complicity around creation, no conventional conversation. This secret passion for forever anonymous artists, dear to Apollinaire, ended up being exposed in broad daylight, favored by a meeting.
Mauritius, 1992. The mayor of Paris, immersed in a book on prehistory, in a swimsuit on the edge of the lagoon, does not want to be disturbed.
A “tourist”, convinced that he had seen his book, co-written with two academics, Jean-Louis Paudrat and Lucien Stéphan, in the monumental office of the Town Hall, insisted on introducing himself. The picture of Paris Match attests to this: this sum, African Artpublished in 1988 by Citadelles and Mazenod, is indeed Jacques Kerchache! ” It’s you ? ! » Every evening, they dine together, in front of a resigned Bernadette who has already had her fill of digressions on art in the Ming dynasty. The story will last well beyond the death of the tireless promoter of primitive arts, in 2001, at the age of 59.
Who is Kerchache? An adventurer who crossed Spanish Guinea on foot and by canoe, then the Congo, in search of masterpieces of Fang, Bakota, Bakwele, Punu statuary? A great expert? A learned collector? An original organizer of exhibitions? The merchant as cunning as he is feared, “capable of selling at a very high price, like Mademoiselle Chanel”, what does the expert in African art Pierre Amrouche describe? No doubt, but also the tireless militant of a museum of primitive arts, whose magazine Rolling Stone published, in January 1990, the famous manifesto “so that the masterpieces of the whole world are born free and equal”.
Attracted elsewhere
Artists, poets, philosophers (Arman, Yves Bonnefoy, Michel Leiris…) sign this petition from Kerchache asking the Louvre to dedicate a space to what is still called “primitive art”, “ethnographic arts” or “tribal arts”. The absence of a recognized term for these “distant arts” says a lot about the debates that agitate the scientific community, the small world of curators, that of gallery owners and, implicitly, about the reluctance of the largest museum in the world. François Mitterrand and Jack Lang will not move a finger, even when Release, three months later, will publish the petition, enriched with a host of prestigious names. In December 1969, Kerchache had already written to Georges and Claude Pompidou, clients of his gallery in the rue de Seine, to implore them to add to the future Beaubourg “a museum of primitive art which Paris and France badly need”. He argues with as much ardor as his famous predecessor: Apollinaire, collector, argued in 1909 that the“negro art” was to enter the Louvre.
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