Bettencourt Schueller Foundation, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
For the past twenty years, one of the primary aims of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller has been to champion and support French craftsmanship. To celebrate this anniversary, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris is staging a multisensory exhibition exploring a variety of periods, media, and skills. L’Officiel Art speaks to Olivier Brault, director general of the foundation, and Laurent Le Bon, curator of the exhibition.
L’OFFICIEL ART: What prompted you to call on Laurent Le Bon, director of the Musée Picasso Paris, to curate the exhibition “The Mind Begins and Ends in the Fingertips”?
OLIVIER BRAULT: In our commitment to the crafts, our interest has mainly been in extracting them from the confinement in which our society places them, crossing borders, and showing their profoundly contemporary dimension. It seemed to us that Le Bon’s generous, willingly transgressive, and open-ended gaze was relevant to the curatorship of this exhibition. We hoped that this event would allow us to take a step forward in offering the public the best of French knowledge.
The Fondation Bettencourt Schueller provided financial support for the establishment in 2017 of Toguna, a place for exchange and sharing created by artists and craftspeople, which broadens the type of work on display for the visitors of the Palais de Tokyo. Your presence in this institution has now been visible for some time.
This is indeed our fifth collaboration. We entered into a partnership with the Palais de Tokyo precisely because this atypical institution was the ideal place to show the contemporary value of craft. Jean de Loisy, who was then president, sought to take a step toward artisans/artists with regard to material, believing this was a fertile source of contemporary art and creation. We committed to a multi-year agreement that allowed us to set up three exhibitions: “The Use of Forms” in 2015, “Double I” in 2016, and “Another Banana Day for the Dream Fish” in 2018. Toguna, if not strictly speaking an exhibition, represents another form of investment in creation by craftspeople, with a view to installing sustainable equipment at the Palais de Tokyo. “The Mind Begins and Ends in the Fingertips” is thus our fifth step in this direction.
Laurent Le Bon, you are the exhibition’s curator – why did you call on the artist Isabelle Cornaro for her mise en espace? LAURENT LE BON: I immediately suggested a collective logic, and from the outset the idea of a scenography became clear. The architecture of the Palais de Tokyo, built in the 1930s, is composed of large spaces bathed in natural light, which could easily be compared to the flexibility so sought after by Renzo Piano and Richard Rogers for the Centre Pompidou. The materials are, of course, very different from those of the Pompidou, closer to the spirit of artisans; it was thus exciting, from these noble materials and this vast plateau, to create a story incarnated in a mise en espace. Admittedly, we could have used professional scenographers, but we chose to trust an artist with a different outlook, who was able to respond to the bold choices of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. In her past work and in recent installations, Cornaro has shown her extraordinary sense of materials and the relationship between perspectives. We thus did not create a chronology between a concept that I would propose and that would then induce a mise en espace: we had considered from the beginning that we would work in pairs in order to unfold a story in four chapters. We should also mention two important artistic advisers and longtime associates: Jean de Loisy [president of the Palais de Tokyo from 2011 to 2018, current director of the Beaux-Arts de Paris] and Alain Lardet, cofounder of the Designer’s Days festival in Paris and artistic director of “Homo Faber” [a Fondation Bettencourt Schueller exhibition in Venice in 2018], who has an encyclopedic knowledge of the world of crafts. As a quartet, we thus returned to the etymology of the word “curator” – one who cares, who listens. The story that we tell throughout the 1,000 sq m of the Palais de Tokyo celebrates twenty years of the foundation in a way that we wanted to make festive. We did not have carte blanche, and this was exciting because freedom is born out of constraint. This constraint was, in our eyes, a road map that invited us to journey through the awards handed out by the foundation, and the different stages that marked the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand. The award winners and their creations were the elements of a vocabulary from which we created sentences and a story.
The word “collective” has an extremely strong meaning within the foundation.
O.B.: We work in perfect coherence, and this alliance of talents within the collective that Le Bon has assembled illustrates our intention: we do not want to take a stand in order to try to determine if craftspeople are artists or not. Balthus said that he hated the word “artist” because, as soon as it was pronounced, the respect due to craftspeople would disappear. We want to show that this extraordinary treasure of French skill has its rightful place on the French stage today.
L.L.B.: And what better word than the one chosen by the Bettencourt SchuelleAnd what better word than the one chosen by the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller for one of its awards, “Dialogues”? In the dialogue, we are on an equal footing. Sometimes, the ego of some artists requires special attention, but it is the principle of collective exhibitions that everyone must find his or her place. It is thus logical that the foundation should be welcomed into the “Future, Former, Fugitive” season at the Palais de Tokyo, which highlights the French scene – though our purpose is very different, we are also celebrating creation.
Through its work carried out in recent years, the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller has helped to change the way the arts and crafts sector is viewed in France.
O.B.: What interests us is to cross borders. It’s a way to change people’s perspectives. This question has been central since the beginning of the foundation: the reason for our commitment to the art profession for twenty years is the feeling of a very profound injustice experienced by Liliane Bettencourt, who, having been exposed very early to Ruhlmann furniture, was awakened to its beauty and the particular genius of the craftspeople. France had overvalued the most conceptual and most abstract forms of intelligence, whereas Bettencourt thought like Paul Valéry, who wrote: “From the prodigious hand of the artist / Equal to and rival of his thought / One is nothing without the other.” This was her very natural way of thinking, and we have kept this conviction as the foundation of our commitment to the crafts. We cannot reconcile ourselves with the idea that there is a minor form of creative engagement. Though opinions are evolving, there is still a reluctance among young people to choose manual crafts, because our society is still imbued with the negative perspective with which it considers these trades.
Hence the relevance of the name of the award: the Liliane Bettencourt Prize for the Intelligence of the Hand. How did you organize the four chapters of the exhibition?
L.L.B.: We wanted to create a threshold effect, with a cozy atmosphere and different lighting. Our project presents the diversity of craftspeople within a plastic unit resulting from the work of Cornaro. On the wall is a lesser-known quote from Valéry: “The mind begins and ends in the fingertips.” The strength of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller is its contemporary perspective, which comes to be focused on heritage and on hands through multidisciplinarity. We went to the École des Beaux-Arts, which is full of masterpieces that are never or rarely exhibited. To be a museum curator is also to bring things into the light. We wanted to show a wide variety of media and are thus exhibiting the first x-rays of hands preserved by the Beaux-Arts, but also casts made from nature, photographs, and books from the beginnings of the printing press, on which a curator at the Beaux-Arts noticed the addition of drawings of hands. And what do all these hands do? They are waiting. They are open, ready to welcome the tool. We then enter the chapter of the workshop, in order to show how creative processes are highlighted, sometimes museographically, at the frontier of the industry, with fascinating objects such as looms, molds, and tools. This allows us to pay tribute to institutions such as: the Meisenthal International Glass Art Center; the world capital of tapestry, Aubusson; and the Troyes Center for Tools and
Worker Thought. Georges Henri Rivière, founder of the Museum of Arts and Popular Traditions, placed a Picasso ceramic and a rustic ceramic pot at the entrance of the collection. It is this equality that the foundation wants to defend today. The photographer Sophie Zénon shows our laureates at work: these photos are fascinating, in that they present the link between the gaze and the hand. O.B.: We have worked with Zénon for years, she is a photographer and an artist with a remarkable portfolio. She has an extraordinary eye and the talent to showcase the 110 laureates who have made the history of this award for twenty years. Believing in people is a fundamental position of the Fondation Bettencourt Schueller. We infinitely respect institutions, we support them and count on them, but one conviction comes from the family of our founders: in the end, it is men and women who make the difference in life.
L.L.B.: After this gallery of portraits, we discover the objects, in a spectacular space with a very high ceiling. We chose to leave it in its original strength, bathed in natural light, slightly filtered in order to protect the works. We must imagine here a parade, a festive moment. With Lardet, we have been attentive to choosing the best artists and to the dialogue with each of them. We also asked the artisans to talk about their works, and their words are presented near each object. The journey then leaves the real in order to enter the digital world. By way of a panorama, projections allow one to circumnavigate the world and the foundation’s twenty years of support for the arts, to show the diversity of these activities (one of the most recent occurred after the fire at Notre-Dame cathedral, where the support for the crafts was made concrete). Thus, after “Prélude,”
“Atelier,” and “Grande Galerie,” this final chapter, entitled “Constellation,” reveals the multiplicity of talents and the links that are woven between them.
This exhibition is didactic: it shows and explains. But it also expresses the notion of happiness and sharing.
O.B.: At the origin of this exhibition is our birthday: a joyous party. The bouquets of amaranths arranged throughout the exhibition are a metaphor for the sensory bouquet, the bouquet of pleasure that we would like to offer visitors, with the help of all those who have been involved. Crafts offer us beautiful works, a beauty that is related to pleasure. In our increasingly hectic, fast-paced world, there is an even more intense, true joy in meeting craftsmen and women who, in many cases, have made life choices that are radically different from ours. Opting for an austere life, confronting a resistant material, faced with complicated gestures to learn and precarious economies, real-life difficulties and a lack of recognition in France. These craftspeople nevertheless offer us wonderful objects, shaped by hand, unique or in very limited series; they conceal a history, a territorial anchorage, a choice of subjects that speaks to us as a country – and it is of ourselves that we speak through them. The visitor to the Palais de Tokyo – who is also a consumer and citizen of our time – will find joy and happiness in the presence of artisans.
“The Mind Begins and Ends at Your Fingertips”, (“L’esprit commence et finit au bout des doigts”), Palais de Tokyo, Paris, from October 16 to November 10, 2019, part of the “Future, Former, Fugitive” (“Futur, ancien, fugitif, une scène française”) season. palaisdetokyo.com, fondationbs.org