As part of a collection of books published on the initiative of the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art, Catherine Francblin has just published a biography of Jean Fournier who from 1954 to 2006 was the gallerist of artists such as Simon Hantaï, Joan Mitchell, Sam Francis, Shirley Jaffe, Claude Viallat and Pierre Buraglio,
amongst others. On this occasion, we wanted to bring together some Parisian gallery owners to ask them about their profession and their commitment to art
in today’s very different context. And because artists should have their say too,
we also invited Fabrice Hyber. Four gallerists with various profiles and at different stages in their career were invited to discuss their experiences: Florence Bonnefous who in collaboration with Édouard Mérino runs the Air de Paris gallery, which they founded in 1990; Emmanuel Perrotin, from the eponymous gallery, which also opened in 1990 and has, in addition to the large exhibition space in the Marais in Paris, five other Perrotin galleries around the world; Nathalie Boutin, director along with Solène Guillier of the GB Agency, inaugurated in 2001; Thomas Bernard, who founded the Cortex Athletico gallery in 2003 in Bordeaux, and then inaugurated a gallery in his name in Paris in 2015. They were joined by artist Fabrice Hyber who maintains a rather distant, even critical relationship with gallerists, in terms of the projects he himself creates, as detailed below. In the background of a debate that proved to be cordial but nevertheless revelatory of highly contrasting points of view, hovered over by Jean Fournier, to whom I devoted a biography, Jean Fournier, un galeriste amoureux de la couleur (Hermann). Between the 1970s and the 1990s, Jean Fournier’s gallery occupied a well-established, enviable position, which he maintained long enough to be able to see several of the artists he represented, including Simon Hantaï, Joan Mitchell, etc., rise to success in the artistic landscape and earn their place in art history. What remains of the spirit of engagement that characterized Jean Fournier? Has the realpolitik gotten the better of the passion that drove us all into the art world in our day? While our discussion may not provide any definitive answers, it demonstrates, at the very least, the vigilance of those working in the arts today. CF
——— Jean Fournier was a gallerist deeply committed to the artists he represented. He worked permanently with a dozen artists, whom he knew at an early age and with whom he worked for most of his life, at least until the late 1990s. Obviously, the situation of galleries is much more complex today; it requires other means, other methods. Nonetheless, we could start with some aspects of the gallerist’s work that seem to have changed little. For example Nathalie, you attach a lot of importance to building a strong relationship with the
public. Everyone said that Fournier was a born pedagogue. He loved talking about artists with visitors. For you, is the job of a gallery owner today to maintain close ties with the public? Nathalie Boutin The gallery owner’s relationship to a work is something private, intimate and not necessarily intellectual. However, it is also a social relationship in the sense that the gallery must protect and allow the public to understand the vision of a particular artist within the social context. This implies a commitment. The gallery owner looks for a particular work, it is a personal choice, but then we must transmit this work to an audience. For me, Saturdays at the gallery are an especially fruitful experience: people take the time to discover the works on display, to come talk to us. A gallery is not just about production.
Florence Bonnefous Even more important than the public are the artists who approach us on their own initiative: the group effect. You work with one artist, then another, and another, then these artists meet and a group is created. I find it more exciting to show a work to an artist represented by the gallery who is unfamiliar with that other artist’s work, rather than to a stranger off the street.
Emmanuel Perrotin This is something that Air de Paris and Jean Fournier have in common: the fact that artists co-opted other artists. Hantaï brought artists he admired to Fournier. Nevertheless, it is difficult to compare experiences because the size of the audience is not the same. We have an average of 350 visitors a day. The Internet has changed everything in terms of a relationship with the public. Talking to people can be done through the booklets that we offer, the videos we produce, the conferences we organize. Our work also relies on art fairs. This is why galleries of our generation participate in fairs much more frequently. They are a means of increasing opportunities.
A PLATFORM FOR EXCHANGE Sending a newsletter is a form of communication. It is not the same thing as talking about an artist to visitors on a Saturday afternoon. EPThat depends. Gallery assistants can be considered gallerists in effect, for example. I believe that the people working in my gallery are, for the most part, more intelligent than me. It is no coincidence that our gallery space has three reception areas to facilitate exchanges.
Thomas Bernard That’s true. The gallery is a great platform for exchange. But what has changed today is the relationship to distance, what is near and far: one can be both a local gallery in the sense that there is a need for a physical presence, and at the same time we can be present via a multichannel system. Jean Fournier’s gallery consisted of four physical spaces: the exhibition rooms, the office, the showroom and the storage space. Nowadays, galleries can be present in other spaces, such as fairs, social networks, etc.
EPYet the Internet doesn’t prevent us from opening spaces overseas. Paradoxically, the development of a gallery internationally relies heavily on human input.
FB A classic function of entrepreneurial development.
EP Indeed, but it allows us to accompany artists’ ambitions. Unlike what is happening in the musical sphere, where artists cannot do anything outside of their own record label, in the art world, artists rarely work with a single gallery. For example, we don’t necessarily encourage our artists to have only one interlocutor. It is obviously important that artists find gallerists with whom they feel comfortable enough to be able to discuss their stomach problems, family issues, etc. But big galleries can also offer that to some artists.
It’s a delegation of power of sorts. EP Which allows a complementarity, because every director of a foreign organization brings their own personality, the goal being to offer a larger service and to allow all of our artists to make a living. It’s a role that is not just intellectual. Artists may well love you, but they also want to have the means to produce their projects. If one artist sells a lot of work, some galleries use this to finance the installations of other artists whose work they have greater difficulty selling. In my opinion, this is quite unhealthy, even when the artists in question benefit from a network of patrons or gallerists because they remain dependent on this network to produce work. Obviously, you take a risk by giving a lot of autonomy to your artists, because you are always afraid of losing them, but I think that this should still be our objective.
TB You have to allow the artist to do what they want to do. But the ideal situation is that the artist is not dependent on our filter. Many galleries exert a filter: we accept or refuse to produce this or that project.
EP It’s exactly for this reason that Fabrice Hyber has been invited to participate in our debate; he has remained independent from gallerists. Furthermore, he’s not particularly faithful to them.
FH I don’t agree and let me explain why. It’s true that I’m very independent; that’s my nature, my way of working and I haven’t changed my behaviour with regard to gallerists. Instead I have developed and invented a new way of working together with them for each project. If I have stopped working with them, it’s generally, except in the case of the Galerie Obadia, because they went out of business. Froment & Putman parted ways in 1996, ZénoX stopped because S.M.A.K. in Ghent had bought a work directly from Tilton in New York, Erna Hécey closed in 2003 and Jérôme de Noirmont in 2013. It is therefore necessary, if I want to continue making art, to constantly find other ways of doing so.
EP In a gallery, some artists are at the beginning of their career, others are already established. How can the established artists be expected to understand that we need to financially support an artist at the beginning of their career, for whom the production risks are high? This is problematic because artists have different needs. I don’t know of any gallery where the artists agree to share all profits equally.
FB It’s the gallery who shares its profits when it succeeds in selling an artist. I don’t find that unhealthy at all.
The exchanges between artists and galleries are not solely commercial; they are sometimes of an intellectual nature. I’m thinking of the artists connected to relational aesthetics presented at Air de Paris in the 1990s. FB The term ‘relational aesthetics’ appeared after the fact; it was invented by artists. At first, in 1990, the approach of many artists was a more intuitive one. This is where the family model comes from: a group of people from the same generation share common interests and something is created. Some continue, others change direction. At that time, the issue of making a living was secondary. Making a living meant living one’s life, working hard. But time passed. These artists—Philippe Parreno, Pierre Joseph, Liam Gillick, etc. are now 25 years older. Their lives have become more complex. The constraints of everyday life have lessened those carefree moments where art and life combined, a bit like the Fluxus model, where the party and fun were all-important. Today some of these artists are famous with a lot of
money available to produce their projects; this is not the case for others. Galleries may play the role of economic communicating vessels for a certain period of time, but they will never be able to bridge the gaps in terms of an artist’s renown, in turn influenced by changing times, changing relationships in the group, and by their own personal psychology. Life is harder in a world where the entrepreneurial model with its emphasis on marketing and communication, dominates. Today, major galleries have artist-liaison people who act as the fraternal shoulder for other artists, paying attention to their aches and woes. Most of today’s collectors have less time. They turn more easily to information given in magazines or events posted on Facebook. These are the perverse effects of a system that leaves little room for the life of ideas.
CREATING ONE’S WORLD Fabrice, what is an artist looking to do with their artwork? FH First and foremost, the artist wants to create their own world, so they invent stories, which they then produce and disseminate. For years, I have been setting up new possibilities for the production and distribution of work. In 1992 I wrote a book, 1-1=2 in which I proposed other models of diffusion and development, collaborations between art and business, art and science, etc. I also created the company UR, Unlimited Responsibility, in 1993/94 to facilitate the production of my work and that of other artists. I stopped this in 2006 when I asked Jérôme de Noirmont to sell it. In short, what interests me is imagining and creating. For example, for some years now with the Directors programme (Les réalisateurs), I have been teaching young artists, working in pairs with students from business and management schools, how to produce artworks in partnership with companies.
Is it correct to say that you’re your own gallerist? FH I prefer producing and while working with a gallery is one way to do this, it is not the only way. Art has different forms. When I made the biggest soap in the world, I didn’t need a gallery.The mode of diffusion is inherent to the work. Now there are perhaps other ways of disseminating art. Today, I have an agent in Japan who deals with the marketing of my projects. Everything depends on the work and to whom it is addressed. Working directly with a company, with collectors, allows me to develop different projects. It inspires me to work with people. Moreover, because I draw a lot, I sometimes bring out drawings from my studio for exhibitions, and some of them are sold.
EP In summary, your paintings and drawings are sold by galleries but public and other commissions pass through you. A modus operandi that does not call into question the role of galleries.
FB In 1993/94, when Fabrice created his first production company, there was no system allowing gallerists to produce a huge amount. He gave them a hand. No accurate accounting system, no return on investment, etc.The question today relates to the merits of the relationship between the gallery, artist and the public, the latter including the customer, of course.
FHToday, a gallerist’s work is more extensive. They sell behaviours, time. Gallerists are agents.
FB Indeed, I once worked a lot with artists who sold situations more than objects.This is not really the case anymore. In terms of personal tastes, I offered a young artist, Eliza Douglas, her first exhibition and in the space of one year her stock has risen considerably. She makes large format paintings, cheaply.The content of the work strongly affects this triangular relationship. Works with a richer history, acquiring the benefit of time, often lag behind in sales. The format ‘a large but not too expensive painting’ is potentially a huge market. I have personal experience of this and I don’t regret this experience, but I have come to see that painting, and even sculpture, classic forms are acclaimed, while a Duchamp-style art history, which led to the development of conceptual works that are criticized for being accompanied by a discourse not likely to be heard by the general public, well, this type of work has never attracted a very large market.
COMPROMISES? NBWe often hear that it would be a lot easier if you compromised a little.
EP Speaking of compromise, if the other gallerists compromised themselves it would be rather serious. One can have an interest in other forms. In music, we find it normal to love classical music and dance music. Is it a compromise to love both? There are too many gallerists, especially on art fair committees, who say that showing things they don’t like is akin to compromising themselves.
NB Maybe, but it’s important to respect a certain line, to make choices. To have a gallery also means being part of society, drawing its outlines and sometimes taking a step back from it. It is about trusting artists, a family of minds to ‘tell’ that things are not simple.
EP Having a more radical programme and another based on taste can create bridges. What you analyse as marketing has the virtue of helping artists get out of their isolation, artists who remain in the same networks, with artists who have the same practices, who frequent the same people and depend on a few fairs to survive. This is a situation that is far from ideal. A gallery does more than just selling. The more you’ve sold, the more you can afford to do something else.
TB This entrepreneurial thinking that Fabrice evokes as an artist should also be implemented by gallerists. In 2007–2008, in Bordeaux, we created a structure under the name Adam Smith (a well-known economist, involved in the field of aesthetics) so as to allow our clients to invest in the production of certain projects by artists. They were not necessarily collectors at the time and became so later. A few years ago, we offered clients the possibility of taking out a subscription to the gallery, with which we could anticipate and produce projects upstream. We have to try things, and adopt a creative position in order to meet the needs of artists so that they don’t become confined to other systems.
LESS AUTONOMY? I would like to come back to one point: if galleries seek a certain coherence in the choice of the artists they represent, it is by conviction. It is nobody’s intention to deny commercial success. NB It comes down to chance encounters. When we set up the gallery with Solène, we didn’t want to overlook anything or anyone. So we went looking for artists who had gone through part of the 20th century in a non-linear fashion. We had been especially impressed by Catherine David’s Documenta. Our reading of the 20th century was becoming more complex and it was necessary to bring to light the sense of liberty embodied by certain figures. We went to see Robert Breer, who had not been represented by a gallery since 1974, and with whom we worked until his death in 2011. Another artist who is important to us in terms of the history of the 20th century was Julius Koller, a conceptual artist from Slovakia. Both artists are now dead. To work with an artist you knew personally and who has passed away becomes another issue when some galleries receive all the estates.
EP The fashion of estates …The press tend
to summarize this issue as the search for a new source of income, but the intention is not so strategic. We are a generation of gallerists who started young; we’ve reached an age where we want to vary our pleasures; we don’t work at all in the same way with an artist or with an estate.
TB This work with estates also stems from the fact that art history is often discussed with the current generation of artists. I worked with an artist who committed suicide (Charles Mason), with an artist who died at the age of seventy-one (Rolf Julieus) and an artist born in 1928. Today, the break-even point of a gallery is extremely high. So there are things that must be explored because of one’s tastes, convictions, desires, whatever one wants, but also by virtue of economic contingencies. I feel responsible for how artists pay their rent.
FB I think today’s artists have less autonomy because the pressure to be in the spotlight is stronger. This is a particularly anxiety-provoking situation. If they don’t succeed, they disappear. And if they succeed too quickly or too intensely, they disappear too.
Isn’t it true that artists, bombarded with requests to produce work for collectors in Hong Kong, Shanghai and around the world, especially when they are commercially successful, and even if they are good, are likely to repeat themselves? Thomas mentioned that tomatoes have lost their taste because tomatoes are now produced
solely for supermarkets. Many people have started wanting real tomatoes again and not just standard products. FB Contemporary art has become a vector of communication, a subject of general interest. However, there is a smokescreen which means that, unlike the climate in which Jean Clair spoke of elite art, it is now accepted by everyone and perceived by municipalities and various regional authorities as a vector for culture, tourism and urban development. The art market is not limited to the galleries and the work we sell; it is also a huge net that covers a large number of events all over the country: Museum Night, biennales, festivals, etc.This is a form of democratization and we should congratulate ourselves on this fact, but one can also, and I’m not being pessimistic here, worry about a problem of cultural overproduction.
EP I don’t agree with what you said about the overproduction of standardized works. With social networks, people are aware of every little work produced on the other side of the world. It is often the artists who promote the work themselves on their own social networks. On the other hand, the Dubuffets, Calders, Warhols and Picassos of the world made large quantities of standardized objects! We could never tell Mark Rothko: ‘Stop doing the same paintings all the time.’ So why criticize living artists?
Artists do not produce any more works now than they did in the 19th and 20th centuries paradoxically, despite the fact that they now have many more opportunities to do so.
FB I am convinced that there is a standardization, of artworks I don’t know, but certainly of minds. Exhibitions are repeated. There is a standardization of desire. I ask myself the question: have I changed or the way I look at the world?
INSTITUTIONS Let us quickly touch on one last point: the relationship between galleries and institutions. How do galleries go about helping artists with institutions? We all know that museums suffer from a lack of financial resources and yet artists with galleries and powerful collectors behind them always seem to be welcome. FB This is more prevalent in the United States than in Europe. A study from last year revealed that the five largest New York galleries accounted for 75–80% of artists who had been exhibited in an art centre or museum in the United States. This is not the case at the Centre Pompidou, although a detailed study of works entering the collections might show that priority is given to those artists whose galleries are particularly vocal. On the other hand, participation in the Venice Biennale requires the financial support of galleries; this is more or less the case for all biennials. Outside of the capital, institutions are increasingly impoverished, they suffer from a real lack of resources that sometimes affects programming. The Magasin de Grenoble that I once knew, renamed Magasin des horizons, has begun a very special programme, targeting a wide audience, which combines the practice of physical movement with the idea that we can change the way we talk about art by moving our bodies. Who knows? It is a sideways shift, which passes not through the search for funding but through other means and other places by a de-contextualization of collective practice. It seems to me a hopeful response to a very fragile situation due to shrinking funds; private contributions have dropped to benefit private foundations instead. A local response to a national crisis of institutions? In any case, this is an experience that raises a new question: should we also invent other models of institutions?
Catherine Francblin has just published Jean Fournier, un galeriste amoureux de la couleur (Hermann) and Deux Pères juifs (Le Bord de l’eau).