Chantal Crousel. The Will and the Way
She is ranked among the most influential European art dealers, due to her radically lucid views and her eye for emerging talent.
After the opening of her second space in Paris last October (5-7, rue de Saintonge), and before the release of her autobiography (forthcoming in summer 2019), L’Officiel Art spoke with Chantal Crousel, tracing back the pivotal steps of her nearly 40-year long career.
L’OFFICIEL ART: Your presence in the art world is the result of what might be called “chance and necessity,” since in 1974, thanks to an impromptu conversation with a gallerist in Brussels concerning a work by Man Ray, you decided to leave your position as executive secretary of a transport company to study art history. Your parents had advised you against just such a path. This decisive moment thus allowed you to return to an initial passion: art.
CHANTAL CROUSEL: My parents thought that pursuing art history studies, as I wished, was of no interest, and they advised me to embark on a career as a teacher or an executive secretary, which would have allowed me to take advantage of my classical training in Greek and Latin and my fluency in several modern languages. In this respect, I must say that my classical culture has been an essential foundation for me over the years, because like mathematics it nurtures a spirit of logic and makes it possible to establish links between disciplines and ideas, and to project these links into the construction of thought.
You speak seven languages, acquired in various circumstances. Has this been helpful, especially with regard to artists and collectors?
I learned some of those languages by necessity, such as Swedish because of a position that I held for a Scandinavian company, but it was also fun, because it is close to my mother tongue, Dutch. Being born and living in Europe allows easy access to different languages that have come into contact through the history of nations, such as Arabic and Spanish, or Arabic and French. In my view it would be natural and desirable, for the mutual understanding of peoples and cultures, to encourage this kind of learning. Making it harder for today’s young people to learn from the history of their parents and grandparents is really a mistake, a narrowing, a matter of convenience. I am very critical of this. In the art world, we have the opportunity to cross borders, to communicate with people around the world, telling them how we feel and what we have to say. Every artist with whom one works has his or her own language, and every artist is almost a language per se. If we want to use this diversity of languages within the idea of what a gallery should be, this also means applying this constructive foundation of who we are.
Conversely, have these parameters influenced your choice of artists?
I think that expression, the artistic message – necessarily influenced by the region where an artist lives and has his or her background – is also a language of exchange with other artists, the material of a cultural exchange in general: with collectors but also with museums, with their increasingly international collections. I think we were one of the first galleries in Paris to broaden our spectrum to artists from very different and far-flung countries, who all had something complementary, something to exchange: it is now essential to develop this vision and the action that goes with it.
It is interesting to observe that the seven languages you speak are a heritage that you have chosen to acquire, with neither obligation nor constraint.
Dutch is my mother tongue and French was taught at school, where we had excellent teachers, while we also spoke it at home. We lived about ten kilometers from the French border and my father – a banker who had studied French at the University of Louvain – had many French clients. My mother had also studied French, at a boarding school in Tournai. In college, after learning Greek and Latin I worked on English and German. At the time we had to memorize entire books and carry out grammatical analysis… Then, as a personal desire, I learned Italian in evening classes when I lived in Brussels. Swedish, as I just mentioned, was a matter of professional reasons and love (my second husband is Swedish). Finally, I learned Spanish out of affection for the country, which have I visited often. My appetite for languages is also due to the fact that I am a great reader, and language learning provides access to literature in its original version. The various languages have played a certain role in the gallery’s framework. They allow me, without mediation, to build a relationship and to develop affinities with artists, but also with collectors.
Your family culture was more oriented towards music and antique art, your father being a great lover of music and the Flemish masters. How did your attraction for contemporary art emerge?
Flemish painting and classical music were very important, as was cinema, curiously enough. My father was president of a film club in a small village, so at a very young age I was able to see the works of the Nouvelle Vague, as well as the great classics and many innovative films. I also subscribed to Cahiers du cinéma. Literature, especially French, was also omnipresent, and for instance I read Marguerite Duras a lot. In contemporary art I could perceive elements of response to existential questions that plagued me. Great artists have a certain clairvoyance, a hypervision that is a powerful “tool” of analysis of the era.
In relation to the initial impulse that brought you into the art world – aesthetic and emotional shock sustained by the role of the initiator, the communicator – what is the role of the gallerist today with respect to artists, audience, collectors and museums? How has it evolved over the last forty years?
The general mood has changed, including that of artists and collectors. Just as museums now have to cope with balancing their role – their main role, in my opinion – of constructing art history with that of satisfying the tastes of their patrons and donors, quite often museums tend to get some kind of satisfaction from their own choices and collections. And sometimes the two are linked: they can both offer and buy at special prices. When I started my activity in the 1980s, a number of collectors had very modest sums with which to buy art, but they were driven by such passion… Contemporary art did not reach very high prices as quickly as it does today. The works of very good artists, recognized by museums, never went beyond 100,000 euros and most often were valued around 50,000. This meant that many collectors were freelance professionals, namely the average level of buyers in France at the time, and they were able to create outstanding collections, such as Marc and Josée Gensollen in Marseille. Over time such collectors have gathered impressive holdings, driven by the aim of capturing a vision of their time, implying a sort of self-portrait based on insight. They would all agree that their collection has helped them to learn about themselves and to expand their inner perceptions. Today this is much less the case. Collectors, who buy works at levels well over 50,000 euros, set out to broadcast their financial power, and increasingly they are using art as a means of speculation to increase their wealth. So it is rare, unlike in the early years, for collectors to acquire a work with the intention of keeping it in the long run, of living with it, believing that it is meaningful in their personal development. This change took place around the year 2000, and today an average collector buys only if he is almost certain that the acquisition will gain value. So today the focus is more on profit.
In this new economic and human cartography, how do you manage to maintain a relationship with the collector?
“Historic” collectors are still a part of our preferred relationships. Half of the people who send us requests, however, are art advisors. These “art advisors,” some of whom are excellent, represent a radical change. In the space of a few years, the art market has had a multiplier close to 50: today, while the volume of artists and works present on the market has increased massively, quality has remained rare. It is therefore essential for the purchaser who lacks self-confidence or a desire for discovery to find a way to gain knowledge before deciding to act.
In this profusion, does the staging of museum exhibitions imply that the artist will soon be out of reach for a large majority of collectors?
Not necessarily, because it takes time to mature, especially with regard to the accessibility related to the work’s depth of content or the artist’s message. Here too we are seeing a sort of smoothing out of content, or even the total absence of content in a work, which can be an illusion, suggesting a form of happiness or euphoria very often associated with the term “lifestyle,” which says it all. It’s pretty, nice to look at, it can make you think of this or that other artist, who might be much more interesting than the work in question... These artists without density will adorn interiors or yachts for a while, before disappearing, though after some of them have reached dizzying prices.
If contemporary art galleries are of course not equivalent in terms of quality, programming, or the relevance of their vision, given your long experience do you think that you have made errors in terms of appreciation?
Let’s say that when a gallery owner starts a collaboration with an artist he has “discovered,” in whom he believes that he sees truly outstanding qualities, and whose work has never been shown before, he has the desire to “expose” him in the literal sense of the word, to present him to the greatest number of people, and to trust in the quality of the work. But it is true – and I have experienced this – that sometimes, after two or three exhibitions, it becomes clear that the artist is at a dead end, that his approach doesn’t go much further. This can happen for reasons that can be easily analyzed: the artist was placed too quickly in a situation to which he is not able to “respond,” where he does not have the maturity to follow up on the success of his first works. And I think that in such cases my reaction reflects an aspect of myself that is good and bad at the same time, namely that I cannot defend a work that I do not like, that I do not respect. When an artist moves towards a type of expression that I cannot appreciate, I cannot work with him anymore. This has led to several break-ups.
The history of your “catalogue” of artists – all with very different modes of expression – is eloquent, especially regarding those to whom you gave their first exhibition and who are now included in the largest private collections and museums. What role do you intend to play with artists, and what connects these artists to each other?
There is an initial and fundamental point that connects all these artists, namely that each of them has to have a very sincere argument, expressed by necessity, for themselves, before we even talk about the market or sales. When I think of Wolfgang Tillmans, Gabriel Orozco, Anri Sala, or the young David Douard, they all have this need in their body: they simply cannot do anything except to be an artist. But they want to do it in the most honest, sincere way possible, and with as much wonder as possible. And, of course, they want to grow, to be known, to be famous. But they give a lot of themselves. Since their concerns and the content of their work are original, the messages they are trying to convey are precise and done in a new, high-quality language, specific to no other artist, they need galleries that accompany them with the same commitment, the same effort, the same belief in their work and a complicity that often results in a friendship. In my opinion, this is one of the most intense relationships of all professions. Because we constantly question ourselves, we try constantly to formulate answers. The artists know they have the freedom to express deep doubts, fears, and this is something the gallery owner must receive, and to which he must respond. It’s a big responsibility, and it’s one of the most beautiful and rewarding things about what is simply one of the most beautiful professions in the world.
We might say that since the opening of your first gallery in Brussels in 1976, named (boldly enough) La Dérive, you have gone from strength to strength.
I have always felt the urge to exercise my freedom to deviate. To deviate from what one seeks for comfort’s sake… To grant oneself the possibility to take side roads punctuated by unforgettable encounters, with artists of course, but also with curators and art theorists, like Harald Szeemann and Jan Hoet, who was a genius and a visionary. The exhibition “Chambres d’amis” curated by Hoet in Ghent in 1986 was an extraordinary model, a real novelty. He designed exhibitions that have not been sufficiently studied, in my view. I am indebted to him for the privilege of having met Tony Cragg, at the moment when Cragg was thinking about the works he was planning to show in Hoet’s exhibition “Art in Europe After 1968” held in 1980.
Tony Cragg was one of the first artists you showed in Paris. He was a major figure in the emerging New British Sculpture, who was living at the time in Wuppertal. Eight years later, in 1988, he represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale and received the Turner Prize.
I was immediately seized by Cragg’s work. It was a revelation for me of a completely new current in an artistic landscape then dominated by the American minimalists. The few people who saw the exhibition were delighted, but I didn’t make any sales… During the first years I sold almost nothing. Even the works of more established artists such as Alighiero Boetti. I had to be tenacious, to believe in it fiercely.
The active presence of a few collectors and the support of a handful of museums has been your lifeline, along with the creative energy of the era.
Foreign collectors, especially Belgian collectors, knew the artists I exhibited, and the art museum of Saint-Etienne, with Bernard Ceysson who was the first person in France to acquire one of Tony Cragg’s works, as well as the Centre Pompidou – I was very close to Pontus Hultén – were the first institutions to make acquisitions at the gallery. My intention was to show in France all these artists who, although recognized internationally, were absent here. To do this I traveled a lot, going to artists’ studios. And all this worked in an organic way, Cragg, Bruce McLean, Boetti, Gilbert & George participated in important biennials like Documenta, where new currents were revealed. This corresponded to a moment of unprecedented creativity, unparalleled since. The New English Sculpture, but also the incubator that was West Germany with the Neue Wilde and the emergence of the Italian Transavanguardia led by Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino – they were a group of powerful artists that I wanted to exhibit quickly. The time was indeed one of reactions: against Arte Povera, but also against Minimal Art with a movement initiated by Jenny Holzer, Barbara Kruger, Robert Longo, Richard Prince, Troy Brauntuch. In 1982, I showed them in the context of group and solo exhibitions, the first ones in France for Jenny Holzer, Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger.
Your base is in Paris, as demonstrated by the new space you have recently opened on Rue de Saintonge. How do you envision your international presence and the transmission of this heritage to your son Niklas Svennung?
We are very active internationally, especially through our presence at art fairs, but we have made the choice, for the moment, to focus on spaces in the capital. We have recruited a person based in Beijing, however, to represent the gallery in China, and our new director, who was in Berlin before, has reinforced the strength of the Parisian team. Niklas has evolved in the art world since an early age. He is truly immersed in it, and is capable of both ambition and vision. While his perspective is not exactly the same as mine, he has agreed to make this particular activity, that of being a gallerist, his present and his future. With the same commitment, the same conviction, the same personal need for fulfillment.