Newsletter 21Istanbul Symposium
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At the press opening of the Venice Biennale, a crowd of several hundred people, including the representatives of many National Sections of AICA (Austria, Belgium, Brazil, France, Germany, Ireland, Puerto Rico, Russia, Sweden, the USA, the UK …) gathered in the blazing heat, in front of the French pavilion, to pay their last respects to their colleague and friend, the great French critic, Pierre Restany, who had died a couple of weeks before. A series of short tributes from a number of Pierre’s closest associates - of which the briefest and most moving were from his widow, Jos De Kock and the artist, Yoko Ono – were enough, perhaps, to suggest the range of his sympathies, but could only hint at the impact of his writings and his personal charisma. Alfred Pacquement, the director of the Centre Georges Pompidou paid tribute to Pierre’s role, as the founder and promoter of Le Nouveau Réalisme, in the early 1960s and Nicolas Bourriaud and Jérome Sens spoke of his inspirational example, as the titular President of the newly established project spaces in the Palais de Tokyo. The collector, Gino de Maggio and exhibitions manager, Paulo de Grandis, (founder of the sculpture ‘Open’ in Venice) spoke of Pierre’s devotion to Italy and to contemporary Italian art. Appropriately enough, it was left to Christophe Domino, the President of the French Section of AICA, to underline the nature of Pierre’s lifelong attachment to our Association and its international ideals – a subject which Pierre himself had addressed, in his characteristically idiosyncratic way, at the Fiftieth Anniversary Celebrations at UNESCO, in Paris, in 1999. All the published obituaries have concentrated, naturally enough, on Pierre’s early advocacy of the work of now celebrated artists, including Arman, César, Klein and Tinguely, and of the links that he established between these artists in Paris and others in Milan, including Fontana and Manzoni, and Japan, including representatives of the Gutai Group. They have also drawn attention to the fact that he had represented a new type of critic, who was as partisan and engaged as the artists he championed and firmly committed to the idea that art was itself a piece of reality and commentary on the nature of that reality, within the context of society at large. Pierre first joined AICA in 1954, was active on many Commissions, attended numerous Congresses and twice served as Vice-President of the French Section, from 1981-84 and 1989-96. Although it is hard to imagine his ever becoming involved in the organisation’s internal politics and administrative affairs, it is less difficult to understand the appeal that AICA (and its parent organisation, UNESCO) held for him, as an outsider to the French critical establishment and the outstanding contribution he was able to make, on account of his effulgent personality, his nomadic lifestyle and his unusual skills as a linguist. It was at the 1960 AICA Congress in Warsaw that Pierre first became seriously engaged with the contemporary art of Central and Eastern Europe, when most of his colleagues in the West were too complacent or short-sighted to look beyond the limits of the commercial market. It may be said that articles that he published and the exhibitions that he organised on his return to Paris from this and subsequent trips to Warsaw and Prague contributed significantly to our understanding of the cultural renaissance in Poland under Gomulka and Czechoslovakia, at the time of the short lived ‘Cultural Spring’ of 1968. My own first encounter with Pierre was as a fellow jury member at the small international painting biennial at Cagnes-sur-Mer in the mid 1970s, when he dominated the proceedings with his wit and strategic naps. We stayed in contact, in the ensuing years and often met casually at arts events such as the Venice Biennale and the São Paulo Bienal, where Pierre held court. A place in his address book would lead to the occasional surprise, such as an invitation to join him on the jury of a new biennial, in a capital city in the Middle East that I believed had never hear of before or a summons to Milan for an interview for Domus, on the grounds that this (on top of a fee) would provide us both with an excuse for an evening with friends, at a good restaurant. The last time I saw Pierre was when he came over to London with his wife, Jojo and friend, the artist Jean-Pierre Raynaud, for the Royal Academy’s exhibition, ‘Paris: Capital of the Arts 1900-1968’, which he relished with a characteristic mixture of spontaneous enthusiasm and critical acuity. But friendship with Pierre brought other rewards, in the shape of introductions to a steady trickle of visitors to London from many parts of the world – most of them artists, and many of them young or unknown. It is to this capacity for friendship that the eminent British art critic, John Russell alluded, in a recent letter to me, with personal recollections of AICA, in its early years. In this, Russell described the atmosphere in an AICA meeting in Paris, in the early 1950s, where ‘there was a rowdy, but vivid scene with people getting up all the time and tying to make an effect. I did not know my way around till a year or so later, but a later friend for life was Pierre Restany, who was open to everyone and took the trouble to help us.’ Pierre had been among the first of us to foresee the effects of the globalisation of culture and the corresponding expansion of the interest in minority languages, cultures and beliefs. For AICA he accurately predicted an evolution towards a kind of ‘supple corporatism’, which would be ‘less prestigious, but more professional’ and suggested that the ambitious young d’Artagnans among the art critics of the future should follow the path already plotted out for them on the ever-expanding web of electronic communications. But Pierre’s own particular forte was a curiously old-fashioned and timeless one – his seemingly limitless curiosity, which enabled him to go in any direction that art and his own unerring instinct for the unexpected would dictate. We shall all miss Pierre’s infectious enthusiasms, his quizzical responses and his limitless capacity for life. We have lost a friend, but we have won an example of selfless dedication to a set of causes with which we can all identify. Henry Meyric Hughes, International President, AICA Last updated : 09/25/2003 |
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© AICA 2003 |
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