Didier Ottinger doesn’t fit the stereotype of the stodgy art historian one might associate with a man who’s the deputy director and chief curator of Paris’ Centre Georges Pompidou.
With droves of reporters and photographers waiting outside the Taipei Fine Art Museum’s (TFAM) VIP room where I interviewed him, Ottinger arrived dressed in a casual navy blue suit. Speaking fluent English with a thick French accent, he is an expansive interlocutor, delivering anecdotes and theories about modern art without using the jargon beloved of most curators.
Ottinger was in Taipei this month to organize and open Arcadie, a joint exhibit by the Pompidou Center and the TFAM that features works by major modernist artists such as Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Georges Braques and Henri Matisse.
Arcadie (Arcadia) is on display at TFAM, galleries 1A and 1B. The museum is located at 181, Zhongshan N Rd Sec 3, Taipei City (台北市中山北路三段181號) until July 12. The museum is open Tuesdays to Sundays from 9:30am to 5:30pm, with extended hours on Saturdays until 8:30pm. Admission is NT$250. For more information call (02) 2595-7656. For more information, go to www.tfam.museum.
Taipei Times: You originally developed the idea for Arcadie after the Seoul Museum of Art invited you to create an exhibit of modern art based on the Pompidou’s permanent collection.
Didier Ottinger: Yes, they asked us to make a show that is a representation of the collection. So it had to cover all the periods ... and of course they were expecting to have the big names and so I was thinking of what it could be.
And then I thought, on a different level, to make a choice in the pieces of the collection that could be meaningful for people who are not familiar with Occidental modern art — to have a narrative. So what could be this narrative? And I thought Arcadia could be a way.
The other idea is more personal. It is the fruits of my reflection on modern art. We used to say that modern art starts with this famous painting by Manet — Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) — and we used to say this is the beginning of modern art because this is the destruction of the subject in painting, the narrative and so on. And I said, “Why can’t we consider the other side, that this particular painting introduced in modern times a kind of nostalgia for what we have lost in modern times, which is contact with nature.” So this is the narrative that is told in the exhibition itself and you can see that it makes sense to understand that many of these artists have a kind of wish to reconsider their relation to the cosmos.
(Arcadie consists of 83 objects by 42 masters. Its main theme investigates Arcadia — a region in central Greece that has taken on mythological resonance as a utopian land of abundance. Each of the exhibit’s 10 sub-themes addresses a detail of The Arcadian Shepherds by Renaissance painter Nicolas Poussin. Taken together the themes suggest aesthetic continuity between French classicism and European modernism as informed by artistic concerns that date back to antiquity.)
TT: Nicolas Poussin is a Renaissance painter who is generally considered by art historians to be working in a tradition different than the modern artists represented in the exhibit Arcadie.
DO: This is another point. I said making a narrative with the exhibition could be a way for people unfamiliar with this period of time in modern art [to access it]. The other point is to ask a question to the idea of modern art and say, “Why, after all, is this notion of willing to have a new relationship with nature not the key question for the time?” Especially now because it has become a big question for society everywhere: It’s the ecology, the green power — all these things. It could be the major question of the 20th century.
And the third element is Poussin. People living in another cultural area like Asia are not familiar with Occidental culture and I think that the reference to Poussin is a key element to introduce a wider spectrum in the culture, to say, “Most of the questions asked by the modern painters could be rooted in a very old tradition and this tradition of course is the French painting and the classicism of Poussin and before that all the Latin and Greek tradition which is the basis of our culture.” It could give people who are curious about Poussin or Arcadia an opportunity to discover, for example, Dante and Virgil. So for teachers it could be a good introduction.
TT: Have you had any feedback about the exhibition in Seoul?
DO: This is another point. The goal was also to focus on a particular topic — Arcadia, of lost paradise and lost contact with nature and so on — but with the intention that this question could be understood in different cultures. This idea of a lost paradise, of a golden age, of a time in space where the people were in perfect harmony with the cosmos is something that is shared by all the civilizations everywhere on Earth.
TT: What is the significance of the sub-themes?
DO: The themes are derived from some details of Poussin’s work. The very first thing that the visitors will see is a curtain. On this curtain we shall have a huge-scale projection of Les Bergers d’Arcadie (The Arcadian Shepherds) by Poussin — it was not possible to get the original one because it’s in the Louvre. So it’s a projection on the curtain and the visitors will have, like they did in Seoul, to cross the painting to enter the world of Arcadia. Each section of the exhibition came from one detail of this particular painting. For example, [in Poussin’s painting] there is a half-naked woman, so this is the introduction to voluptuary. From these details we have sections devoted to still life, and landscape and the nude and most of the iconography of the painting of the time.
TT: Does the exhibit really bring home the idea that these modernist artists were influenced by the Renaissance tradition?
DO: In spirit, of course.
TT: What are the differences between the pictorial experiments taking place during the Renaissance and the modernist experiments taking place during the late 19th and early 20th centuries?
DO: I think we’ve emphasized for too long that there is a big difference. I’m not sure that there is that difference. You can use different vocabulary, but in fact you are saying the same old story. And the Renaissance is not a single way of practicing painting. If you compare Poussin to Caravaggio, there is probably more difference between Poussin and Caravaggio than Poussin and Matisse, I think. It was a dramatization of history to say that modernity is the negation of the past, that it is the radical idea of innovation. Yes it could be, but it could be something different.
TT: So placing the work of Poussin together with these modernist artists goes against the grain.
DO: Yes. This is rarely a way of seeing modern art. Generally we say there is the Poussin of classicism ... and there is a break with Manet and we enter a different world. But what you see in the show is that ... Manet will be at the end and Poussin at the beginning just to explain that, after all, if we want we can imagine that history is not going in the way we were thinking. It’s much more complex. This stems from ideas that we have had since the middle of the 1970s when we started thinking of a new way of reading and writing art history.
(Ottinger is an expert on modern art and has written books and essays about seminal figures such as Jean Helion, Rene Magritte, Marcel Duchamp and Francis Picabia, to name just a few.)
TT: You’ve published 11 books and catalogues on modern art. Did you write anything for the Arcadie catalogue?
DO: Yes, there is an introduction. I have a new interpretation of Poussin and this is something I wanted to propose to my colleagues from the Louvre. The most important art historians of the time wrote major books about Poussin, such as [Erwin] Panofsky and [Harold] Rosenberg — and I propose this new idea.
TT: What has been the response to your theory?
DO: It’s not very well known in France because the show has only been shown in Seoul and the catalogue was mostly sold in Korea.
TT: So the Taipei exhibit has not been seen at the Pompidou.
DO: No. No. No. No. No. No.
TT: Will it be seen at there?
DO: I’m not sure it would be that easy because … (we both laugh). It’s something quite experimental in a way. I don’t know.
TT: The exhibit might cause controversy in France. Is that why you’re doing this outside the country?
DO: Perhaps I am more free in the way I could think of what modern art is outside the place where these ideas are rooted.
TT: Has the essay that you wrote for the catalogue been seen by other critics or art historians in France?
DO: I’m not sure. I haven’t publicized it. But probably I will have to give the text to Pierre Rosenberg because he was curious about that. He heard about the project — he was the former president of the Louvre — and heard about Arcadie and asked about the text. When I’m back I will give it to him. I am curious to know what he thinks about my interpretation of the works because it is not one he explains in his books.
TT: Did the Pompidou exert any control over the content of the exhibit? Is it representative of the museum?
DO: No, no, no ... When I was a teacher ... at the Ecole du Louvre I used to tell the kids, “You have to consider that there is not a single way to know what’s the meaning of modern art. There are plenty of ways and if you come up with something interesting, probably you will be able to write another story about that.” I used to compare — as a game, but it was also to explain — two interpretations of Barnett Newman’s work by critics working at the same time and in the same country. One was by Clement Greenburg, and he says [Newman’s work] is purely formal, and at the same time you have Harold Rosenberg who says it is purely mythical and religious. Who is right? You cannot reconcile these two views. Who was right at the time? For a long time we thought Clement Greenburg was right. Now we think that probably Rosenberg is right. I think it’s the same thing with the most established ideas about modern art. Manet is not the man who destroyed the subject but probably introduced another kind of subject that we didn’t see at the time.
This interview has been condensed and edited.
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