Jean Leymarie

"Alberto Giacometti, I don't dare say he was my friend... I was his interlocutor... I have the impression that I only really existed during my dialogue with him. It was he who taught me to see..." Born in Gagnac (Lot) on July 17, 1919, Jean Leymarie began his museum career in 1945 after studying literature and art history in Toulouse and Paris. Assistant to the Paintings Department at the Musée du Louvre from 1944 to 1949 and Curator of the Musée de Grenoble from 1950 to 1955, he went on to teach at the universities of Lausanne and Geneva, publishing the first volumes of an abundant and varied body of work as an art historian. Works devoted to Impressionism (1955), Dutch painting (1956) and Fauvism alternate with monographs on Derain (1949), Braque (1961) and Soutine (1964). In 1969, in the delicate post-Mai '68 context, he was called upon to replace Bernard Dorival at the head of the Musée national d'art moderne, then housed in the Palais de Tokyo. He undertook a reorganization of the collections in preparation for the museum's transfer to the Centre Pompidou, opening it up to the most contemporary forms of creation. His major publications include Giotto (1950), Gauguin (1950), Van Gogh (1951), Les vitraux de Chagall (1962), Picasso, métamorphoses et unité (1971) and Balthus (1978). With the opening of the Centre Pompidou, Jean Leymarie was appointed Director of Studies at the Ecole du Louvre and, above all, Director of the Academy de France in Rome, a post he held until 1984. On his return to Paris, he continued to support and write about artists he esteemed: Tal Coat (1992), Fenosa (1993), Schauer (1994) and Rouvre (1998), until his death in Paris on March 9, 2006.

1979-1985