Jean-Marie Drot

"The Villa Medici is an open window on Italy. Instead of moaning, let's take advantage of this Franco-Italian dialogue to advance the Europe of cultures. For us, it's a matter of life and death. If we miss this train, in ten years' time, communication will be American or Japanese, but certainly not European. We need to gradually transform Villa Medici into a kind of Royaumont of Europe, whose activities would be financed by both France and Italy, including patronage." Jean-Marie Drot, born in Nancy on March 2, 1929, is a poet, writer, essayist and film-maker. He was director of Villa Medici in Rome from 1985 to 1994. Winner of the Concours Général in French in 1946, he prepared for the Ecole Normale Supérieure at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and graduated from the Sorbonne with a degree in Modern Literature and Philosophy. In 1948, he won an American literature competition on Melville's Moby Dick (1851), and was given the opportunity to study in the United States for a year. On his return, he made his television debut, working as assistant director on the first Vatican television program. An auteur-director with Télévision Française since 1951, he is the author of an audiovisual body of work of over 200 films listed by the I.N.A., including a series shot with André Malraux, L'Art et les Hommes and Journaux de voyages. In the early 1960s, he embarked on a vast fresco of artistic life in Montparnasse in the first half of the twentieth century, "Les heures chaudes de Montparnasse": 14 films, each 52 minutes long, repeated in 1980 in a new version broadcast on Antenne 2. Over one hundred and fifty artists, models, photographers, gallery owners, publishers, actors and musicians are featured. All have now disappeared. Their testimonies, captured by the camera of a great director, are an indispensable contribution to our knowledge of one of the most moving artistic periods of the last century. After watching the film on Giacometti, François Mauriac wrote in his Bloc-notes: "I would have listened to it all night...". With Les Heures chaudes de Montparnasse, Jean-Marie Drot set out to capture these moments, keeping alive, while there was still time, the last stirrings of a particularly fertile age in our history, when artists from all over the world made the trip to Paris as they did to Rome in the Grand Siècle. He has published numerous novels: Le Départ de Novembre, (Ed. Robert Laffont), Une mort difficile (Ed. Robert Laffont), Le Temps des désillusions (Ed. Stock), L'Enfant fusillé (Ed. Stock), Le Retour d'Ulysse Manchot (Ed. Julliard). Poetry: Soleil, bel assassin (Ed. Pierre Seghers), La longue nuit des amants frileux (Ed. Pierre Seghers), Le frangipanier de Féline, (Ed. Galilée), Femme-Lumière (Ed. Deleatur). Essays and art books: Joseph Delteil, prophète de l'an 2000, (Presse du Languedoc-Imago), Journal de voyage en Haïti au pays des peintres de la fête et du vaudou, (Ed. Skira), Fassianos ou la volupté mythologique (Galerie Beaubourg), Voyage au pays des naïfs (Ed. Hatier), Peinture naïve, peinture vaudou en Haïti, (Carte Segrete, Rome), Les Heures chaudes de Montparnasse (Ed. Hazan), La Tête farcie de Yannis Gaïtis (Ed. Medusa, Athens). Jean-Marie Drot was Cultural Advisor to the French Embassy in Athens from 1982 to 1984, then Director of Villa Medici in Rome from 1984 to 1994.












He was Chairman and head of cultural policy at SCAM (Société Civile des Auteurs Multimédia). He passed away, aged eighty-six, on September 23, 2015.

1985-1994