Jérôme Neutres – Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa

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Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection
Expressions d’Afrique
Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection
curated by Jérôme Neutres
galerie gmurzynska
20 th century masters since 1965
Galerie Gmurzynska

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Expressions d’Afrique
Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection
curated by Jérôme Neutres
galerie gmurzynska
20 th century masters since 1965

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EXPRESSIONS OF AFRICA
Inside Jean Pigozzi’s Collection
Jean Pigozzi’s imagined Africa
by Jérôme Neutres
110 years ago, in 1909, Raymond Roussel published
Impressions of Africa, a masterpiece of literature that would
influence both art and literature, creating enthusiasm among
both Apollinaire and the surrealists. Raymond Roussel had
not however ever stepped foot in Africa. He always insisted
on the central and centrifugal role of “the imagination” in
the composition of his texts. “He is just following the whims
of his imagination,” André Breton, one of his most fervent
admirers, said of him. Roussel inspired generations of
creators, starting in 1912 through Francis Picabia or Marcel
Duchamp who discovered Impressions of Africa during the
theatrical revival of the text. It was Roussel who inspired
Duchamp for the masterpiece that is The Large Glass, or
Tinguely - even later - with his drawing machines in the
1950s. Amongst other artistic visions, Roussel imagined in
his book a machine that painted and drew autonomously
through “strange photo-mechanical properties.” His influence
is international: the author’s discourse and style have a
universal scope: particularly in the United States, Roussel is
considered a new Rabelais.
Impressions of Africa positioned the horizon of
modernity and aesthetic innovation in an imagined Africa.
Roussel’s Africa came out of that Africa which in European
culture, was first and foremost an “interior Africa” to use
anthropologist Jean-Pierre Dozon’s phrase, that is, first and
foremost a mental image, a sort of symbolic non-place open
to all the most diverse representations. Roussel’s Impressions
of Africa is part of the canon of books that forged a mythical
Africa, functioning for artists as a symbolic field, almost
the synonym of a utopia. Africa as a radically foreign space
represented at the beginning of the 20 th century an almost
surreal domain, which allowed a glimpse of access to other
possible artistic forms, and to other languages. A form of
visionary prejudice in one sense, if it may be said, when we
know to what extent Africa actually contained – and contains
– original and powerful cultures and images. Thanks in part to
Roussel and his Impressions of Africa, though invented and
implausible, Africa became for western creators the mirror of
an artistic modernity, festive and subversive. “Our voyage is
fully imaginary. That is its strength” as L .- F. Céline tells it so
well in the prologue to his Voyage to the End of the Night.
Raymond Roussel never traveled to Africa. Neither did
Jean Pigozzi. An eccentric dandy who never wore the same
shirt twice, Roussel spent his life between the fashionable
16 th arrondissement in Paris and the south of Italy. Without
knowing it, this other eccentric dandy of Italian origin who
is Jean Pigozzi – who only dresses himself in the clothes he
designs – grew up in Paris at an address close to Roussel’s.
There are no coincidences. It was also without knowing what
he was seeking that Jean Pigozzi found himself one day in
August 1989, 30 years ago, at the Grande Hall de la Villette,
to see the Magiciens de la Terre exhibit before it closed.
Another event that would be a milestone in the history of
culture, Magiciens de la Terre, under the administration of
Jean-Hubert Martin, then director of the Musée National d’Art
Moderne at the Centre Pompidou, showed for the first time
under the stewardship of a great French museum, amongst
a wide international selection, some contemporary African
artists. Amongst them: Frédéric Bruly-Bouabré, Seni Awa
Camara, Esther Mahlangu, and Chéri Samba. The world of
western art, up to that point so ethnocentric, was opening
itself to other horizons of creation, and African artistic
culture was coming out of the ethnographic ghetto where
people loved to imprison it. A photographic artist and lover
of art, Jean Pigozzi’s eye was at the time fascinated by the
freshness of these hanging African creations, and seduced
by their artistic strength, by their new vision of the world.
He decided after this initial visit to start, with the support
of André Magnin, the commissioner of the African section of

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the exhibition, what would become over the years the most
important collection of African contemporary art in the world,
replete with some ten-thousand works today.
As with Roussel, in a sense, Africa is first also for Jean Pigozzi
a land of desires and mythologies, a window into imagining
another possible world, a springboard for poetry. But unlike
the author of Impressions of Africa who wrote his own text
about it, Jean Pigozzi put together another sort of narrative
in the form of a collection of contemporary African works of
art. To Raymond Roussel’s “Impressions” of Africa, today we
offer comparing the “Expressions” of Africa created over these
last thirty years by the artists of the “dark continent” chosen
by Jean Pigozzi, and who have proven over time to be the
best African artists. Works often radically foreign to western
artistic practices; or sometimes created as a function of or in
comparison with western ghosts. The current exhibition was
constructed through a subjective exploration of the Pigozzi
Collection, by looking at these works with the eyes of their
collector, by listening to the history of Jean Pigozzi’s artistic
tastes and desires. We have wanted to offer an original
reading of this collection as a collection. And also to create,
through the reference to Raymond Roussel, a mirror effect
between two eras, two looks, two continents, to show how
much Africa, if it has been a fundamental motivation of
western artistic imagination, was also nourished from African
dreams of Europe. “Cultures are changed by exchanging and
are exchanged by creating,” said poet Édouard Glissant, a
hero of cultural diversity.
What made a person like Jean Pigozzi accumulate tenthousand
works in thirty years? What are the reasons that
drive him to concentrate this exceptional collection on one
territory in the world, Africa, that he explicitly does not visit
and where he will probably never go? How did this innovative
artist of photography who is also this pioneer collector find
himself amidst creations of African art so different from
his personal artistic work? Or is it in fact that Jean Pigozzi
found in these African artists a part of himself, conscious
or unconscious, that he had not been able to express in
his practice of photography? These are the subjects of our
exhibition. We have also had Jean Pigozzi speak about his
artists, their work, their style, his desire for art. The previously
unseen interview published in this catalogue takes a look at
a selection of his remarks about his collection.
There is an Africa, the geographical and sociological
continent of the world that requires several lives to travel
through and understand, like all the world’s great regions
and civilizations. There is also an Africa of contemporary
artists, which is not the same reality, but which comes from
it directly. Subjective looks, poetic images, artistic creations,
which sometimes take root in traditional cultural practices,
and sometimes in thought about the intersections of the
history of African art and the history of western art. There is
finally an Africa of Jean Pigozzi, an artistic reality collected
and nourished in the imagination of these collected works,
that does not seek exhaustivity or an academic panorama,
but that offers a certain vision of an imagined Africa that
becomes in turn a sort of work in-and-of itself.
When we speak of Jean Pigozzi’s collection, we must
mention the driving force of André Magnin, in all likelihood
the best expert of the contemporary African artistic scene,
who was hired by Pigozzi in 1990 as an “art researcher” to
establish what is today the most significant collection
of contemporary African art. If Jean Pigozzi approved the
acquisition of each work, if the mix that comprises the
collection – and which resembles no other – is in the end
Pigozzi’s personal choice, there is also a lot of André Magnin
in this collection – his tastes, his encounters, his loyalties.
It is clear, for example, that Kinshasa and the Congo are
very represented in the collection, and that other countries
– in particular the countries of English-speaking Africa – are
absent. It is another map of Africa that this collection draws,
a geography that corresponds to a history different from the
continent’s history: the history of a collection, the history
of André Magnin’s trips, the history of Jean Pigozzi’s artistic
friendships particularly. Because Jean is a man of emotion,
whose collection – like an address book – bears witness to
his faith in friendship. There are not many artists who he
met and whose works he purchased at the beginning of the
1990s that are not found over and over again today in the
collection’s new developments. Chéri Samba has thus been
present in this collection since its beginnings. We find, in
fact, material with a real retrospective of Samba, a brilliant

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painter, from his first storyboards from the 1970s to his more
simplified large format canvases from the 2000s - 2010s. It
is extremely rare in the history of art collections to meet a
collector who has managed (if the collector has the desire
to do so, because collectors often have changing tastes and
fly from collection to collection according to their desires...)
to follow an artist’s entire career. The case of Samba in the
Pigozzi collection is not unique. We could say the same of
Moke, Lilanga, Hazoumè... The artists from his collection are
for Jean Pigozzi a sort of new family. A family that he chose
for himself. The farthest away from his European-American
culture and his Italian-French roots. Unless, on the contrary,
this new family has revealed to him another part of himself,
like Jean Genet who said in Prisoner of Love that he had
become, out of fascination for Africa, a “black man who has
white and pink colors.”
Rousseau. Jean Pigozzi loves the numerous paintings of this
exceptional master even if he has often been refused by
curators (or perhaps because of that?). Our exhibition is proud
to present masterworks by Bodo, works as strong as they are
unique. Not only does this painting deserve to be known and
recognized, but our subject is first and foremost Jean Pigozzi’s
look onto Africa and its artists. Bodo holds a special place
in this geography of Pigozzi’s imaginary Africa. It is perhaps
not by chance, because this work is based fundamentally
on phantasmagoric visions. Pierre Bodo’s oneiric painting
inevitably seduced Jean Pigozzi, whose collection is based on
an African dream.
Even the most daring and audacious of collectors, if
they accept and take ownership of risk taking by investing in
the names of unknown artists, still end up listening a tiny bit
to criticism and the market. You can go for a short time against
the vox populi of the art world, as was the case of the great
pioneer collectors, like Jacques Doucet buying Brancusi when
the critics teased him severely (“Art for Americans!” mocked
critic Louis Vauxcelles), and acquiring Douanier-Rousseau’s
The Snake Charmer which would be refused for years by
national museums when it was donated! But it is rare for a
collector to spend his or her life fighting against the winds
of the institutions and the market. Now, if a good number of
artists from the Pigozzi collection are today (almost) finally
recognized and (almost) celebrated as they should be given
their importance, not only did that take a lot of time, but
moreover certain names, like Lilanga or Bodo, continue to
cause bewilderment or indifference in the west. If in this
case, Pierre Bodo is still exiled from panoramic exhibitions
on Africa in renowned museums and art centers, even the
ones presented from the Pigozzi collection, Jean Pigozzi
still maintains his full admiration for him. The painter, now
deceased, developed an eminently original world, a surrealist
poetry that imposes a style that is not found elsewhere. His
fantasy allegories sometimes remind people of Hieronymus
Bosch and his imaginary landscapes have the apparent
naïveté of style that makes people think of Douanier-

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Introduction to the exhibition
by Jérôme Neutres
In 1909, 110 years ago, Raymond Roussel published
Impressions of Africa, a masterpiece of literature that
inspired the artistic avant-gardes, from Francis Picabia to
Marcel Duchamp via Apollinaire and the surrealist group.
Roussel had never traveled to Africa and just followed “the
slope of his own imagination” as André Breton said of him.
Roussel’s Africa is an “internal Africa” to use anthropologist
Jean-Pierre Dozon’s expression, a mythical Africa functioning
as a symbolic field, almost the synonym of a utopia. By
placing the horizon of modernity and esthetic innovation
under the sign of an imagined Africa, Impressions of Africa is
a prescient dram if we assess how many original and powerful
contemporary images Africa contains. These are here some
Expressions of Africa that we are presenting, the Africa seen
and displayed by some of the greatest contemporary African
artists. This exhibition is a subject reading of the collection of
Jean Pigozzi, who has been assembling for thirty years some
ten-thousand contemporary works from the African continent
– without having ever gone there himself either. A collector
both through passion and accumulation, Jean Pigozzi has
established the personal narrative of another imagined Africa
based on his artistic imagination. Discovering contemporary
African art in 1989 during the Magiciens de la Terre
exhibition, this photographer-artist was fascinated by the
strength of visual innovation and the new vision of the world
that these works convey. He then started with curator André
Magnin what would become the most significant collection
of contemporary African art in the world. We suggest looking
at these works of art with the eyes of their collector, by
listening to the history of the tastes and artistic desires
of Jean Pigozzi. A reading of the collection as a collection,
that brings together here his twelve favorite painters and
sculptors, the ones whose progress Jean Pigozzi followed
most closely for three decades and who may perhaps make
up his real family.

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Credits
Concept
Krystyna Gmurzynska, Mathias Rastorfer, Isabelle Bscher
Texts by
Jean Pigozzi, Jérôme Neutres
Support
Elisabeth Whitelaw, director of the Contemporary African Art Collection
(CAAC) - The Pigozzi Collection www.caacart.com
Reproduction of the works by Maurice Aeschimann
Artworks © the artists
Artworks by Romuald Hazoumè and Barthélémy Toguo
© 2019, ProLitteris, Zurich
Portraits of the artists by Jean Pigozzi,
p. 50, 60, 70, 100, 116
Portraits of the artists by André Magnin,
p. 26, 38, 56, 78, 90, 108, 128
Photo by Alexia Niedzielski, p. 20-21
Documentary Photos by André Magnin, courtesy of Galerie MAGNIN-A, Paris,
p. 34, 42, 52, 66, 86, 105, 113, 120, 130, 134
Printed by
Grafiche Step, Parma, Italy
© galerie gmurzynska 2019
www.gmurzynska.com