Page 68 - Studio International - April 1968

An interview with Denise René

A leading European gallery owner talks to Jean Clay

It will soon be twenty-five years since Denise René opened her first very quickly, transforming the workshop into a passable gallery in a
Paris gallery. Apart from difficulties connected with fashion and couple of days and sending out 150 invitations to friends.
finance, her life has been marked by a fierce loyalty to an aesthetic They came and so did the press. At that time there were dozens of
concept based on a mixture of constructivism and neo-plasticism. papers eager for something new; they made us. There were only
This loyalty obviously stems from an intense personal dislike for all thirty-odd galleries in Paris in 1944 in comparison with 400 today !
equivocal or morbid paintings, for all forms of Tachism, for any work I followed up with Max Ernst. His canvases fetched between
dwelling upon ambiguity or the decomposition of matter and which 30,000 and 150,000 old francs at the time. But to tell the truth, I
does not give pride of place to reason. Her gallery in the rue La Boétie wasn't too sure what I was about. I wanted to do something new,
Jean Clay to beat fresh paths, to back unknown artists. But who? At the
was the outcome of a meeting with Vasarely.
Liberation, French painting consisted on the one hand of Matisse,
Braque and Picasso followed by such less distinguished descendants
In 1939 I had an enormous apartment; during the war I used it as a as Gischia, Tal Coat, Fougeron and Pignon, and on the other, of such
workshop. We used to buy up cheap vases and decorate them to sell semi-figurative painters as Bazaine, Lapicque, Estève and Manessier.
them at a higher price. Vasarely, who came to Paris in 1930 and who Abstract art hardly counted, Mondrian, Kandinsky and Malevich
still hadn't adopted the style for which he is now known (Breton being completely unknown. Modern art attracted no one but a few
wanted him to join his group), was keen, before going further, to test journalists, some critics and the initiated. Paul Klee's first exhibition
public reaction to his work. He had no suitable premises, but I at the Paris Museum of Modern Art in 1947 drew 1500 people; a
did. This apartment is in the very street where, before the war, a large retrospective Léger exhibition at about the same time, a mere
number of galleries were situated. 1200. In 1950 it was still possible to buy works by this artist for
However, an exhibition would be quite a risk for both of us—for 120 dollars; today they are worth 40,000 dollars.
Vasarely to have his first public show in an unknown gallery, and for I was feeling my way. As a step in the direction of non-figurative
me to try to break into a notoriously difficult profession without either art, I exhibited Atlan and then in 1946 put on a group exhibition of
money or elementary know-how. Nevertheless we made up our minds Hartung, Deyrolle, Dewasne, Schneider and Marie Raymond (the