Daniel Cordier, l’ivre d’arts

Through a new presentation of Daniel Cordier's collection, the Abattoirs are exploring for the first time the link between his taste for visual art and his love of books. The works and artists on show are all concerned with linking the page and the canvas, in a wide range of media, and a shared history is being written in the light of a lesser-known passion of the collector.

During his lifetime and in the months following his death in 2020, nearly ten thousand books from Daniel Cordier's personal library were donated to various public libraries: Cordier the art lover was also a book lover. His reading, from poetry to politics, history and art, nourished his critical eye and his knowledge of art history. He has amassed works of all kinds, often annotated by himself, sometimes signed by the same artists whose works he has acquired and exhibited in his Parisian, German and American galleries.

At Les Abattoirs, where almost all of his collection was deposited by the MNAM-CCI/Centre Pompidou following his donation in 1989, many of his works resonate with multiple literary references and extend the work of artists who were sometimes authors, such as Henri Michaux or Jean Dubuffet. They are also echoed in the library's holdings, which include several thousand artists' books that link art to the book-object.

If Cordier shared his daily life with his precious books, it was precisely because books are everyday objects with many facets. The exhibition route, each room of which borrows its title from a book loved by Daniel Cordier, aims to reveal a number of them: the book-object, the book-image and the book-space. ‘The book to come’ (Maurice Blanchot) is first and foremost an objet d'art, and a work of craftsmanship, nourishing the experiments of artists who share common gestures with papermakers, printers and bookbinders. It is the fruit of meticulous design, most often centred around a fold, the ‘backbone of the book’ according to Stéphane Mallarmé. Following in the footsteps of Michel Butor's ‘Words in painting’, visual artists are pushing back the boundaries of illustration and writing, which respond to and sometimes merge with each other: handwritten or not, the letter itself becomes aesthetic. Finally, their research and their work are carried out within a specific framework, that of a ‘Poetics of space’ dear to the philosopher Gaston Bachelard. The space within is that of the blank page worked like a paper architecture. The space outside, on the other hand, is that in which the book is embedded, starting with the library and, more broadly, society itself, where it occupies a multifaceted place, whether functional, decorative or social.

Presentation of the rooms

Room 1: "Le livre à venir"

Arman (1928-2005), Marion Bataille (born 1963), Maurice Blanchot (1907-2003), Öyvind Fahlström (1928-1976), Hessie (1936-2017), Isabelle Jarousse (born 1964), Jacqueline de Jong (1939-2024), Aleksandra Mir (born 1967), Daniela Ortiz (born 1985), Raymond Queneau (1903-1976), Morgane Tschiember (born 1976), Bernar Venet (born 1941), Éric Watier (born 1963)

Room 2: "Les mots dans la peinture"

Judith Bartolani (born 1957), Michel Butor (1926-2016), Nicolas Codron (born 1977), Juliette Green (born 1995), Joël Hubaut (born 1947), Nalini Malani (born 1946), Judit Reigl (1923-2020), Bernard Réquichot (1929-1961), Philippe UG (born 1958)

Rooms 3 and 3bis. "Poétique de l’espace"

5.5 DESIGNERS (composed of Vincent Baranger (born 1980), Jean-Sébastien Blanc (born 1980), Anthony Lebosse (born 1981) and Claire Renard (born 1980)), Laurence Aëgerter (born 1972), Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962), Sophie Calle (born 1953), Nicolas Codron (b. 1977), Robert Combas (1957, France), Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985), Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), André Malraux (1901-1976), Henri Michaux (1899-1984), Jean-Luc Parant (1944-2022), Ramon Parramon (b. 1963), Chloé Vanderstraeten (b. 1996)

Curator: Julien Michel, Research assistant

*Daniel Cordier, in Daniel Cordier, Amateur d'art. Alias Caracalla 1946-1977, prefaced, established and annotated by Bénédicte Vergez-Chaignon, Paris, Gallimard, ‘’Témoins Gallimard‘’, 2024, p. 235.