Iris Clert

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Iris Clert (* around 1917 in Athens ; † 1986 in Cannes ) was a Greco-French art gallery owner and collector.

Iris Clert

Life

Iris Clert (birth name: Iris Athanassiadis ) was born into a middle-class Greek family. At the age of five, she and her mother went into exile in France after the fire in Izmir that killed thousands of Greeks and Armenians . From there she discovered Vienna and Paris ; She remained closely connected to these two world cities throughout her life. Because of her pronounced political convictions, she and her husband Claude Clert were actively involved in the French Resistance from 1939 to 1945 during the Second World War .

In 1955 she founded the Iris Clert gallery for art in the Rue des Beaux-Arts in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district in the heart of Paris . It operated at its original location until 1963, after which it moved to larger premises on the same street by 1971. The gallery had great success. After that, Iris Clert closed it for personal reasons and then withdrew completely from the public and into a self-chosen anonymity.

Works as a gallery owner

In 1955 she met the young artist Yves Klein , whose avant-garde ideas she was initially not impressed with. Nevertheless, in 1957 she gave him the chance of an exhibition that Klein used convincingly: his idea was to exhibit around 250 postcard-sized works by around 100 artists in the only relatively small room in the gallery, including names such as Pablo Picasso , Max Ernst and numerous avant-garde artists from the Parisian environment. The exhibition under the name Micro-Salon d'Avril was a complete success, Iris Clert suddenly found herself on the market in the Paris avant-garde with her small gallery.

In May 1957, Klein exhibited his own works in the gallery for the first time, monochrome works, mostly blue, which rigorously pushed abstraction further and further. The highlight of these reductions was the exhibition “Le Vide” (“The Empty”), which Yves Klein presented at Iris Clert a year later by completely clearing out the gallery space and painting the walls white. On the opening evening, Clert managed through contacts to engage two Republican Guards as “bouncers” who normally only appeared in the company of high-ranking politicians and gave the opening the effect of a “state event”. 3000 guests came to the opening alone, and the success was so great that the exhibition time was extended by a week. Despite its minimal dimensions, the gallery finally became one of the most important artistic centers of the Seine metropolis Paris.

Big names, also from other cultural areas, became friends of the gallery. Albert Camus visited them as did the artists Arman and Jean Tinguely , who exhibited there again and again in the years that followed. An intense friendship developed with the collector of avant-garde art and patron Theodor Ahrenberg . The recognition of Yves Klein and Iris Clerts meant that both were commissioned to design the newly built music theater in the Revier in Gelsenkirchen . In collaboration with the architect Werner Ruhnau and other artists, they both developed large wall-high blue reliefs especially for this building, some of which were covered with natural sponges. This work, carried out from 1957 to 1959, is considered to be Yves Klein's main work.

She received special recognition for Iris Clerts' work in 1961 in the exhibition "Les 41 présentent Iris Clert dans sa nouvelle galerie" in her newly opened gallery, for which numerous high-ranking artists made portraits of the gallery owner. Robert Rauschenberg shot the bird: Since he had forgotten to make a portrait of Clert, he sent her a telegram at the last moment that should find its way into art history: “THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO” (“ This is a portrait of Iris Clert, if I will ”). In the exhibition, Arman showed a "portrait robot d'Iris" by presenting various objects and accessories from the gallery owner in a transparent plexiglass box.

From 1958 onwards there was a conflict between Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely about the integration of magnetism in art, in addition, Takis had also dealt with this art in ignorance of the situation. Iris Clert, who represented all three as a gallery owner, had to mediate between the artists.

The sudden death of Yves Klein on June 6, 1962 meant a deep turning point for Iris Clert as well. After the gallery moved to new, larger rooms in 1963, its orientation became more commercial, it followed the mainstream and, until its closure, oriented itself towards the already established artists.

literature

  • Revue Iris Time Unlimited . 46 single issues, published 1962–1975.
  • Mémoires sonores d'Iris Clert. Conversations with Ralph Rumney [and other participants: Takis, Pierre Restany, Harold Stevenson u. a.] Sampler with 6 audio cassettes.
  • Iris-time - l'artventure . Éditions Denoël, Paris 1975. Reissued in 2003
  • An archive collection with numerous sources on the Galérie Iris Clert is in the holdings of the "Bibliothèque Kandinsky" in the Center Pompidou (Paris)

Web links


Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Martin Schieder: A lime green lady's shoe and a gold loan note. Armans Portrait-robot d'Iris Clert (1960), in: Ulrike Kern and Marlen Schneider (eds.): Imitatio - Aemulatio - Superatio. Image politics in a transcultural perspective. Thomas Kirchner on his 65th birthday, Heidelberg, arthistoricum.net, 2019, pp. 105–123 ( https://doi.org/10.11588/arthistoricum.486 )
  2. ↑ Bernadette Walter: "Dark horses": Swiss artist careers in the post-war period, p. 116, 2007
personal data
SURNAME Clert, Iris
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Greco-French art gallery owner and collector
DATE OF BIRTH around 1917
PLACE OF BIRTH Athens
DATE OF DEATH 1986
Place of death Cannes