When he was young, the late French artist Christian Boltanski liked to recount, he devised a novel, if slightly louche method for making his way through the vast and for an aspiring artist, potentially intimidating masterpiece-lined halls of the Louvre Museum. Upon entering, he would find an attractive young woman and follow her at a discreet distance, remaining entirely unnoticed by her, but pausing whenever she paused, to stop and look at the art she chose.
I thought of that story as I made my way through those same labyrinthine, hallowed halls recently, when Christian, who died in July, was being honored by a trifecta of great Parisian museums. What was I doing there? The artist had played an important role in my young life. He was best known at that time for a haunting series of works in which he arranged black-and-white archival photographs blurred almost beyond recognition , weathered tin biscuit boxes, and electric lights naked bulbs, or the kinds of lamps one imagines are used in interrogations into altars evoking memories both personal and historical—the Shoah, in particular, which had marked his life.
More on that later. Nevertheless, though he often claimed to spend his days doing nothing, he was in fact intensely prolific , with a profusion of works nearly impossible to enumerate. There were early drawings and paintings, most of which he destroyed. I possess one. I listened to that recording recently, and realized that the fact that in the past I had heard that particular heart beating was irrelevant—that anyone listening would sense, reflected in it, their own mortality. The means he employed were always low-tech, humble; the emotions evoked bordered on the grand guignol, while often calling forth more poignant associations.
But there was a formal coldness to his art that saved it from sentimentality, a refusal of closure that threw you back on your own life with unanswerable questions. Christian Boltanski poses for a portrait among a sculptural installation memorializing victims of the Holocaust, circa In we created a work together, one of four site-specific projects he devised for the Public Art Fund , on view simultaneously at different locations around Manhattan.
Our installation, which he very generously co-signed with me, took place at the Eldridge Street Synagogue on the Lower East Side, a magnificent, Moorish Revival sanctuary over a century old and at the time in great disrepair. I was in Paris on assignment for Vogue , and I stayed on an extra day, in part to have lunch with him at the Closerie des Lilas and to see a retrospective of his work then on view at the Centre Pompidou.
