Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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1978, as the intellectual credibility of commu-

nism finally crumbled in France, the cause of

liberal democracy suddenly became fashion-

able—and so did its chief spokesman. Aron

wrote a well-regarded autobiography and ac-

quired the status of national guru which had

earlier belonged to his student friend, and sub-

sequent adversary, Sartre.

PETER MORRIS

See also: educational elitism: the grandes

écoles

Arp, Jean

b. 1887, Strasbourg;

d. 1966, Basle

Artist

Arp was a modernist pioneer sculptor, and a

founder member of the 1916 Zurich Dada

group. Expressionism provoked his interest in

abstract form with only oblique reference to

the real world. He abandoned traditional skills

in favour of the idea of artist as artificer. In his

works, for example, Portrait of Tristran Tzara

(1916), form, following the elements of cu-

bism, becomes determined by the laws of

chance and force (air currents, gravity) rather

than the artist’s choice. After 1930, his con-

templative three-dimensional sculptures, for

example, Human Concretion in Oval Bowl

(1935), began to reflect the face of nature and

growing forms.

VALERIE SWALES

Arrabal, Fernando

b. 1932, Melilla, Spanish Morocco

Playwright and director

Arrabal is best known as the writer of ritualis-

tic, turbulent plays noted for their disregard

for convention, influenced by grim personal

experience of war and family tragedy, e.g. Le

Cimetière des voitures and Picnic on a Battle-

field (Pique-Nique en campagne).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Further reading

Bérenguer, A. (1977) L’Exil et la cérémonie

dans le premier théâtre d’Arrabal, Paris:

Union Générale d’Éditions (analysis of

works).

art brut

The company of art brut was formed in 1948

to manage Jean Dubuffet’s immense collection

of ‘raw art’ (l’art brut) at the Galerie Drouin.

Other founder members were André Breton

and Michel Tapié. The group’s major exhibi-

tion, ‘L’Art Brut Préféré aux Arts Culturels’,

was held in November 1948. Following Sur-

realism and also the tradition of the irrational

of Alfred Jarry, Dubuffet sought inspiration

in the art of children and the mentally unsta-

ble, and in accidental marks and graffiti on

walls and pavements. Encrusted, muddy pig-

ment, trowelled, scrawled and scratched into

parodies of the heroic metaphors of the ro-

mantic tradition, contribute to postwar real-

ism’s commentaries on the brutalism of con-

temporary society and the careerist intellec-

tual; for example, The Cow with the Subtle

Nose (1954).

VALERIE SWALES

Further reading

Bryson, N. (ed.) (1991) Calligram, Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press

(examples of contemporary art criticism,

including essays by Barthes, Baudrillard,

Lebensztejn and Bonnefoy).

Gee, M. (ed.) (1993) Art Criticism Since 1900,

Manchester and New York: Manchester

University Press (chapters on general issues

in criticism and on art criticism in France

between the wars and postwar).

art galleries/museums

The idea of offering public access to hitherto

private collections was to have social implica-

tions unimaginable in 1793 when the Louvre

was transformed from a royal palace into the

first national museum in Europe. It was not

until the late nineteenth century and the rise

of the historical sciences, notably art history,

that the public art gallery/museum became a

recognized social institution, albeit one that

excluded any innovatory art that might chal-

lenge the French establishment. The official

policy in France remained unchanged until just

before World War II, although of course many

small privately owned art galleries in Paris

regularly exhibited and promoted avant-garde

art during this period. The closed-door policy

of the public art galleries was reflected in the

closed spaces of their architecture and in the

sober atmosphere they generated. Apollinaire,

in fact, wanted to burn down the Louvre and

Proust saw it as an elitist microcosm isolated

from the world.

A change in French policy after the war was

illustrated in 1947 by the opening of the

Musée National d’Art Moderne, then housed

in the Palais de Tokyo, with its collection of

twentieth-century avant-garde art. Despite this

change in attitude, the concept of the muse-

um’s function, as essentially a preserver of the

artistic legacy of the past, and the elitist image

that went with it, remained unquestioned un-

til the 1960s, when the prevailing ethos forced

the institution to open up to a wider public

and a wider range of activities.

The Amsterdam Stedelijk Museum and the

Berne Kunsthalle, which Christo ‘wrapped’ in

1968 encouraged by its director; were pioneer-

ing forces shaping the new museology which

aimed at desanctifying and democratizing the

public’s experience of art.

The same ideas informed the policies of the

curator of the Moderna Museet in Stockholm,

Pontus Hulten, who was able to implement

them on a grand scale when the Musée Na-

tional d’Art Moderne (MNAM) was rehoused

in Beaubourg in 1977.

Beaubourg, or the Centre Georges

Pompidou, to give it its official name, was the

architectural incarnation par excellence of this

new spirit. President Georges Pompidou, a

keen collector of modern art, had decided in

1969, in line with the prevailing ideology, to

create a multipurpose cultural centre, and Ri-

chard Rogers and Renzo Piano were the ar-

chitects chosen to bring his project to fruition.

Their late-modernist structure incited contro-

versy as well as admiration. Its design encour-

aged public participation in cultural activities,

while its flexibility invited collaboration be-

tween the museum and the artists themselves.

This resulted, for example, in the adaptation

of exhibition spaces to contemporary artistic

practice such as installation art. At the same

time it promoted itself as multifunctional, a

place of entertainment, incorporating restau-

rants and bars, children’s play areas/work-

shops as well as a place for research and study

with its cinema, library, bookshops, music, lec-

tures and debates. These activities are cur-

rently organized by its four main departments.

Beaubourg represented a turning point in mu-

seum design and thereby, in a sense, succeeded

in reasserting the artistic vitality Paris had lost

when New York usurped its place as art capi-

tal of the world. In terms of numbers of visi-

tors, it was an immediate success.

A similar conception of the museum’s func-

tion seems to have informed President

Mitterrand’s appointment of I.M.Pei as the ar-

chitect of the new ‘open’ entrance space for the

Louvre and its undergound network of service

art galleries/museums

areas, made available when the Ministère des

Finances moved out of part of the building. It

was completed in 1988 in time for the Bicente-

nary celebrations of the Revolution that had

given birth to the museum. The choice of a glass

pyramid to cover the new entrance was practi-

cal as well as symbolic, in that it allowed light

to penetrate by day, adding to the openness of

the new user-friendly area in which the visitor

is informed by wall-mounted texts and video

monitors of the options available in the mu-

seum. In conception, it recalls the vast ground-

floor information area at Beaubourg, while the

physical transparency of both buildings mirrors

the transparency and honesty of their intentions.

The same cannot be said for the Musée d’Orsay,

at least in the view of those who support the

‘Beaubourg’ ideology.

Pompidou’s immediate presidential succes-

sor, Giscard d’Estaing, took the decision in 1977

to have the old Gare d’Orsay turned into a

museum for nineteenth-century art. The success

of Beaubourg may explain the timing of this

decision, as a conversion plan had been mooted

some four years earlier. It fell to Mitterrand,

elected president in 1981, to see this project

through to its conclusion (and thereby to claim

it as one of his Grands Projets, along with the

Pyramide du Louvre). Appropriately, art of the

period 1848 to 1914 (from the beginning of the

Second Empire to the outbreak of World War I)

was to be displayed in this turn-of-the-century

building. To defenders of the ‘Beaubourg’ idea,

however, Gae Aulenti’s conversion of the inte-

rior into the traditional palace of separate

spaces, divided off by grandiose structures which

eclipsed Victor Laloux’s original architecture,

was a retrograde step. She admits, moreover,

that the decorative features, pastiches of Egyp-

tian and neoclassical motifs, were not intended

as references to nineteenth-century cultural tra-

ditions. This may be condemned as artistic dis-

honesty or accepted as postmodernism. The

curators have also been accused of promulgat-

ing a neoconservative interpretation of nine-

teenth-century art, with the work of avant-garde

artists once rejected by the official salons virtu-

ally hidden on the top floor, while the so-called

pompier (more ‘popular’, not to say vulgar)

paintings are among the first art works seen by

the public as it enters on ground floor level.

This restatement of the museum as a ‘pal-

ace of rooms’ is also evident in the 1985 con-

version of the Hotel Salé in the Marais quar-

ter of Paris into the Musée Picasso. Because

the conversion specified a minimum number

of changes to the original hotel particulier

built for a rich merchant in 1656, its obvi-

ously bourgeois layout defines a space that

clearly contradicts the spirit of the avant-garde

that Picasso’s work consistently embodied.

While the thinking behind the Musée Pi-

casso and Orsay conversions appears to rein-

state a retrograde museum culture, this is only

partially counterbalanced by the alternative

conception of the museum represented by the

Pompidou Centre. Research has shown that

the typical Beaubourg visitor is still a member

of the educated middle class and that the work-

ing classes are poorly represented. Cultural

barriers are clearly more complex in origin and

much harder to break down than the archi-

tects of the Beaubourg idea originally thought.

CAROL WILCOX

Further reading

Davis, D. (1990) The Museum Transformed,

New York: Abbeville Press (a study of the

effect of Beaubourg on museums world-

wide, with excellent photographs and a

foreword by Jack Lang).

Lumley, R. (ed.) (1988) The Museum Time

Machine, London and New York:

Routledge (a collection of essays present-

ing different perspectives on the changing

face of the museum).

art informel

Mathieu is historically significant for his role

in delineating art practices along the Paris-

New York axis in the 1940s and 1950s. Two

art informel

pairs of terms were used to name this differ-

ence: American artists were referred to as

expressionistes abstraits, while Mathieu and

his colleagues styled themselves

expressionistes lyriques. The subdivision of

action painting, usually used to refer to

Pollock’s work, was paralleled in France by

the term ‘informel’. The difference was insist-

ently revealed by a show at Nina Dausset’s

gallery in 1951 entitled Véhémences

confrontées, at which Bryen, Capogrossi, De

Kooning, Hartung, Mathieu, Pollock,

Riopelle, Russel and Wols were represented.

The reliance upon Merleau-Ponty’s notion of

the body as inseparable from the self (a re-

fusal of the mind/body problem present in

philosophy since Plato), and the addition of

suggestive ideogrammatic symbols related to

the Surrealist notion of ‘automatic drawing’,

distinguish the French work from similar ex-

periments in the US. Other artists whose work

may be styled ‘Informel’ include Degottex,

Hantaï, and Soulages.

SIMEON HUNTER

See also: theatre

Further reading

Sontag, S. (ed.) (1976) Antonin Artaud: Se-

lected Writings, trans. H.Weaver, New

York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (a repre-

sentative selection from all Artaud’s major

writings; the introductory essay by the edi-

tor summarizes some of the key points in

the poststructuralist debate on Artaud.)

ARTE (Association Relative

aux Télévisions Européennes)

Television channel

ARTE is a public sector Franco-German cul-

tural television channel created by agreement

in 1990 between President Mitterrand and

Chancellor Kohl, which began transmissions

in 1992.

On the French side, the origins of ARTE

lay in the creation in 1986 of la Sept (Société

d’Édition de Programmes de Télévision, re-

named Société Européenne de Programmes

de Télévision in 1989), whose mission was

to develop cultural and educational

television programming for pan-European

transmission on the French direct

broadcasting satellite Télédiffusion 1. While

the satellite was not a commercial success,

the French state still retained its commitment

to the concept of a European cultural channel

and sought a partner for the new venture. The

Franco-German agreement on the creation of

ARTE represented another instance of co-

operation between the two states at the heart

of the European Union. In the audiovisual field

it followed on from the bilateral technological

collaboration on satellite broadcasting during

the late 1970s and 1980s.

The headquarters of ARTE are symbolically

located near the Franco-German border in

Strasbourg. The ownership of the channel is

equally shared between La Sept/ARTE (France)

and ARTE Deutschland TV (Germany). La

Sept/ARTE is jointly owned by the French state

and three public sector broadcasting compa-

nies, of which the television company France

3 is the biggest single shareholder. France’s

stake in ARTE is funded from a combination

of licence revenue and direct state subsidy.

Following the collapse of the commercial

channel La Cinq in 1992, the French govern-

ment allocated the fifth terrestrial network to

ARTE. Programme transmission began on

French and German cable networks in the

same year. Since late 1994, ARTE has shared

the fifth network with the educational chan-

nel La Cinquième, with the former transmit-

ting in the evening from 7 p.m. until 3 a.m.

ARTE’s programme output consists of high

culture, including documentaries, magazine

programmes, music and feature films. Despite

its free availability on a terrestrial network,

its audience share in France is minuscule.

Two main criticisms have been directed

against ARTE: first, the undesirability of the

‘ghettoization’ of cultural output on a special-

ist channel; and second, the high cost per viewer

to the public purse of such elitist programming.

Defenders of ARTE emphasize the originality

of the channel. It is the first transnational

television channel in Europe resulting from co-

operation between two countries; there is an

acceptance of the principle of bilingual

programming; and ARTE’s production and

programming are innovative, with the channel

providing free to the viewer a range of

contemporary cultural and intellectual output

ARTE (Association Relative aux Télévisions Européennes)

not generally available on other channels. The

next stage in ARTE’s development—and a test

of the commitment of both governments to

the project—is to transform itself into a truly

pan-European cultural service capable of at-

tracting a significant audience share in a com-

petitive, multi-channel, digital environment.

RAYMOND KUHN

Further reading

Kuhn, R. (1995) The Media in France, Lon-

don: Routledge (the first full-length study

of the French media in English).

arts funding (including

regional)

Financial support for the arts in France comes

from four sources: the Ministry of Culture,

other ministries, local government and private

sponsorship.

The culture ministry contributed 19.8 per

cent of overall public spending on the arts in

1993. Its remit is wide-ranging: theatre and

shows, music and dance, cinema, books and

reading, visual arts, archives, heritage and

museums. Until 1981, its spending rarely ex-

ceeded 0.5 per cent of state spending. But in

the late 1960s, a target figure of 1 per cent

was adopted by the arts world, which

Mitterrand promised to reach. Accordingly,

the ministry’s budget was doubled in 1981,

passing from 0.47 to 0.75 per cent (5.99 bil-

lion francs) and continued to rise in the ensu-

ing years, though 1 per cent was only ever

reached fleetingly. Furthermore, the costly

presidential building projects absorbed much

of the increase and, alongside existing institu-

tions like the Pompidou Centre, continue to do

so because of their high operating costs. The

ministry’s budget for 1995 fell from 0.93 to

0.91 per cent; but in his 1995 presidential

campaign Chirac restored the 1 per cent target

and the following September Léotard, his

Culture Minister, proposed a budget for 1996

of 15.54 billion francs to meet it.

Various other ministries, including Educa-

tion and Foreign Affairs, fund the arts, ac-

counting for 27.4 per cent of public spending

in 1993. But the biggest spender is local gov-

ernment, whose arts provision has risen stead-

ily since the 1960s, due to the commitment of

particular authorities, the introduction of con-

tractual agreements with central government,

and decentralization measures. In 1993, local

arts spending made up 50.3 per cent of public

expenditure and is expected to rise to around

two-thirds by the year 2000. Although regions

and departments have begun to play a bigger

part (2.0 and 7.4 per cent respectively in

1993), the lion’s share comes from communes

(40.9 per cent in 1993).

While public funding totalled 73.3 billion

francs in 1993, business sponsorship has tra-

ditionally contributed little. The setting up

of ADMICAL (Association for the

Development of Industrial and Commercial

Patronage) in 1979 and the subsequent

introduction of tax and other incentives

partly remedied this, though income from

private business remains relatively small (1–

1.6 billion francs in 1992). Various types of

approved private foundations, including the

state-initiated Fondation de France, also

provide funds. Plans for a new, autonomous

Heritage Foundation were announced by the

government in 1993.

DAVID LOOSELEY

See also: architecture under Mitterrand; cul-

tural policy

Further reading

Looseley, D.L. (1995) The Politics of Fun:

Cultural Policy and Debate in Contempo-

rary France, Oxford and Washington, DC:

Berg (traces the ups and downs of public

arts funding).

Ministry of Culture (1996) Chiffres clés

1995: statistiques de la culture, Paris:

arts funding

Documentation Française (full statistics on

funding and other matters).

Wangermée, R. and Gournay, B. (1991) Cul-

tural Policy in France, Strasbourg: Council

for Cultural Co-operation (a detailed 1988

survey of arts provision).

athletics

France, in the person of Pierre de Coubertin

(1863–1937), did much to resurrect the Ol-

ympic Games (Athens 1896), but a national

body devoted exclusively to athletics—the

Fédération Française d’Athlétisme—was cre-

ated only in 1920 (its predecessor, dating from

1887, having embraced other sports as well).

Paris hosted the Olympic Games in 1924.

France’s success in athletics was rather lim-

ited before the Atlanta games of 1996 (which

saw a marked improvement), but a small

number of outstanding world record-holders

and Olympic champions have emerged from

the 1960s onwards, including Guy Drut (110

m hurdles), Michel Jazy (middle distances),

Pierre Quinon and Thierry Vigneron (both

pole vault), Colette Besson and Marie-Jo Pérec

(both 400 m).

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Gardien, A., Houvion, M., Prost, R. and Tho-

mas, R. (1982) L’Athlétisme, Paris: PUF (a

technical analysis of athletic events).

Atlan, Jean-Michel

b. 1913, Constantine, Algeria;

d. 1960, Paris

Artist and poet

Atlan, a philosophy teacher, received no for-

mal art training. Arrested for Resistance ac-

tivities in 1942, he escaped deportation by

simulating insanity. He was interned in St

Anne mental hospital, where he produced Le

Sang profond (Blood’s Depths), a collection

of illustrated poems. After the war he joined

the Surréalisme Révolutionnaire group and

contributed to the avant-garde reviews

Réaltiés nouvelles and Cobra. His early figu-

rative paintings combine landscapes and ani-

mal images (Paysage) and Old Testament sub-

jects (Le Lion de Judah, Salomé), which tes-

tify to his Jewish roots. He developed violent

abstract forms, combining the magical and the

erotic (Miroirs de l’Asie), and explored the

relations between writing and painting.

ELZA ADAMOWICZ

Atlan, Liliane

b. 1932, Montpellier

Playwright and poet

A Jewish writer whose work deals with the

history and suffering of her people and the

atrocity of war, often employing fantasy rather

than grim realism to tell the tale. Her major

works include Monsieur Fugue, first staged in

1967 at the Comédie de St-Étienne.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Further reading

Oswald, P.-J. (1971) Les Musiciens, les

émigrants, Paris: Honfleur (biographical

analysis).

Attali, Jacques

b. 1943, Algiers, Algeria

Attali, Jacques

Writer, economist and political

adviser

An economist and polymath intellectual, a

graduate from the École Nationale

d’Administration (ENA), and the author of

numerous socioeconomic and historical es-

says, Attali was Special Adviser to President

Mitterrand from 1981 to 1989, and helped

shape the foreign and European policies of the

president. In 1990 he became Director of the

newly formed European Bank for Reconstruc-

tion and Development, providing financial

support to Eastern Europe. He resigned in

1993 amidst allegations of overspending and

lax management. His long memoirs, Verba-

tim, were criticized for plagiarism and for not

always being trustworthy.

FRANÇOIS NECTOUX

Further reading

MacShane, D. (1994) ‘Misjudgements’, Criti-

cal Quarterly, 36, 3 (an analysis of the rea-

sons why Attali never fitted the Anglo-

Saxon financial world).

Attoun, Lucien

birthdate not known

Broadcaster, actor and director

As well as for his acting and directing roles,

Attoun is known for founding the Théâtre

Ouvert company in Paris, with his wife

Micheline, in 1971, in order to promote con-

temporary playwrights through readings, per-

formance and publication. The company, per-

manently based since 1981 at the Jardin

d’Hiver, Paris, was made the first Centre

Dramatique National devoted to new writing

in 1987.

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Further reading

G.C. (1992) ‘Théâtre Ouvert—vingt et un ans

de theatre d’essai et de création’, in P.Laville

(ed.) Théâtre 1991–1992, Paris: Hachette.

Meureuze, D. (1986) ‘A la recherche des

auteurs’, Avant-Scène 797 (article on the

Attouns).

Audiberti, Jacques

b. 1899, Antibes;

d. 1965, Paris

Playwright and writer

A playwright of carnavalesque, wordy plays,

many dealing with concepts of good and evil,

which were mainstays of 1950s and 1960s

Parisian arts theatre, e.g. Le Mal Court (Evil

Runs About) and Le Cavalier seul (The Lone

Cavalier).

ANNIE SPARKS

See also: theatre

Further reading

Farcy, G.-D. (1988), Les Théâtres d’Audiberti,

Paris: Presses Universitaires de France

(analysis of work).

Aufray, Hugues

b. 1932, Neuilly-sur-Seine

Singer-songwriter,

real name Jean Auffray

Aufray appeared in nightclubs on the Left

Bank in Paris before forming a skiffle group

Attoun, Lucien

in the 1960s under the influence of Joan Baez,

Pete Seeger and, above all, Bob Dylan, some

of whose early songs he sang in imaginative

French translations by Pierre Delanoë. Impor-

tant on the French musical scene for his im-

portation of American folk music and as an

exponent of protest songs, he has enjoyed

something of a revival in the 1990s.

IAN PICKUP