A Tal Coat museum in Morbihan?

About the interview with Olivier Delavallade who left the Domaine de Kerghéhennec last November.

The most important public collection of works by Pierre Tal Coat (1905-1985) has been on view since 2019 in Morbihan, at the Domaine de Kerghéhennec. Unfortunately, we still know too little about it, according to Jean-Marc Huitorel, art critic, and Olivier Delavallade, director of the site from 2011 to 2021. So the former interviews the latter this month for the contemporary artists' magazine Art Press. This is a way of reminding the elected representatives and administrative managers of the Morbihan department that it is now up to them to ensure that the Tal Coat collection is surrounded in a coherent manner by the other exhibition spaces of the Domaine in order to promote its reputation. If this major 20th century painter still lacks recognition, as evidenced by the astonishment and interest shown by the young contemporary artists in residence at Kerghéhennec, it is surely, in Jean-Marc Huitorel's view, because he has had too little exposure to his counterparts. Olivier Delavallade had begun to fill this gap at the Domaine by putting the Tal Coat collection in dialogue with a maximum number of other artists.

The catalogue raisonné put online by the painter's grandson, which can be viewed freely on Pierre Tal Coat's official website hosted by WebMuseo, highlights "the resonances of his paintings with his friends Balthus, Bazaine, Braque, Calder, Chillida, Giacometti, Gruber, Kijno, Masson, Miro, Joan Mitchell, Staël or Zao Wou-Ki... but also his close ties with the writers André du Bouchet, Georges Duthuit, Philippe Jaccottet, Henri Maldinev and Wallace Stevens. All of which gives the decision-makers in Morbihan some perspective. To which Jean-Marc Huitorel does not hesitate to add Dubuffet, Soulages or Fontana, as well as the following generations of artists up to the present day.

The paradox here is not trivial: it was the destruction of a large quantity of Tal Coat's most recent works in the fire that ravaged his studio in Dormont, in the Eure region, in 2006 (and not in 2012, as J.-M. H.'s introduction indicates) that finally made it possible to bring together more than 1,100 of them in a single place! The disaster gave rise to a project led by Olivier Delavallade, with the complicity of Pierrette Demolon Tal Coat, the painter's daughter, making it possible to offer for the first time an overview of the work of the contemporary artist, too often simplistically summarised by a passage from the figurative to the abstract. The drawings, paintings, watercolours, etc., as well as some of the sculptures on display here prove that the opposite may well be true.

An important donation from Françoise Simecek, the painter's last companion, made it possible to constitute the initial collection of the Tal Coat space in Brittany, which was completed by numerous purchases of works of art at very reasonable prices at the time.

The young Pierre Jacob, born into a family of fishermen in Cloas-Carnoët, near Pont-Aven, had chosen his pseudonym, meaning "wooden forehead", at the time when he was painting at the Manufacture de Sèvres. He was becoming an artist and did not want to be confused with the poet Max Jacob. The young man had just left the Henriot faience factory in Quimper, where he had entered as a moulder and ceramist at the age of 21, after having successively tried his hand at the professions of blacksmith and notary's clerk following the death of his father. He became a painter, engraver and illustrator, and on rare occasions a sculptor, and settled in the countryside of Aix-en-Provence in the 1940s. Before moving back to Normandy in 1961 to set up his studio in the Dormont Charterhouse in Saint-Pierre-de-Bailleul. Where a large part of his works that remained there after his death were burnt.

When Olivier Delavallade discovered his paintings at the Clivages art gallery in Paris, he was still a student. "It was a great shock," he recalls. He was given the opportunity to work in this very gallery and thus deepen his knowledge of Tal Coat's work, which seemed terribly misunderstood. The implementation of the Kerghéhennec project was the best way to remedy the problem. And if the space could now be labelled a Musée de France, that would be the apotheosis.