Alain Jacquet: This great French artist we didn't see

What do you do when you suddenly realise that the world may have missed a major artist like Alain Jacquet for decades? You think that art critics are doing their job badly! You suspect the media of being just as biased as in politics. And you think you're a loser yourself for being so lacking in curiosity and discernment. Especially if we are talking about a French artist at the height of his art in the sacrosanct sixties. A blessed time when the Mona Lisa was not yet considered a cool background for selfies.

So there is no excuse.

How can Jacquet be considered great?

Unlike most European pop artists, Jacquet was a pioneer rather than a follower of the US mainstream. A sold-out French David Hockney? If you look closely, he was the man in the shadows, much more so than Lichtenstein, who is said to have been the first to use a dot pattern in painting. We have already mentioned his masterly Déjeuner sur l'herbe in passing. History will remember Lichtenstein and not Jacquet.

Warhol himself could be accused of plagiarism with his Brillo box installations, which only a polite respect for American soft power prevents him from seeing as a rehash of Alain Jacquet's Jeu de cubes installation. Better still. Our man does Rauschenberg before Rauschenberg with his series of Camouflages. Each canvas mixes, by superimposition, two existing images that most often belong to our collective imagination. The result is an interaction of meanings that the plastic vibrations challenge through their interference. As, for example, between a painting by Jasper Johns and a cult Pathé Marconi ad.

Jaquet asked himself the right questions about art in the 1960s. And he came up with some great answers. To general indifference. We don't miss him. We have original artists like Christo. He does Jacquet after Jacquet very well. And we cry genius.

Photo: Camouflage Jaspar Johns- The voice of his master - 1963