André Chastel (November 15, 1912 - July 18, 1990)
André Chastel died on July 18, 1990. Until the last few months, he had remained very active and present at the Collège itself. Many of us find it hard to believe that he's gone. Knowing the affection he aroused, we may feel that the distance has not yet been re-established, which would enable us to pass an impartial judgment on his work. However, I have no hesitation in saying that we have just lost one of the most important art historians of our time - in France, and not only in France - as Focillon was for the first half of the century.
In the eyes of some, André Chastel's life will be summed up in the example and model of a great academic career. Born in Paris in 1912, he was educated at the Collège Notre-Dame and the Lycée Louis-le-Grand. He entered the École normale in 1933 and passed the agrégation des lettres in 1937. A teacher at the Lycée du Havre, he was soon mobilized, taken prisoner, sent to Germany and finally released. He returned to teaching in Paris in 1943, in Chartres in 1944, and in 1945 became an assistant at the Sorbonne. At the time, assistantship was a very heavy and temporary burden. Appointed to the Lycée Marcelin-Berthelot, then to the Lycée Carnot, he wrote a doctoral thesis, which he defended in 1950.
He immediately obtained a post as director of studies at the École Pratique des Hautes Études, a position so dear to him that he insisted on keeping it, despite all his responsibilities, until 1978. When Pierre Lavedan left his chair in the history of modern and contemporary art at the Sorbonne in 1955, a few friends urged André Chastel to stand as a candidate: he was elected, at the age of forty-three, despite the prestige of older competitors, who never forgave him. He was to remain at the Institut d'Art for fifteen years, until his election in 1970 to the Collège, where he felt very happy, and which he remained until this summer, even though he retired in 1984.
In the meantime, he had been awarded the highest distinctions: election to the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres in 1975, the Grand Prix National des Arts et Lettres in 1978, not to mention the dignity of Commander of the Légion d'Honneur. Add to this the elegance and irresistible radiance he had in his youth, the poise you knew him for right up to his final days, and a benevolence always open to anyone who asked for it; if we also mention his wife, herself an art critic and delicate writer, well known for her longstanding column in Le Monde, who gave him three much-loved sons and who shared his passion for the Ravine estate, where they both took pleasure in marrying something of Tuscan poetry to the old and noble land of the Dordogne, we have the model life of a great academic, with its moral dignity, its balance, its harmony and the right balance between scientific work and teaching duties.
This is undoubtedly the image that many will retain of André Chastel, sometimes with envy, sometimes with admiration and gratitude. This image is true. I'd also like to mention another, which is in danger of being forgotten all too quickly. I personally witnessed it from start to finish, and I could see that it was, if not truer, at least more important. It's the image of a man of action, with a taste for and a gift for building, suffering failure and stubbornly starting over, hiding effort, fatigue, moral sorrow and sometimes physical pain under the guise of calm, and a kind of British phlegm that expressed, in truth, less his nature than his modesty and constant concern to remain master of himself.
André Chastel had a deep love of art, in all its forms. He was convinced that it was one of the highest expressions of the human spirit, and believed that an existence could be devoted to it. He devoted his life to it. But he was one of those who believed that faith is little without works.
In the pre-war and early post-war years, art history was at a low ebb in France. Closed in on hexagonal conceptions, distorted by ideological or political aims, it had lost its scientific rigor without sharpening its intuition. French heritage was being ransacked. André Chastel himself spoke of his irritation as a young man at "this kind of artistic illiteracy" that prevailed "among the masses as well as the ruling class", where "good conscience" accommodated "the thick force of convention". He was to devote his life to fighting this situation, but in his own way, which was less to criticize than to build.
By chance, he was given the art column in Le Monde even before he became a professor at the École des Hautes Études. His sensitive style, clear thinking and vast culture soon won him an exceptional audience. He immediately began the battle, seeking to open French minds to the manifestations and methods of other countries, trying to make them understand the art of the past and the art of the present. One of his proudest achievements was to have first singled out Nicolas de Staël for glory; one of his secret sorrows was to be forced, in the 1970s-1980s, to stop praising contemporary art, which was now oriented towards expressions he could no longer love or esteem.
His appointment to the Sorbonne in 1955 gave him a new platform, but also a new field of action. Art history lectures were a dying art. His first task was to develop it. In less than fifteen years, through ceaseless efforts favored by circumstances, he obtained the creation of posts in almost every university, covering each part of the map one after the other. But he revived the Association des professeurs d'histoire de l'art, organized it, gave it a scientific journal, l'Information d'histoire de l'art, and even sought to create a European federation to counterbalance the American "College Art Association": in 1967, the French professors held their annual meeting in Cologne. 1968 brought an abrupt end to this momentum. It was a deeply bitter experience for him. But what was already there remained.
Heritage was no less important to him. It wasn't enough for him to support the efforts of museums and historic monuments in every possible way, not least in the columns of Le Monde. When Malraux became Minister of Culture, he did everything in his power to persuade him to set up an "Inventaire général des monuments et richesses d'art de la France", taking advantage of foreign examples. Malraux was won over. The success of his most cherished project was the reward for infinite patience and effort. Here too, province after province, he was recomposing France, and the founding of a new regional center was always for him a new victory and a new celebration. Alas, I watched helplessly, and with great sadness, as the administration deviously and tenaciously tried to wrest his work from him, transforming an enthusiastic enterprise into a heavy ineffective machine, and destroying before his eyes, if not the organization, at least the spirit.
In addition to this action at national level, he himself set an example of international collaboration through carefully nurtured links with scientific circles in England, America, Germany and, of course, Italy, his country of choice. He was no less proud to be a member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, the British Academy in London, the Bayerische Akademie in Munich, and the Institut de France. Introduced to the Comité International d'Histoire de l'Art by Marcel Aubert, he became its scientific secretary in 1961. This venerable institution, troubled by war and European upheaval, no longer even had an exact list of its members. In just a few years, it was equipped with statutes, regulations and regular meetings. Through his personal prestige, André Chastel forced countries such as England and Spain, which had turned their backs on the organization, to take an active part, not hesitating to oppose his American friends when they sought to take over the revamped organization.
But he knew that research was essential to any discipline. He undertook to save the Répertoire d'Art et d'Archéologie, an international bibliography founded by France in 1911: it seemed doomed, so he put it back on its feet and pushed it towards computerization in 1969. He wanted to give France the great international journal it had once had, but no longer possessed. The adventure, which began in 1959, was long and full of ups and downs. Art de France disappeared after four years. But André Chastel was not discouraged, and in 1968 created the Revue de l'Art, now regarded as one of the three or four major periodicals in the world. In June, he was able to see issue 88 come out, and left confident in its future.
He was too familiar with history not to be convinced that an institution is only as good as its people. He was constantly on the lookout for men, quick to give his trust (sometimes too much), fighting to obtain study facilities, positions and responsibilities. When the Villa Medici in Rome was reformed in 1961, he succeeded in having three art historians accepted each year, and from then on he was never happier than in this Italian Renaissance palace, surrounded by the few young Frenchmen who lived there. His earliest wish - and his last - was to establish in Paris itself a genuine Institut national d'histoire de l'art, comparable to those he admired abroad, and thereby save the illustrious Bibliothèque d'art et d'archéologie Jacques Doucet, then on the verge of closure, while maintaining a living hotbed of vocation and training. He thought he had succeeded in 1986. He didn't realize the intrigues he was stirring up: in 1989, the Institute was dissolved. Yet he continued to fight, even though he knew his end was near. A few months ago, I accompanied him on a new mission, which at least gave him back some hope.
These forty years have been so full of initiatives, it's hard to believe that so many lectures and so many writings could have found their place. I won't dwell on the latter: they speak for themselves. Numerous - fewer, no doubt, than they would have been had it not been for this continuous action and the ever-increasing obstacles - they form a complex but coherent whole, which will be even more so when theHistoire de la peinture française he left almost complete is published.
As early as 1934, André Chastel had been in contact with the Warburg Institute, already withdrawn to London. His interest in Italy had been encouraged and guided by the historian Augustin Renaudet, and like the best of his generation, he was particularly sensitive to currents that viewed art essentially from the angle of "Geistesgeschichte", the history of the human spirit. But he was also a pupil of Focillon, always keen to distinguish between the life of forms and the particularity of styles, and a friend of Roberto Longhi and the English "connoisseurs". He refused to confine himself to a single approach. He always sought to combine different points of view, taking into account the quality of the inspiration and of the work, while at the same time bringing out the various articulations of art with historical realities and formal requirements. An essential lesson, perceptible in his teachings, inscribed in his books, and one that will live on.
This is why, in his last years, in an Italy disoriented by so many different fashions, he enjoyed a prestige that surpassed that of living Italian art historians. In our own country, however, it was rarely understood: the radiance of the man partly concealed the importance of his thought. André Chastel loved to act and hated to preach. Liberal by nature and principle, he refused to impose any doctrine. His death could well mark the beginning of a new and lasting ascendancy for his ideas, in France itself. For most great scholars, attentive to their time but driven by a lofty thought, death is simply a way of changing roles.
Jacques Thuillier, 1992.
Reference
Printed
Thuillier J., " André Chastel (15 novembre 1912 - 18 juillet 1990) ", L'annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 91, 1986, p. 85-89.
