Footnotes

Selections from the Anne & Jacques Kerchache Collection

Jacques Kerchache, dealer and tireless campaigner for the arts of Africa, the Pacific and the Americas, was born in Rouen, Normandy, in 1942. A chance encounter whilst on holiday with his parents at the age of 12 with the poet and art critic, Max-Pol Fouchet, whom he had greatly admired from his television programmes, was to have a great impact on his life and steered him in the direction his career would follow. The two spent three days together, Fouchet teaching the young Jacques to look at objects.

From the age of 16 he ran the gallery of Iris Clert on weekends and opened his own gallery on the Rue de Seine in the early 1960s. Here he exhibited "primitive art" and the works of contemporary artists, some of whom would become life-long friends such as Sam Szafran. Between 1965 and 1974 Kerchache organised eight exhibitions of "primitive" art in his gallery, the catalogues often with texts written by renowned scholars. These included La Tête (1966) with text by Max-Pol Fouchet; Fleuve Sepik (1967) with an introduction by Jean Guiart; and Le M'Boueti des Mahongoué (1967). In his introduction to this catalogue Claude Roy recounts Jacque's adventures in finding the 23 reliquary figures in the Gabonese equatorial forest where they had been hidden from the missionaries intent on their destruction. He describes Jacques as "a young man who comes straight out of Jules Verne and exotic adventure novels".

His first trip in search of objects was to South East Asia in 1961 at the instigation of Richard Cordier. He discovered Africa later where he travelled between 1965 and 1969. As he himself said: "Without any prior method, the passion for Africa propelled me to the heart of Gabon, took me from Congo to Equatorial Guinea, from Ivory Coast to Liberia, led me from Burkina Faso to Mali, from Ethiopia to Benin, from Nigeria to Cameroon and from Tanzania to Zaire".

In 1978 he was appointed technical advisor to Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor for the project of the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar. By 1980 Kerchache was devoting much of his time to advising museums and organising exhibitions and he closed his gallery. He held his first museum exhibition in Arras with a collection of Mumuye figures in 1981 and was a major collaborator in the exhibition Primitivism in 20thCentury Art at MoMA in New York in 1984. In 1988 he was a major force behind the iconic Citadelles and Mazenod publication African Art.

Determined that "primitive art" should have its rightful place in French museums, in 1990 Jacques launched his manifesto, Pour que les chefs-d'oeuvre du monde entier naissent libres et égaux (So that the masterpieces of the whole world are born free and equal) which advocated the opening of an eighth department at the Musée du Louvre, dedicated to primitive art. Signatories included not just historians and ethnographers but also artists and intellectuals. Two years later he met Jacques Chirac, then mayor of Paris, who was greatly impressed by Kerchache and gave him the opportunity of organising the L'art taino exhibition at the Petit-Palais in 1994. In 1995, Jacques Chirac was elected as president of the Republic, and the following year the idea was formulated to create an original cultural and scientific institution that would bring together primitive art from national collections in a single location. The first goal realised was the exhibition of primitive art in the Louvre. Kerchache was responsible for the selection and display of more than one hundred works of art from Africa, the Pacific and the Americas in the newly liberated exhibition space of the Pavillon des Sessions. The display he arranged with characteristic attention to detail and the lighting of each object. He was keen to avoid any form of exoticism and for that reason did not wish to include masks in the display; rather the objects chosen should be integrated with the other items on view in the Louvre. The opening was a great public and critical success and Kerchache would announce: "The time of contempt is over. "Primitive art" has just entered the Louvre".

Whilst working on the display at the Pavillon des Sessions Kerchache was devoting a great deal of time on the project of the Musée du Quai Branly. He was involved in the selection of objects for display and also in the acquisition of new works to fill gaps in the collection. However due to his untimely death in 2001 he did not live to see the project come to fruition. He donated his library to the new museum and his contribution is recorded for posterity in the reading room at the museum which bears his name.