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Iris Clert: the ambiguous star of the avant-garde in bookstores
27 Oct. 2021
Iris Clert : few names of gallery owners love as much as this one. For generations of art lovers, she remains the flamboyant icon of the post-war Parisian artistic effervescence. After a first book dedicated to Jean Fournier published in 2018, the Comité Professionnel des Galeries d’Art is proud to dedicate the second opus of the Art Gallery Collection to Iris Clert. This collection, co-published with Hermann Editions, pays tribute to the great French gallery owners of the second half of the 20th century.
Active from the mid-1950s to the early 1980s, Iris Clert (1918-1986) hosted mythical exhibitions in her successive galleries, Rive gauche and Rive droite, such as Yves Klein’s Le Vide in 1958 and Arman’s Le Plein in 1960, as well as some of the most important artists of the twentieth century, such as Pol Bury, Gaston Chaissac, Bill Copley, Yolande Fièvre, Lucio Fontana, Leon Golub, Raymond Hains, Ad Reinhardt, Takis and Jean Tinguely.
The manifest eclecticism of her program, that of a true Pasionaria of the avant-garde, is the bright side of a visionary practice of her profession. From her pioneering presentations at the Venice Biennale in the 1960s to the Stradart adventure in the 1970s, from the publication of iris.time unlimited to her undeniable sense of communication and exhibition formats, Galerie Iris Clert is still today the emblematic model of a pilot gallery dedicated to the discovery and promotion of living artists. A gallery without capital but with unlimited freedom!
Its author : Historian and art critic, independent curator and editor specialized in contemporary art, Clément Dirié is an observer as attentive to current artistic creation as to the genealogies of contemporary art history since the 1960s. Author of numerous essays on art and design, he signs here his first book.
The Art Gallery Collection is directed by Georges-Philippe Vallois, president of the Comité Professionel des Galeries d’Art from 2011 to 2019. A first book, signed by Catherine Francblin, dedicated to Jean Fournier (1918-1986) was published in 2018.
