Jean Clair

Jean Clair
Jean Clair by Claude Truong-Ngoc 2013
Born	Gérard Régnier (1940-10-20) 20 October 1940 (age 76) Paris, France
Occupation	French Writer Novelist Art historian
Known for	Member of the Académie française

Jean Clair (French: [klɛʁ]) is the nom de plume (pen name) of Gérard Régnier (born 20 October 1940 in Paris, France). Clair is an essayist, a polemicist, an art historian, an art conservator, and a member of the Académie française since May, 2008. He was, for many years, the director of the Picasso Museum in Paris. Among the milestones of his long and productive career is a comprehensive catalog of the works of Balthus. He was also the director of the Venice Biennale in 1995.

His father was a farmer with socialist ideas and his mother a devout catholic. Jean Clair was born in the sixth arrondissement of Paris. He was a student at two secondary schools, the lycée Jacques-Decour and the lycée Carnot, before embarking on a course of post-baccalaureat preparation, the so-called khâgne, at the prestigious lycée Henri-IV in Paris. Then he pursued a doctorate degree in literature and sciences at the Sorbonne, specialising in philosophy and the history of art. There he was a student of the art historian, André Chastel, and the philosopher, Jean Grenier. Later, he secured a doctorate in art at the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University with scholarship support from the financier Arthur Sachs. During his studies he spends a year in the Netherlands and another year in Belgium. During the Algerian war, for a time, he was involved with the Union of Communist Students (Union des étudiants communistes de France - UEC).

Jean Clair enters the literary world and became the art editor of The “La Nouvelle Revue française” (New French Review), led by the well-known Marcel Arland, Georges and Jacques Reda Lambrichs. His start as a writer was marked by the publishing in this magazine of a journal-novel under the pseudonym Clair at 22, in 1962. In this journal he expresses the nostalgia of his childhood and adolescence on a farm, in the countryside, which his parents left taking him with them to live in the city.

For his first job, he was assigned to the Orangerie Museum, but found it "so dusty , so bourgeois". Passing the second competitive examination for the position of curator of the Museums of France in 1966 at age 26, he is assistant curator until 1969, then curator at the National Museum of Modern Art for ten years, and then curator of the section (“cabinet”) of graphic art of Centre Pompidou between 1980 and 1989. He is appointed General National (French) Heritage “conservateur” (preserver) in 1989. He was the Director of the Picasso Museum, Paris, France until 2005. He also curated many national exhibitions such as "Duchamp" (1977), "Les Réalismes"/The various form of realism) (1980), "Vienne/Vienna" (1986), " L'âme au corps"/The soul and the body (1993 ), "Balthus ","Szafran,"," Mélancolie/Melancholy "(2005)," Crime et Châtiment"/Crime and Punishment (2010) and directed the Venice Biennale for its Centennial in 1995.