René Huyghe

René Huyghe (3 May 1906, Arras – 5 February 1997, Paris) was a French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art. He was also a curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France and from 1960 a member of the Académie française. He was the father of the writer François-Bernard Huyghe.

René Huyghe studied philosophy and aesthetics at the Sorbonne and the école du Louvre. Made a curator of the Louvre's department of paintings in 1930, he rose to chief curator and professor of the école du Louvre in 1936, aged only 30. He founded and edited the reviews L’Amour de l’Art and Quadrige. He was one of the first figures in France to make films on art, such as his Rubens (winner of a prize at the Venice Biennale), and founded the International Federation of Films on Art.

During the Second World War Huyghe organised the evacuation of the Louvre's paintings into the unoccupied zone and took charge of their protection until the Liberation of France. In 1950, he was elected to the Collège de France, occupying the chair of psychology of the plastic arts. In 1966, he won the Erasmus Prize at The Hague.

In 1974, Huyghe was made director of the Musée Jacquemart-André. It was at this time that he first met the Japanese philosopher Daisaku Ikeda with whom he published a dialogue titled Dawn After Dark. The book was re-released in 2007 by the London-based publishing house I.B. Tauris.

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