During the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand announced the Pompidou Center’s acquisition of the Bouqueret collection. It is now official. Nearly 7000 original prints will become part of the Pompidou Center’s photography collection.
The purchase, whose price remained confidential, was financed by the Yves Rocher Company, the same company that sponsored the 2009 exhibition Elles@. According to museum director Alain Seban, the collection was purchased at a fair price, “a sponsor’s price” commented Christian Bouqueret. Since its creation, this is the third time the Pompidou Center received this type of sponsorship. The investment provided a tax break amounting to nearly 90 percent of the cost.
For Quentin Bajac, their is an obvious complementarity between the 2 collections. They both originated at the same time, during the ’70’s, with the same guiding principles: photographs have material value, they must be original, and above all, the prints must be top quality. The collection follows three axes: the first is surrealism, including works by Man Ray, Dora Maar or Claude Cahun, artists already present in the museum collection. It also includes works from the German new wave. 450 prints by Germaine Krull will belong to Beaubourg, as well as works by Marianne Breslauer, an artist who is not in the Beaubourg collection. The Bouqueret collection also includes pictures from French photocraphers between the two World Wars such as Emmanuel Sougez or Laure Albin-Guillot or such remarkable pictures as Le Papier collant et mouches, by Jacques André Boiffard.
Clément Chéroux announced an exhibition in 2012. “The exhibition will be a way to show the collection’s major and lesser known elements, providing insight into photography between the two World Wars.”
We hope that this acquisition will allow us to create a veritable photography center, alongside the center’s permanent art collection.
Sophie Hedtmann
