The image of his father Etienne Alexandre hiding from the Nazis beneath the floorboards for a year and a half remained with Christian Boltanski all his life. The horror of that concealment in a dusty, rat-infected space turned the young boy into a conceptual artist who could not let go of the 20th century.
Or perhaps that century, defined by the Nazi’s cruel, totalitarian grip, could not let go of him. Christian Boltanski, who has died aged 77, was a sensitive and perceptive installation photographer, sculptor, painter and film-maker, who worked with the evanescent quality of memory.
His installation The Inhabitants of the House of Saint Aignan in 1939, in the courtyard of the Museé d’Art et d’Histoire du Judaisme in Paris, takes the form of 80 small posters naming each Jewish artisan who worked in this building at the outbreak of war, including place of birth, profession and sometimes the date of the convoy to the camps. They resemble the death announcements once posted on the walls of Eastern European cities. They also evoke the so-called stumbling stones, or stolpersteine, created by the German artist Gunter Demnig in 1992, and placed outside the former homes of deported Jews. In Boltanki’s view, names and photos hung up and illuminated by light bulbs reflect what can never be defined; memory, passing shadows, death everywhere.
That image of his hidden father was in itself a light-bulb moment for the artist, but the light for him illuminated a world of conflict, of lack of resolution, of things that fade and can never be recovered. Boltanski once said that nobody is remembered two generations after their death.
The Holocaust was the catalyst of this reality, leading him to preserve what he could of the lost ones.
While haunted by the sense of those who disappeared in that war and in all subsequent wars, Boltanski worked through an intensely physical experience: discarded clothes suspended from hangers or lying on the ground, a mountain of rubbish piled high, tall boxes of newsprint looming like skyscrapers – all of which define a reality which is actually hidden from view – a metaphysical message of things that cannot die.
“Most of my parents’ friends were survivors,” he told the Brooklyn Rail. “Today I believe we are still at war. Nothing changes. I don’t believe we are in a time of peace. How many immigrants die in the Mediterranean Sea? This is war.”
Boltanski was a key influencer in the development of contemporary art from Europe to Asia with his stress on the unique and truthful value of memory, despite its fragility. Dependence on light is essential to his installations, videos, sounds and shadow theatres, using photos of the young and the elderly. Sometimes Holocaust imagery is understated in his work. Volumes of clothes recall the victims’ shoes at Auschwitz. Installations such as Die Judische Schule, or Caches 2019, show black and white photos of Jewish schoolchildren in Vienna in 1931. In 1989 he created Reserve for a Basel exhibition and filled the space with worn clothing, suggesting the concentration camps, and the relentless weight of human suffering. Forgotten lives were also evoked in his 2010 installation No Man’s Land at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, in which a 60ft crane dropped discarded clothing into a heap to the sound of 75,000 beating hearts, gathered from all over the world and stored on an island in Japan as Les Archives du Cœur (The Heart Archives, 2008).
Born in Paris in 1944, two weeks after the city was liberated, to Etienne Alexandre Boltanski and Marie-Elise Ilari-Guerin, the artist’s Jewish heritage loomed large in the Boltanski home.
School hardly featured after he left, aged 12, with his brothers, Luc and Jean-Elie. Their mother did not allow friends to visit, and they slept at the foot of their parents’ bed until they were in their teens. The young Bolstanski began creating art in the late 1950s, experimenting with plasticine sculptures and then large-scale figurative paintings, before he took up photography.
Soon he developed the practice of using discarded or found images from newspapers, police records and family photograph albums at flea markets. He assembled them into narratives implicitly referencing the Holocaust. A few short, avant-garde films and notebooks emerged at the time and in some he evoked fantasy lifestyles of the ideal family he, himself, never had. A certain anxiety remained etched into his robust features, a questing look in his eyes .
The theme of missing loved ones persisted throughout Boltanski’s work. He invited visitors to the Japanese art island of Teshima, to write messages to loved ones for an installation of 400 wind chimes. Their chosen names dangle from each bell on strips of transparent material. The sound of the wind chimes is meant to conjure the mystery of the soul.
In 1990, Boltanski made The Reserve of Dead Swiss, now in Tate Modern. It consists of blown-up photo clippings from death notices in a provincial Swiss newspaper. The faces are deliberately blurred; each is lit with a sing le, naked electric bulb. Of this, Boltanski remarked: “Part of the work is also about the simple fascination of seeing somebody who is handsome and imagining his ashes.” The installation is an allusion to Switzerland’s wartime neutrality, but questions the difference between neutrality and complicity.
From his first solo exhibition at the Theatre Le Ranelagh in May 1968, he featured in more than 150 art exhibitions throughout the world, including several solo shows. His work remains in permanent collections at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, London’s Tate Gallery and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris.
In 1970, Boltanski married contemporary artist Annette Messager but they chose not to have children and they lived outside Paris. Their careers developed in parallel with each other’s and they occasionally collaborated. He is survived by Annette and by Luc and Jean-Elie.
Gloria Tessler
Christian Boltanski born 6 September, 1944. Died 14 July, 2021
