28 écrivains, et 13 artistes participent à cet ensemble, ces mélanges pour Jacques Dupin, hommage au poète, au critique, au galeriste.

Contributeurs : Arnulf Rainer, Anne-Marie Albiach, Yves Bonnefoy, Gilles du Bouchet, Hubert Damish, Michel Surya, Jacques Monory, Bernard Noël, Jean Frémon, Franck André Jamme, Antoni Tàpies, Dominique Fourcade, Francis Cohen, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, Pierre Alechinsky, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Jean-Luc Sarré, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Hélène L’Heuillet, Nicolas Cendo, Peter Stämpfli, Emmanuel Laugier, Claude Royet-Journoud, Marcel Moreau, Jean Maison, Nicolas Pesquès, Mathieu Bénézet, John Ashbery, Rémi Labrusse, Pierre...

28 écrivains, et 13 artistes participent à cet ensemble, ces mélanges pour Jacques Dupin, hommage au poète, au critique, au galeriste.

Contributeurs : Arnulf Rainer, Anne-Marie Albiach, Yves Bonnefoy, Gilles du Bouchet, Hubert Damish, Michel Surya, Jacques Monory, Bernard Noël, Jean Frémon, Franck André Jamme, Antoni Tàpies, Dominique Fourcade, Francis Cohen, Jean-Pierre Verheggen, Pierre Alechinsky, Michèle Cohen-Halimi, Jean-Luc Sarré, Ernest Pignon-Ernest, Hélène L’Heuillet, Nicolas Cendo, Peter Stämpfli, Emmanuel Laugier, Claude Royet-Journoud, Marcel Moreau, Jean Maison, Nicolas Pesquès, Mathieu Bénézet, John Ashbery, Rémi Labrusse, Pierre Buraglio, Michel Deguy, Jaume Plensa, Esther Tellermann, Valéry Hugotte, Jan Voss, Jacques Roubaud, Daniel Lelong, Konrad Klapheck, Emmanuel Hocquard, Paul Auster, Claude Garache.

Jacques Dupin, Art Scholar and Poet, Dies at 85

Jacques Dupin, a poet, art critic and cultural eminence in France whose influence straddled the avant-garde literary world and the commercial market in paintings and sculptures by major 20th-century artists, died on Oct. 27 at his home in Paris. He was 85.

Family members who confirmed his death said he had been ill for several years.

Mr. Dupin was for a long time one of the directors of the renowned Galerie Maeght in Paris, which represented Joan Miró, Marc Chagall, Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon, Wassily Kandinsky and other modern artists.

As both a poet and an art dealer, he had a wide circle of friends. Bacon and Giacometti painted his portrait. The American poet John Ashbery, another friend, translated a seminal monograph written by Dupin in 1961 about Giacometti, which was published in English in 2003.

Mr. Dupin’s closest relationship among artists was with Miró. He wrote Miró’s official biography and over 10 volumes of catalog monographs on his work. After Miró’s death in 1983, Mr. Dupin was empowered by Miró’s family as the only person authorized to authenticate his work, which had become the frequent target of fraudulent copiers.

In 1985 Mr. Dupin made a well-publicized visit to New York to judge the authenticity of several paintings said to be by Miró that were scheduled for auction. An article in The New York Times described him examining one piece, valued at $50,000. “With a piercing gaze, Mr. Dupin scrutinized the painting’s colors, its signature, its composition, its brush strokes, The Times wrote. It’s a fake, he quietly declared. It’s not even a very good fake. It’s terrible.” He explained the process he used in making such calls, then added, “When the fake is good, my job is interesting.”

Mr. Dupin’s poetry, beginning with his first collection in 1950, earned him a parallel rank among France’s postwar avant-garde writers. In 1966 he was a founder of L’Éphémère, an influential poetry quarterly whose other founders included André du Bouchet, Yves Bonnefoy and Paul Celan.

The American writer Paul Auster, author of The New York Trilogy and other novels and memoirs, was a protégé and friend of Mr. Dupin, as well as one of his rare English translators.
Mr. Auster’s translation of Fits and Starts: Selected Poems of Jacques Dupin (1974) was among only a handful of collections to introduce his often difficult work to readers in the United States. “Uncompromisingly hermetic in attitude and rigorously concise in utterance, Mr. Auster wrote, Mr. Dupin’s poetry demands of us not so much a reading as an absorption.”

In an interview on Friday, Mr. Auster said he had been an ardent fan of Dupin’s poems since he stumblied on them at his local library as a young man. During a sojourn in Paris in the early 1970s, he said, he sought out the poet, who not only bought him dinner but also soon afterward gave him use of the guest room in his apartment, which Mr. Dupin and his wife, Christine, often lent to struggling writers, political refugees and others. Mr. Auster stayed for a year, he said, writing most of the poems later included in his book Unearth.
“Jacques was a model of integrity and a man of immense generosity, especially toward young artists, Mr. Auster said. I don’t think I have ever had such a great friend.”

Jacques Dupin was born on March 4, 1927, in the small town of Privas in the South of France, where his father was the psychiatrist on staff at a state-operated mental hospital. He was an only child. “He liked to say that he grew up in an insane asylum, and that his earliest friends were mental patients” Mr. Auster said.
That experience probably shaped him as a poet, Mr. Auster added. “I think it made him a radical at heart, someone who refused to accept the dogmas current at any given moment.”

Mr. Dupin was a teenager when his family moved in 1944 to Paris, a city he once described as having been left “a desert” in the wake of its wartime occupation. The poet René Char helped him publish his first collection of poems in 1950. A year after that he married Christine Rousset, who survives him, along with their two daughters, Hélêne and Élizabeth, and three granddaughters.
His poetry, which has been described as intentionally ambiguous, emerged in a stark postwar period of re-evaluation at all levels of French society, art included. “It’s succinct, laconic, impersonal”, said Mary Ann Caws, a professor of French literature at the City University of New York.
“In some ways, she added, Mr. Dupin’s poetry was the opposite of Mr. Dupin himself. I knew him as a friend, she said, and he was an awfully decent and warm man.”

Paul Vitello, The New-York Times, 4 novembre 2012.