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The Renault Collection: Contemporary French Art

by John McGee

Victor Vasarely, Vega Blue, 1970, oil on canvas, 160x160cm
(Images © ADAGP, Paris & JVACS, Tokyo, 2002)

French automaker Renault is better known for "Le Car" than "l'art." Nonetheless, they were a driving force behind French contemporary art from 1967-1986. Their Recherche, Art et Industrie department started with a goal of bringing art and industry together, initially by providing grants, technical support and spare parts to artists. When Renault built a new headquarters in 1973-1974, the plan shifted to include collecting. In particular, they commissioned works for the new interiors
—dangling installations and rainbow murals to line hallways, and eye-popping paintings to hang in cafeterias and meeting rooms. 

This is the first time pieces from the collection have been shown together (even at Renault they are spread throughout the buildings). Most of France is currently on summer vacation, giving the Sompo Japan Museum this unique opportunity to borrow 136 paintings, drawings, collages and sculptures. 

Renault worked with established artists like Jean Dubuffet and Joan Miro (not all were French) and relative unknowns like Jesus Rafael Soto. Though it may be hard to characterize the collection as a whole, most of the work by the 13 artists here is dynamic, optical or automotive—they describe or capture motion, play retinal tricks or incorporate car parts. 

Jean Dubuffet, Le Mur Bleu, 1967, polyurethane on polyester, 350x710x110cm 

Op art impresario Victor Vasarely hypnotizes the exhibition with a roomful of patterns that pucker and spherize, appearing to fold flat canvas. Some of his range of work here, spanning 1949-1974, has held up surprisingly well. Gordium PS positif, a black-and-white line painting from 1951, looks like an enlarged Paul Klee drawing, sans color. One of the best pieces in the show is Perokta (1973), a small abstraction that knits dozens of Josef Albers-type color tests into a quilter's pattern. Studies for silkscreen prints have a similar handicraft quality. 

Soto's op art really was 3-D. Dozens of droopy horizontal rods hang in front of thin horizontal lines painted on canvas. Shadows from the twisting rods cross each other and interact with the painted lines, vibrating in the viewer's eyes. 

Arman used tools of the trade—wrenches, gears and the like—as stamps and masks, creating repeating "accumulations" and "compositions" both in sculpture and painting.

Jean Tinguley, Roberto Matta and Henri Michaux counter the uptight grids and corporate wallpaper with exuberance. Tinguley's energetic sketches for animated machines are scribbled jumbles of wheels and gears. In Matta's cartoon-like drawings, twisted and accordioned body parts float and flex in space. Michaux froze calligraphic gestures as he dripped and splashed ink and acrylic across his 1960s compositions (forget those from the '80s). 

Erro, Madonna, 1985, oil on canvas,
98x62cm 

Erro's overabundant collages and paintings from 1985 juxtapose cars with figures from art history, e.g. Manet's Olympia sprawls on a futuristic dashboard. 

The show's anomaly is Niki de Saint-Phalle's hanging wall sculpture, White Goddess (1963), a hulking earth mother covered in whitewashed flowers, baby dolls and other toys. The only piece comparable in composition, if not tone, is Dubuffet's blocky blue-and-white polyester wall with a seated person, Le Mur Bleu (1967), leaning near the entrance (as it does at Renault headquarters). 

This view of the Renault collection overindulges in mediocre works, especially by Michaux and Erro. And the collection as a whole missed important French artists of that generation. Still, Renault should be applauded for its engaged support of the arts. Too bad financial strains caused it to run out of gas.

This exhibition was held Aug-Sep 2003 at Sompo Japan Museum of Art, Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan.

©2006 John McGee

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