Daniel Templon, une histoire d’art contemporain

One has to be the man of the moment, meet the right actors and seize opportunities with a taste for risks and with ambition: this sentence applies perfectly to its author, Daniel Templon. Born right after the war, the son of a gardener, he started modestly as a school teacher. But then he made a sharp turn and at the tender age of 21, he opened a gallery on rue du Bac. It was the beginning of an itinerary that would turn him into one of the most influential gallery owners over the last half a century in France. A pioneer of minimalist art, of conceptual art, Pop Art and of the Italian Transavanguardia, Templon was also party to the adventures of art press, such as in artpress with Catherine Millet, then Studio, and of the first private foundations – his own, in Fréjus, would only last three years, from 1989 to 1992. This book, punctuated with recurrent interviews with the gallery owner, is more laudatory than critical, but it draws up a good idea of his unlimited appetite for encounters (from Leo Castelli to Soulages, from Warhol to Jack Lang), of the evolution of his work and of his persistent energy – he recently opened a new venue in Brussels.

• Daniel Templon, une histoire d’art contemporain, byr Julie Verlaine, Flammarion, 480 p., €35.