ÃÂric de Buretel de Chassey (born 1965) is a French historian of French art, art critic, and professor of contemporary art history at François Rabelais University in Tours, France. He has had students from many different countries, one of whom is the Iranian artist .
On 4 September 2009, he was named director of the French Academy in Rome, succeeding Frédéric Mitterrand.
ÃÂric de Chassey was born in 1965 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
He studied at the ÃÂcole normale supérieure (Ulm â 1986, philosophy major) and Sciences Po in Paris.
He holds an art history Ph.D (1994) from Sorbonne University, under the supervision of Pr. Bruno Foucart, and an Habilitation ÃÂ diriger des recherches (1998), under the supervision of Pr. Serge Lemoine.
During the academic year 1989âÂÂ1990, he was a French lecturer at Yale University.
From 1992 to 1996, he was Teaching Assistant in Modern and Contemporary History of Art at Sorbonne University.
In 1996, he was elected Assistant Professor of Contemporary Art History at Sorbonne University.
In 1999, at the age of 33, he was elected full chair Professor of Modern and Contemporary History of the Arts at Université François-Rabelais in Tours (1999-2012). There, in 2008, he created the InTRu interdisciplinary Resarch Laboratory (Interactions, transferts et ruptures artistiques et culturels, EA 6301).
From 2004 to 2009, he was a fellow of the Institut Universitaire de France.
In 2012, he was elected full chair professor of Modern and Contemporary Art History at the ÃÂcole normale supérieure in Lyon, France.
In 2009 he was appointed director of the French Academy in Rome - Villa Medici, where he served two terms, until 2015.
He initiated important restoration programs of the Villa, its interior and garden (with a special focus on the co-presence of the late Mannerist decorations and 20th century interventions by Balthus), enriched the collection with major acquisitions of works from the Renaissance (Jacopo Zucchi) and today (Claudio Parmiggiani), organized and curated a residency program for artists from all fields and origins, as well as exhibitions, concerts, cinema and literature programs, and conferences and lectures in art history and philosophy.
In particular, he initiated 3 yearly festivals of classical music (Autunno in musica), contemporary classical (Controtempo), and pop, rock, electro (Villa Aperta), as well as 3 yearly festivals of cinema dedicated to documentary films from the global South (CineMondo), restored films (Re/visioni), and surveys of the cinematography of an Italian or French actor or actress (Cinema all'aperto): these festivals, variously addressed to the specialists and/or the general public received a wide public and critical success.
His leadership of Villa Medici made the board of this public entity award him the title of Honorary Director in 2016.
In 2016, he was appointed director of the French National Institute of Art History (INHA), in Paris, a government sponsored organization which leads innovative research programs in the discipline, maintains and enriches the largest art library in the world, and furthers the dissemination of art history for the general public.
Under his leadership, the institute has added to its previous fields of research several programs on provenance (with focuses on the art market in France during German occupation and on African objects in French public collections), material culture (with collaborations between art historians and conservation specialists, on chemical colors in 19th and 20th century France or the use of gold in European paintings of the 17th century), new subjects (choreographic notation from the 16th century to now), and extra-occidental art histories (Islamic and African arts).
Its library has expanded its special collections with gifts and sponsored acquisitions of prints by non-French artists (German expressionists, Ellsworth Kelly, Thomas Schütte, Vera Molnár, Takesada Matsutani, Luc Tuymans, etc.) as well as major archives of art historians and dealers (Henri Focillon, Guy Loudmer and Alphonse Bellier, Galerie Jean Fournier, etc.), and opened its new reading room in the Salle Labrouste, which now welcomes more than 400 readers a day (MA and PhD students, art historians and professionals from the art world).
ÃÂric de Chassey has thoroughly increased the reach-out programs of INHA, launching podcasts and a YouTube channel which features the entirety of the seminars, lectures and conferences of the institute, creating collections of books (âÂÂDitsâ and âÂÂInéditsâÂÂ), widening the attractiveness of the Festival of Art History (a yearly manifestation operated jointly with the Palace of Fontainebleau) and creating tools for teaching art history in primary and secondary schools (distributed in the whole country by the French department of Education).
He has served on the administrative boards of the Institut national du patrimoine, Paris (since 2017), Fondation Angladon-Dubrujeaud, Avignon (since 2022), ÃÂcole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Lyon (2011-2017), and ÃÂtablissement public du Grand Palais (2007-2010), and has been a member of the scientific committees of various French public institutions, such as Bibliothèque nationale de France (2016-2019), ÃÂcole nationale des Chartes (since 2017), Musée du Louvre (since 2017), Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac (since 2017), Centre Pompidou (since 2020), Monnaie de Paris (since 2022), Centre de Création Contemporaine - Olivier Debré de Tours (since 2022), and Musée des arts décoratifs (since 2023).
In 2022, he was elected chair of the international network of Research Institutes in Art History (RIHA) and, since 2021, has chaired the editorial board of the international project âÂÂThe Visual Arts in Europe: An Open Historyâ (EVA), a project that he initiated in 2019 and that gathers 46 research institutes in art history and museums representing the 46 countries of the European Council.
ÃÂric de Chassey frequently intervenes in public debates related to arts and culture, notably on public policies in the realm of culture, on the social and political necessity of art history for democratic societies, on repatriations and restitutions.
While in high school, Eric de Chassey produced and hosted two weekly radio programs on New Wave and PostPunk: âÂÂYoung and Hipâ (1981-1982) and âÂÂMethods of Tranceâ (1982-1983) on independent radio station Ciel FM, in Lyon.
Between 1998 and 2001, he was âÂÂacademic counselorâ for Kung Fu Fighting Recordings, an independent music label founded by Daniel Dauxerre, where he curated the compilation Social Bodies (1999), commissioning tracks by acts such as Tommy Hools, Tahiti 80, Stereolab, Arab Strap, and Dominique A.
In 2014, during his concert on the Piazzale of Villa Medici, the French singer Christophe opened a song with the words: âÂÂPetit hommage àmon Italien préféré. JâÂÂallais dire ÃÂric de Chassey mais câÂÂétait gonflé. Non, parce que câÂÂest vrai, Enzo Ferrari, ÃÂric de Chassey, câÂÂest quand même des gens qui comptent pour moi. û
In 2019, he wrote the liner notes for French composer of contemporary classical music Raphaël CendoâÂÂs record Corps, published by LâÂÂEmpreinte digitale.
In 2023, he commented a selection of tracks that appeared in the early 1980s on the independent eclectic record label Les Disques du Crepuscule.
As a scholar, he has worked extensively on the art of Henri Matisse, US and European art and transatlantic cultural relationships, abstraction in the 20th and 21st centuries, photography, the visual culture of the second half of the 20th century and its relations with music (Punk) and politics (May 68 and its aftermath), as well as general essays on the state of art history.
His essays, which also include incursions into the works of medieval manuscripts, Nicolas Poussin, Peter Saenredam, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, romantic and impressionist painting from the 19th century, have been published in numerous languages, in exhibition catalogs, periodicals and collective publications.
ÃÂric de Chassey has extensively published on the art of Henri Matisse:
His more than 50 sole-authored and edited books and exhibition catalogs include:
He has also curated over 45 exhibitions, almost always accompanied by publications, in France, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Italy, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United States. These exhibitions have focused on his main fields of expertise (20th and 21st century visual arts and visual culture), with a wide range of interests, exemplified by the immediate succession, at Villa Medici, of exhibitions dedicated to the visual culture of European Punk and PoussinâÂÂs works on the life of Moses.
Exhibitions he curated include: