GRENOBLE.- Although the Maison Rouge closed its doors at the end of 2018, the Musée de Grenoble is holding an exhibition of the personal collection of its founder, Antoine de Galbert. He was born in the city which gave rise to his passion for art when he became a gallery owner, an activity he then swiftly abandoned to devote himself to forming his collection. Put together during the last 30 years of his life, it comes across today as one of the most unusual of private French collections. It is an implicit self-portrait of its author, for whom the art arena is above all one of freedom.

The exhibitions held in Lyon—Ainsi soit-il/So be it, Grenoble—Voyage dans ma tête/Journey in my Head, and Paris—Le mur/The Wall, gave people a chance to discover part of Antoine de Galbert’s collection, but the broad scope of Souvenirs de voyage/Travel Memories further reveals the collection’s coherence and wealth. Above all, it shows how a collection is more than an activity and a set of chosen artists: it is a particular reflection of a personality, a way of looking at the world, and also a philosophy, a sensibility and an existential quest. Antoine de Galbert was fond of saying, not without irony, that his “collection is an addiction”. Travel Memories, in any event, sheds light on the collection’s originality, which is very like its author, preferring the exploration of unknown territories to the art world’s best-known figures.

Like nothing less than an inner journey, in some twenty rooms Travel Memories retraces the collector’s elective affinities, his passion for contemporary art, and his liking of sidelines, art brut, and ethnography.

Paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, primitive art, and religious and popular objects are all on display in an intimate setting, where major figures of modern art like Schwitters, Ben, Boltanski, Laib and Fontana rub shoulders with younger generations (Cathryn Boch, Mathieu Briand, Steven Cohen, Hubert Duprat, Philippe Gronon, John Isaacs, Edward Lipski, Mari Katayama, Stéphane Thidet, and the like), along with other artists who are hard to pigeonhole (A.C.M., Aloïse Corbaz, Augustin Lesage, Willem Van Genk).

From the collector’s activity to the imagination of cities, from Anglo-Saxon and Belgian art scenes to Africa, from madness to the “body in pieces”, from zen to ecology, by way of a daydream about the cosmos and the “final journey”, like a “gentle and luxurious therapy”, to use his own words, Antoine de Galbert’s collection sheds light on his fondness for decompartmentalization, while at the same time reflecting his deepest obsessions. Running counter to an at times austere and clinical vision of contemporary art, this collection does not shrink from creating a dialogue between conceptual art and popular cultures, and between the advocates of art brut and emerging artists. By trying to get beyond restrictive theories and an art history that has been all mapped out, by doing away with boundaries and encouraging a mixture of genres, Antoine de Galbert likes blazing a trail well off the beaten track, reckoning that the age we are living in needs magic, mystery, simplicity and universality, more than ever.

General curator: Guy Tosatto, director of the Musée de Grenoble.

Curated by Sophie Bernard, the museum’s head curator in charge of its modern and contemporary collections.