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Broadly speaking, the situation that preceded ours can be summed up as follows: formed by tradition artists worked for a rich or fairly rich clientele, or for the State who commissioned them; their works were periodically made the object of official exhibitions (salons presided over by a committee or inspired by amateurs or connoisseurs), or in the form of private shows, both indeed appealing to the same “élite”—on whom Proust has left us some exemplary pages. The rest of the public was composed for the most part of people who had no access to art, who never entered a museum or a gallery, much less a salon, still less the studio of an artist; in short, for whom art had no existence except some names—Rembrandt, Raphael, Michelangelo—who remained names. Between the “élite” and the no-man's-land, a “fringe” public, made up of those who wanted to have, for reasons of taste, of curiosity, or for other motives, an initiation to art, to have some idea of it, and who went periodically to museums, to exhibitions, or who gathered information by reading. It is noteworthy that school hardly played any part: artistic teaching being most often reduced to “drawing lessons” where one learnt to copy Egyptian or Roman plaster casts, engravings, pictures, in short, to copy a design. As for books, they became confused with the same grisaille of printing and line-drawings, which, indeed, reappeared in the windows of bookshops and even in the town…
1 The italics are mine. It is necessary to specify that I bear no personal grudge against the author of these lines. It is the fashion of judging which this text demonstrates that I dispute, an attitude that one finds commonly in many histories of art.
2 Very numerous, the galleries can be distinguished diagramatically between:
(1) The "resale galleries" that, with differing worth, concentrate on the sale of known works, old and new.
(2) The "garage-galleries", according to the expression of Raymonde Moulin, who rent their walls, sometimes very expensively, to artists wishing to show, and who are too often managed by profiteers.
(3) The "pilot-galleries", as I suggested they should be called at the time of creation in 1963 at Lausanne of the "First International Salon of Pilot Galleries."
3 It would be appropriate to study this problem to see the connection between the socio-economic-aesthetic enterprise like the art gallery and the means of information, official, semi-official and private, the result being that however uncertain or disturbing a work of art may be, it cannot be confused with a commercialised product even in the most expensive salerooms.
4 It behaves students to study just this stage, provided that they have first of all learnt that the problem poses itself, and how and where it poses itself.
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