The recent drama over the choice of a new director for Paris's Musée national d'art moderne, the main museum of the Pompidou Center, has given way to surprise. Last week, the rumor mill had the job going to Max Hollein, director of a collective organization of three Frankfurt museums, even as two other front-runners, Catherine Grenier (deputy director of the Pompidou Center) and Laurent Le Bon (director of the Pompidou Center outpost in Metz) were announcing their joint candidacy, arguing the benefits of a "collective approach," according to Le Monde. But on Friday Pompidou Center president Alain Seban and culture minister Aurélie Fillipetti announced that the post would go instead to Bernard Blistène, director of the Pompidou Center's department of cultural development. According to an article in Libération, which describes the selection process as a comedy of errors, Blistène was only considered at the last minute, after an emergency committee was put together. He will succeed Alfred Pacquement, who has led the museum since 2000.
While his name had not come up in media speculation, Blistène, known as a chaismatic and elegant figure in the French art world, is not an outsider by any means. Born in 1955, he joined the Pompidou Center in 1983 as a curator after studies at the Ecole du Louvre, and went on on to hold various positions at the museum.
In 1990, he became head of the Musées de Marseille, where he created that city's first contemporary art museum. Six years later, he returned to the Pompidou Center as deputy director. In 2002, he was named inspector general of artistic creation in the visual arts delegation of the culture ministry, with the specific task of developing the vacant spaces of the Palais de Tokyo, which was directed at the time by Jérôme Sans and Nicolas Bourriaud.
His accomplishments as curator include "The Museum That Didn't Exist" (2002), a solo show of Daniel Buren's work, which was co-curated by Alison Gingeras and Laurent Le Bon and shown at the contemporary art exhibition "La Force de l'Art" at the Grand Palais in 2006, and the 2007 show "A Theater Without Theater" with Yann Chateigné at Barcelona's contemporary art museum, where he explored the relationship between theater and visual arts.
Blistène also taught contemporary art from 1985 to 2005 at the Ecole du Louvre, where he was known for moving back and forth between visual arts and cinema. His father, Marcel Blistène, directed Edith Piaf and Simone Signoret on the screen before moving to television. Bernard Blistène frequently invoked Michelangelo Antonioni and has always been interested in dance, music, and theater.
In 2009, he created the first edition of the Nouveau Festival at the Pompidou Center, which brought new energy to the museum. Every year, for three weeks, the area in front of the museum and its interior spaces are the sites of temporary performances linked to a thematic exhibition. In addition to its multidisciplinary nature, the festival harkens back to the original intention of the Pompidou Center, which was conceived as an active and inventive location.
