“THE SALE OF THE CENTURY”

The auction began as scheduled on April 7, 2003. It did not, however, begin quietly. Protestors gathered at the entrance to l'Hôtel Drouot and denounced those who arrived to participate in the sale. Organized by the Comité Breton, a group of intellectuals dedicated to having Breton's collection preserved, those gathered outside grieved for what they considered to be the defeat of art at the hands of commerce. One protestor went so far as to dramatically affirm, “The clouds are in mourning. They weep for the desiccation of the soul.”⁵

Inside the auction house, as the first lot was put on the block, a stink bomb was set off and fake bank notes, imprinted with the likeness of Breton and read, “Your money stinks up the corpse of a poet you never dared to become,” were hurled into the air.⁶ With just a few dozen participants, however, the protest was largely symbolic and did little to interrupt the proceedings.⁷

The sale itself was not without its own set of skirmishes. The battle between private and public interests was fierce; and the tone was set early on when private collector Jean-Claude Vrain, who would eventually win more than 200 lots, successfully bid on a copy of Qu'est-ce que c'est le surrealisme? (1934) for €286,000, paying twice its estimated price.⁸

A few days later, another collector pushed the price on a first-edition copy of the surrealist manifesto up to €10,000 doubling his own bid of €5,000 to gauge the city of Nantes. Earlier in the week, Nantes published a wish list of sorts, naming the items it would seek to preempt during the auction and hoping that, given the public demand for the conservation of the collection, private bidders would respect its interest as a public institution.⁹ City officials clearly failed to consider the animosity that many private collectors were feeling toward the state, and as a result were driven to pay six times what they expected to shell out for the coveted manifesto.¹⁰ Vrain, who would ultimately lose more than 100 lots to the right of preemption, spoke for many of the collectors in the room when he cried out, “The institutions are pissing us off!”¹¹ And when a Victor Brauner portrait (see Figure 1) of Breton was preempted after a heated bidding war, which pushed its estimated price of €50,000 up to €180,000, a furious bidder exclaimed, “To hell with the museums!”¹² This rivalry between private and public, characterized by one observer as “open war,” served to drive the value of individual items well beyond their estimated worth.¹³ At €46,028,790, the final tally was 50% more than the anticipated €30 million.¹⁴

Despite the soaring prices, the state nevertheless acquired three of the four most expensive lots: Jean Arp's Femme, Picabia's Les Amoureux, and Man Ray's Dancer/Danger (see Figure 2). The first, at€2.5 million, established a new record for Arp, “pulverising” his previous records at auction.¹⁵

Although certain preemptions garnered applause from the audience, some bidders expressed their approval at having several of the more significant items preserved by public institutions; the preemption of this last item caused many to cry out in protest. The exorbitant sum to be paid proved to be too much for the French tax payers in the room, one of whom shouted out, “They're going to pay for this with our taxes! And even worse, when we want to see it we'll have to pay for admission!”¹⁶ This private collector highlights the irony of public ownership, a system in which the collective citizenry must pay an admission price to gain access to a museum's collection despite the fact that this same citizenry is the de facto proprietor of said museum. In addition to the new record set by the sale of Arp's Femme, several other records were set as well. These included individual records for the photographers Hans Bellmer and Raoul Ubac, as well as a record for the highest price paid for a surrealist text, the manuscript of Arcane 17 selling for €836,510. This last item, one of the most sought after lots in the auction, was once again secured by Vrain and preempted by the state.

Although records for original manuscripts were to be expected, the value of similar items having been long-since established, the generous sums paid for lesser-known works permanently altered the market value and cultural worth of several artists. The shaping of collective cultural memory is in large part the product of collective estimations of value. As a result, certain artists enter the ranks of posterity, whereas others do not; and the criteria for admission are often founded in the market. Consequently, a painting by Joan Miro might sell very well at auction, whereas a comparable work by a fellow surrealist artist will go largely unnoticed. The former gains institutional authority, is curated by museums, and becomes a part of the cultural vernacular; the latter does not. The Breton auction did much to turn the surrealist order of things on its head. Miro sold for an expected €2 million, but lesser-known artists such as photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo defied all expectations in fetching prices 5 and 10 times their estimated value.¹⁷

Marcel Fleiss, an expert in surrealist art and the presiding authority over the fine art sessions of the sale, expressed his satisfaction at having finally witnessed the works of lesser-known artists enter the art historical canon: “In fifteen days, we have succeeded in what I have struggled to do for thirty years.”¹⁸ In other words, exorbitant bid prices at auction were able to transform the standard of collective valuation, reshuffling the pantheon of surrealism.

Lesser-known artists were not the only surprise bids of the sale. Seemingly random and mundane objects also fetched prices much higher than anyone could have predicted. A root in the shape of a flower, once photographed by Raoul Ubac, went for €140,000,¹⁹

whereas Breton's waffle-iron fetched €350 and a basket of pebbles €400.²⁰ Similarly, a set of photo booth prints of Breton and the early surrealist gang sold for €10,000, more than 20 times its estimate.²¹

In her study of museums and objects, Susan Pearce theorizes how such artifacts are valued and offers some critical insight into the unexpected bidding wars that erupted over such items as pebbles and paperweights. Pearce first argues that the significance of historical material objects is founded on a sense of our own mortality, stating, “Objects, we have noted, have lives which, though finite, can be very much longer than our own. They alone have the power, in some sense, to carry the past into the present by virtue of their ‘real’ relationship to past events.”²²

She then goes on to elaborate on this process of valorization, maintaining that the value ascribed to historical artifacts is twofold: it is both metonymic in that it bears a direct and real relationship to the past and symbolic because this relationship is continuously rewritten over time.²³ In a summary of this theoretical argument, she writes, “It is the ability of objects to be simultaneously signs and symbols, to carry a true part of the past into the present, but also to bear perpetual symbolic reinterpretation, which is the essence of their peculiar and ambiguous power.”²⁴ A waffle-iron, as a Breton waffle-iron, is therefore valued for its authentic metonymic relationship to the history of surrealism. Granted, other items on the block bore a more obviously significant relationship to this history and the differential in prices paid reflects a sliding scale of historical significance. A root in the shape of a flower, carrying the inscription, “Magic of the Medusa, budding root,”²⁵ and once photographed by Raoul Ubac for the Dictionnaire Abrégé de Surréalisme, fetched €140,000, whereas the basket of pebbles sold for a mere €350. The value of the former is in its direct relationship to what was deemed an historical event: The publication of a surrealist text, although the significance of the latter is several times removed, its value founded on its tangential relationship to this history. Consequently, the one is valued dearly, whereas the other is sold for much less.

That said, the basket of pebbles enjoys an everyday quality that the root does not; and although the bid price certainly privileges the singular event of the Ubac photograph and its subsequent publication, there is nonetheless a healthy market in the acquisition of the commonplace. Such items are routinely referred to as souvenirs: material remembrances of the ephemeral everyday.

Echoing Pearce's argument about the material object's authentic relationship to the past, Cynthia Wall, in her study of the eighteenth-century auction, characterizes the desire to acquire such items as a longing to insert oneself into the past as the souvenir “combin[es] the ‘authentic’ allure of the past with the possibility of remaking it into personal experience.”²⁶

The tangible historical remnant allows a material purchase on the past. In a similar sense, the souvenir—in this particular case a waffle-iron or paperweight—serves not only as a link to the history of surrealism and twentieth-century art but also to the auction itself. Having been dubbed the sale of century before it even opened, bidders must certainly have been aware that they were participating in what was to become an historical event in its own right. Of no interest to public institutions, such objects were removed permanently from the market and transferred to the realm of individual memory.

Buyers keen to acquire an individual purchase on collective memory were not the only participants invested in the acquisition of a material link to the history of surrealism. The thousands of visitors who flocked to the display rooms also sought out an authentic experience of the past. One reporter observed that the bond between Breton and the exhibit's visitors was immediate, affected by the presence of his material objects, “The visitors could not stop themselves from gasping before the display cases. They were discovering André Breton, they were in his home, with him. Each object established a dialogue with the poet.”²⁷

Vrain further testified to the immediate presence of the past when he described his tour of the exhibition rooms, “I found myself confronted with an extraordinary sale—the likes of which I may never see again. In looking at the works, I had the impression that surrealism was being reborn before my very eyes.”²⁸ These reactions beg the question of whether or not a similar experience would have taken place should the collection have found its way into a museum. Perhaps it was the imminent dispersion of the collection that made for such a forceful impression, the highly contested last moments of its collective existence leaving a far more evocative imprint on the collective consciousness than would an eternal showcase in the rarefied air of the white cube.

DECIDING THE FATE OF A PRINCELY COLLECTION

The fate of Breton's collection, as an article published in l'Express in February of 2002 explains, was almost 40 years in the making.²⁹

Having died in 1966, his apartment and the contents therein were left to his wife Elisa and daughter Aube. Almost immediately, the two began lobbying the French government to have Breton's collection protected as patrimonial legacy. These requests, however, were largely ignored. In 1982, l'Association Actual was formed by a group of surviving surrealists, once again in the hope of convincing the state to acquire Breton's collection.³⁰ More successful than the singular efforts of Elisa, the group did succeed in persuading both the Minister of Culture, Jack Lang, and President François Mitterand to visit the apartment in the late 1980s. Although Mitterand expressed lukewarm appreciation for the collection, Lang, on exiting the two-room flat, enthusiastically declared, “Everything here must remain a part of our patrimony!”³¹ Exuberant declarations notwithstanding, however, neither followed up the visit with a course of political action.

The lack of state assistance might have been caused by the fact that the solution requested by l'Association Actual was hardly realistic. Having the collection moved or broken up in any way was at the time out of the question. Regarded as a work of art in its own right, the collection's worth as a collection far exceeded the sum of its parts: “Breton's apartment was a work of art in and of itself, whose value lay in its unexpected juxtapositions, its ingenious disorder, and in its unique spirit.”³²

With the home-turned-museum of Victor Hugo in mind, Actual wanted Breton's two-room flat to be converted into a museum itself. But with visitor-capacity strictly limited to two persons at a time, the financial cost of maintaining such a site was unfeasible.³³

Although the state continued to dismiss the requests of Breton's surviving family and friends, a number of private offers were made on the collection. Daniel Filipacchi, owner of Paris Match and a celebrated collector of surrealist art, proposed to create a museum for the collection in a downtown Parisian hotel. Despite interest on the part of Elisa and Aube, however, the project was abandoned because of impossible start-up costs.³⁴

Back on the market, the collection was then bid on by François Pinault. But Pinault, known primarily as the owner of the Printemps department store, was also the proprietor of Christie's. Fearing that her deceased husband's effects might be auctioned off outside of France, Elisa refused the offer.³⁵ Repeated offers from the University of Texas at Austin were declined for the same reason, Elisa loath to witness the recreation of her home on the American campus quad.³⁶

As the years wore on, a desirable solution became less and less likely. In a letter intended for publication in Le Monde, Aube explained her decision to sell the collection at auction. After Elisa's death in 2000, financial constraints forced Aube to decide on a definitive course of action. Death duties on the princely collection, 60% of half, far exceeded her monetary means. As a consequence, Elisa brokered an agreement with the state whereby she would donate an entire wall of her father's study in lieu of inheritance tax.³⁷

Meticulously recreated at the Centre Pompidou, the wall included works by Picabia, Duchamp, Miro, and Arp as well as found objects and tribal masks. Once the taxes had been taken care of, however, there remained the question of rent on her father's apartment. Although she managed to maintain the lease on the flat, despite the landlord's determination to have the property vacated and leased to another resident, she was nonetheless responsible for paying the rent. Finally, pleading exhaustion—the endless work involved in fielding researcher's requests, bypassing legal loopholes to maintain her deceased step-mother's lease on the apartment, and sorting through solicitations from various museums mounting Surrealist exhibitions—Aube decided to dispense with the collection altogether. She commissioned the help of auctioneers Calmels and Cohen to catalog the contents of Breton's apartment. which occupied the better part of 2 years and ultimately culminated in the April sale at Drouot.

GOING PUBLIC

Following the announcement in late December of 2002 that the collection would be sold at Drouot, media coverage of the event grew exponentially as the April 7 start date drew near. Le Monde, Libération, and le Figaro carried articles on a weekly basis through the winter and by mid-March were daily updating their readers on the various efforts to have the sale suspended. Le Nouvel Observateur and L'Express, as well as multiple international newspapers, also carried stories over the course of these several months: reproducing petitions to the minister of culture, providing in-depth descriptions of the lots to be sold, and discussing the cultural legacy of surrealism. For many the historical significance of the surrealist movement, as an anti-institutional and anticommercial entity, was in danger of being manipulated by the international art market. In an article published in Le Monde, writer Yves Bonnefoy denounced the auction as the commercialization of collective memory, writing, “That which commercial speculation desires most is to reduce to a mere memory all that is loving and free.”³⁸

For Bonnefoy, the sale and dispersion of Breton's collection was tantamount to the destruction of the artistic and social ideals that the surrealist movement put forth. A similar sentiment was expressed in Libération, in an open letter addressed to the minister of culture, which highlighted the ironic possibility of having the market appropriate for its own ends the rebellious spirit of surrealism: “With a secrete hate, you track down the hidden traces of a century that is mine—a century of rebellion, tragedy, and freedom. And you have done so as though you believed it possible to reduce all of this to the curiosities of a shop-window.”³⁹ For almost 40 years the contents of the apartment at 42 rue Fontaine quietly bided their time, the history of surrealism relegated to the pages of art history textbooks. But for 4 months these objects enjoyed center stage in a nation-wide public debate about the meaning of national identity and the social function of collective memory.

Many of these articles, written equally by staff writers and prominent intellectuals, stressed the importance of maintaining the collection as an integral part of French collective memory. François Bon, a French writer and one of three founders of the Comité Breton, established to create an online petition to have the auction dismantled,⁴⁰

emphasized the importance of the surrealist legacy not only for contemporary France, but for generations to come, writing, “We are depriving our country of an essential piece of its memory, or rather that which will become so for future generations.”⁴¹ In calling attention to future generations, Bon was drawing on the rich tradition of patrimonial conservation in France.

It was this sensibility to which the city councillors of Paris appealed when they addressed themselves to President Jacques Chirac. Having unanimously passed a resolution on February, 25, 2003, to do everything in its power to prevent any portion of the Breton collection from leaving France, the council members called on the federal government to intervene:

Echoing Bon's commentary on the need for subsequent generations to have access to the collection, the city council petition maintains that the works ought to remain public. If the works were to fall into the hands of a private collector, French national culture would somehow be diminished. The state, however, failed to reply to these requests. The collection was not declared a national treasure and the auction lots were not forbidden to leave the country. The only point on which the state did comply was an agreement to acquire works through the right of preemption on behalf of the city.

At a more local level, the council of the ninth arrondissement, the area of Paris where Breton's apartment was located, made it a first order of business to petition the government to have the apartment declared a national treasure. To be sure, financial interests were a concern. The establishment of a Breton museum in the neighborhood would have generated local commercial development. Moreover, the development of an upscale establishment, such as a museum, promised to encourage the development of more profitable businesses in the area.⁴³

But the minutes of the council meeting, in which the issue was discussed, reveal that the preservation of cultural property, regardless of financial benefit, would be the concern of the council members should the state choose to shirk its responsibility. In a letter addressed to both the minister of culture and the City Council of Paris, the elected representatives of the ninth arrondissement declared that the Breton collection should be preserved as an essential piece of French cultural heritage:

The Breton collection was valued not only as a part of French artistic history, but more importantly, as the tangible remains of a movement whose influence extended well beyond French borders.

THE POLITICS OF PATRIMONY

In her book, Patrimoine et musées, Dominique Poulot charts the history of French patrimony. She begins with a definition: “Roman law, which has formed a part of western consciousness, understands patrimony to be that group of family possessions considered not for their monetary value, but rather as goods to be passed down.”⁴⁵

The notion of inheritance as an absolute value divorced from the market lies at the heart of patrimonial conservation. Therefore, when Bon and others like him spoke out against the sale, they were expressing their sense of entitlement as the rightful inheritors of French cultural production. Elsewhere, Poulot expands on the above definition, making the leap from familial genealogy to national identity:

As the product of intellectual conceptualization and state approval, patrimony is therefore contingent on a sophisticated set of political interests: decisions about how the past should be publicly represented; imperialist activities, and the manifold ways in which local, national; and individual identities are shaped by the relationship between state and citizen.

The interests of the state in regard to patrimony can be seen to change over time, because certain administrations have been more amenable to the preservation of cultural patrimony than others. At its inception in 1959, the ministry of culture was understood to be a state body responsible for the cultural edification of French citizens. André Malraux, when appointed as the inaugural Minister of Cultural Affairs, described the purpose of this office as being that of guardian not only to French civilization but to all of humanity:

There is a distinct tension between elitism and egalitarian accessibility at work in Malraux's words. According to this model the state is responsible to the population for making qualitative judgements about what does and does not constitute cultural patrimony as well as for providing widespread access to the works that do qualify so that they might inform public taste.

Although adopted by Malraux's successors for more than twenty years, this policy was altered in 1981 when Jack Lang was appointed as minister of culture. Under Lang's administration, the role of the state was reworked so that it was no longer the paternalistic guardian and primary instigator of conservation projects. Instead, the state was presented as a facilitator, responding to the needs of the people. In a public address on his nomination, Lang redescribed the purpose of the minister of culture: “The mission of the ministry is to preserve the cultural patrimony of national, regional, and various social interests. It is to do so for the common benefit of the entire collective.”⁴⁸

The focus shifted from an active and somewhat elitist role on the part of the state, determining the interests of its citizenry by effecting decisions of judgement for them, to a passive role in which social groups—significantly no longer limited to the national scale—have been given the authority to decide on their own what ought to be remembered and what ought to be forgotten. This liberal definition of the ministry's function led to what some have characterized as the rampant patrimonialization projects of the 1980s.⁴⁹

With a move toward the right in 1993, after a shift in the political majority, this liberal impulse was checked by a more conservative set of cultural policies.⁵⁰

With a restated mission, strikingly reminiscent of that of 1959, the ministry of culture once again presented a view of cultural policy that was founded on a top-down model, in which the state would act as caretaker and the citizen as passive recipient:

Curiously, the only differences in this address from that of Malraux's, involve the scope of the ministry's project. The mission statement of 1959 stated that patrimonial works would be preserved for the benefit of French citizens. The most recent statement, however, has dropped the particular emphasis on the French, imagining a potentially unlimited global audience. In his study of the history of patrimony in France, Jean-Michel Leniaud interprets this recent shift toward vague and all-inclusive phrasing as an indication that France has taken it on itself to act as the display case for a global patrimony.⁵²

This preoccupation with the preservation of global patrimony, however, is not peculiar to recent decades. On the contrary, this sentiment can be traced back to the French Revolution and the reasons used to justify the looting of Italian collections. Referring to the great works of Italian artists, an officer of the French liberation army maintained that time had acted as a temporary caretaker of these masterpieces so that the French might ultimately become their eternal guardian: “It is for us that time has respected these splendours—do not doubt it. There is no one but us who can appreciate them and we will build temples worthy of them and their illustrious authors.”⁵³

France was to be both liberator and curator, freeing the peoples of Europe while simultaneously establishing itself as the center of what was to be a new and democratic empire.

Likewise, the political significance of ensuring public access to cultural patrimony was established during the French Revolution with the establishment of the Musée du Louvre. As a former palace transformed into a public institution and open to all French citizens, the Louvre became a symbolic monument to the new republican state. Indeed, the inscription at the entrance to the Louvre's Apollo Gallery, Louis XIV's custom-built reception hall, functioned as a permanent reminder of the fall of the Old Regime and of the democratic promises of the new order: “The Louvre Museum, opened the 10^th of August, 1793, by execution of a decree handed down by the national convention.”⁵⁴

A gift bestowed on the citizenry by the newly formed government, anyone was free to enter and behold the crowns of former kings now displayed as public property.⁵⁵ Equality of access reaffirmed the equality of French citizens, and it was precisely this equality that many felt was threatened by the sale of Breton's collection. The state's refusal to safeguard the collection and have it permanently housed within the walls of a public institution was tantamount to an endorsement of differential access to public goods. In an interview with the Montreal daily, Le Devoir, Laurent Margantin, a founding member of the Comité Breton, emphasized the historical role of the state as guarantor of free and equal access to artistic works: “Allowing works of art to circulate and to go to those who want them, most often means allowing them to go to the richest and the most privileged. It means leaving all room to manoeuvre, all decisions pertaining to artistic creation, in the hands of the art market.”⁵⁶ In this statement Margantin was calling on a longstanding French tradition in which the state functioned as both patron of the arts and paternal safeguard, ensuring that all citizens be granted the right to enjoy their collective artistic heritage. Accordingly, the state's failure to intervene in the Breton sale was considered an affront to the republican function of the museum as democratic institution.

The relationship between republican ideals and public museums forms the basis for Dominique Poulot's Patrimoine et musées, in which she reiterates the central significance of the museum to the revolutionary republic's democratic ideals: “Republican history, militant and commemorative, has always been interested in conferring upon the museum the status of radical innovation. Open to and for the pleasure of the public, the museum marks a convenient rupture with the secret of the Old Regime's private collections.”⁵⁷

As a symbol for the state's investment in the public interest, the museum in France was conceived as a political institution. Monuments to national identity and a sense of collective pride, public holdings of artistic works reaffirmed the democratic and revolutionary ideals on which they were founded. In an impassioned article published in Libération, Philip Lanon calls on the democratic tradition of the museum to support conservation efforts:

For Lanon, nothing short of democratic liberty is at stake. There is a sense in which the collection belongs to the public; as part of French history it cannot be secreted away into the rooms of a private collector. Making reference to the status of the museum as an arbiter of taste and cultural educator, Lanon also argues that to remove Breton's collection from the public arena is to diminish French culture, to sacrifice democratic ideals to the vulgar mechanics of utilitarian governance.

Alternatively, many accusations levelled at the French government focused less on the positive function of cultural conservation in relation to democratic freedoms and more on the negative influence of the market. In an open letter published in Libération, an indignant reader expressed his disdain for the state's failure to act, maintaining that the sale at auction of Breton's collection was “emblematic of a contemporary preoccupation with profit and of the cultural apathy of the state.”⁵⁹

This suspicion that the overriding principle behind the state's position involved commercial interests was reiterated in the André Breton Vigilance Committee's letter to President Chirac:

Signed by, Jacques Derrida and Alain Jouffroy among other notables, this exhortation directed at the state both calls on the historical legacy of revolutionary ideals and a more contemporary concern that the dictates of the international market are overriding the cultural interests of individual nation states.

“IT IS NOT FOR US TO MUMMIFY”

To reply to the accusations, Jean-Jacques Aillagon, the Minister of Culture, granted an interview to Le Monde shortly before the auction was slated to begin. This interview would prove to be the state's sole public response to its detractors. For the most part an evasive public relations operation, nevertheless the interview addressed the most pressing concerns of the public debate. Speaking to the cultural legacy of Breton and the place of surrealism within the scope of French collective memory, Aillagon firmly stated, “The sale will not dissolve the memory of André Breton. It will preserve it.”⁶¹

Indeed it is difficult to determine the extent to which Breton would have entered the popular vernacular had his collection not gone to auction. Aube herself understood the importance of the media as a tool for the transmission of her father's memory: “The media attention proves that André Breton is still alive. We have never talked about him or Surrealism as much as we do today.”⁶² Notwithstanding the efforts of l'Association Actual and the indignation of some 3,000 petitioners, Breton's apartment did go all but unnoticed for almost 40 years. It is entirely conceivable that had Aube wanted to dispense with the collection quietly, selling off pieces to private collectors, one manuscript at a time, she could have done so undetected by the press. To hold Aillagon and the Chirac administration singularly responsible for the dispersal of the collection seems altogether unwarranted given the historical lack of public interest.

When asked about the status of Breton's apartment as a lieu de mémoire, a site of collective memory or living history, Aillagon first responds with reference to similar projects, citing the Bourdelle and Zadkine museums and Victor Hugo's home at Guernesey, which had been founded at the behest and expense of surviving family members and not the state. Real estate prices in Paris being what they are, the homes of the culturally significant are rarely preserved as museums.⁶³

Further dispensing with the suggestion that the Breton apartment be converted into a museum, Aillagon states that preservation for preservation's sake often culminates in a mixed bag of results: “Success isn't always contingent upon creating a fixed location, particularly when a group of works must be transplanted into a new space. Despite the talent of Renzo Piano, the Brancusi studio remains an ambiguous ‘cultural object.’ Sites of remembrance too often become sites of forgetting.”⁶⁴ Aillagon has a point in that a recreation of Breton's apartment, much like the mock-up of the Brancusi studio, would have been a specious monument. In the recreation of Brancusi's studio, meticulously reconstructed in the mid-1990s at the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris, a personal connection with the artist was erased. The auratic quality of immediate and mundane objects, haphazardly discarded sculpting tools, was erased by the plasticity of inauthentic reproduction. Without the objects as Brancusi had used them, his presence was written out of the site. Likewise, had Breton's apartment been recreated elsewhere, his auratic remainder would have similarly vanished. Memory would have turned to forgetting as the immediate was transformed by the fixed documentation of the historian's hand.

Aillagon argues that the precision involved in the detailed reconstruction of an affective locale is such that the element of chance, essential to the experience of the everyday, is necessarily removed. It is the mess and the indeterminacy of the mundane that holds sway over collective memory. Precision belongs to the realm of antiquarian history; and properly speaking a reconstituted site would no longer be a lieu de mémoire, but rather an historical representation. In a discussion of the differences between the two, French historian Pierre Nora writes, “Memory is a perpetually actual phenomenon, a bond tying us to the eternal present; history is a representation of the past.”⁶⁵

The Brancusi studio to which Aillagon refers is a failure in that it does not accept its true identity. Passed off as a site of collective affect, it is in fact a detached recreation of the same. Memory is immediate and present. The removal of Breton's collection and its subsequent representation elsewhere would not have been an effective means of preserving the collective memory of his relationship to surrealism. It would have been a sterile historical simulation.

Throughout the course of his interview, Aillagon, as the official curator of national patrimony, privileges a determined history over and above the inorganic preservation of memory. As a rejoinder to those efforts focused on the preservation of Breton's memory, he states, “In the end, time catches up with everything.”⁶⁶

No amount of collective lobbying or state intervention can prevent the demise of an historical movement. For Aillagon the natural cycle of artistic objects ought not be artificially prolonged: “It is not permitted for us to mummify them.”⁶⁷ Rather than retain entire collections simply for the sake of being comprehensive, Aillagon instead favors strategic selection. In an explanation of his own personal take on the function of museums, Aillagon emphasizes the didactic over conservation:

The purpose of conservation, according to Aillagon, is not so much the acquisition of works as it is the educational aspects of their presentation and installation.

Drawing on the same distinction, Nora elaborates on the differences between memory and history: “Memory takes root in the concrete, in spaces, gestures, images, and objects; history binds itself strictly to temporal continuities, to progressions and to relations between things. Memory is absolute, while history can only conceive the relative.”⁶⁹

Aillagon's museums and libraries would be more in line with this description of history, and the rhetoric surrounding the importance of Breton's collection would conform to Nora's definition of memory. Although several petitioners expressed concern about the pedagogical function of the collection, claiming its importance for future generations of artists, for the most part Breton's apartment was depicted as a national good in and of itself, as an absolute value. Its mere presence was enough to justify its existence. In a sense the conflict between the two sides can also be read as a conflict between the two contradictory efforts of Malraux's ministry. Although Aillagon's focus is fixed on the public, that of his detractors is fixed on Breton's collection itself. The latter would prefer to preserve the collection, even if it would mean compromising accessibility, for the collection's value is absolute; the former, however, is less interested in making judgements of taste than in honoring his responsibility to the public.

Yet the sale went ahead as scheduled and the state acquired 335 lots at auction, spending more than twice its annual acquisitions budget. Why would the state choose to part with €13 million at auction when they could have intervened at any point over the course of the last 40 years and acquired the collection in its entirety for what most likely would have been a fraction of the eventual cost? A possible explanation can be found in recent changes to French law governing the art market.

FRANCE AND THE INTERNATIONAL ART MARKET

The French auction market was historically run by state monopoly. In 1556 Henri II limited all auction sales to French nationals. Additionally, in the twentieth century it was established that auctioneers would be appointed by the Ministry of Justice and were furthermore obligated to obtain degrees in both law and art history.⁷⁰

But as the European market became more integrated, pressure from the European Union (EU) to have France dissolve its monopoly mounted. In addition to the weight of the European Union's demands, international auction stalwarts Christie's and Sotheby's were applying pressure in their own right.⁷¹ Although severely limited in their legal activities, both firms set up shop in Paris in the 1990s in an effort to forcibly open the French market. France stubbornly refused, maintaining its strict set of laws governing the sale of art objects and historical artifacts; and as a result the French art market suffered.⁷²

Meanwhile, Christie's and Sotheby's flourished. Since the 1960s the global auction market has been dominated by the two Anglo-Saxon titans. As late as the early 1950s, however, Paris was still on top with an equivalent share in the market.⁷³

The enormous gap created over the following decade has been attributed to the inflexible French monopoly system. Although it was forbidden for French auctioneers to seek or accept outside capital, Sotheby's and Christie's were both permitted to build their empires with an unlimited pool of resources.⁷⁴ Moreover, the big two were able to infiltrate the American market, both establishing powerful offices in New York; Sotheby's eventually merged in 1964 with the prestigious American firm Parke-Bernet. In his history of the auction, Brian Learmount suggests that the determining factor of this meteoric rise to the top was a savvy understanding of the media:

French auction houses, on the contrary, were barred from employing the same techniques. So while Sotheby's mobilized massive financial capital to pull off newsworthy sales, French auctioneers were forced to make do with the means available to them, the law effectively preventing them “from doing anything except forming loose-knit associations; pooling lots to form larger, more attractive sales; and sharing certain advertising and administrative expenses.”⁷⁶

As a result, many French collectors bought and sold on foreign markets.

There were several distinct advantages to selling on a non-French market. For example, Christie's and Sotheby's were both permitted to guarantee a minimum price to clients, whereas French auctioneers were not. If the price was not met at auction, the item was returned to the client. No similar safeguard existed in France. Moreover, taxes on the sale of goods at auction in France were such that buyers preferred to purchase big-ticket items abroad. Of course, laws existed, and still do, to prevent the export of cultural goods from France, but the means for detection of such goods have been unreliable at best. The law states that all photographs, lithographies, maps, and drawings valued upwards of €15,000 and all paintings with a value of more than €150,000 must be examined by the state.⁷⁷

But the value is self-declared, so collectors could easily undervalue their items to avoid the suspicion of the authorities. This made it relatively effortless to have their goods exported for sale on more lucrative foreign markets.⁷⁸ In an analysis of the international art market and the exportation of patrimonial artifacts, economist Thomas Heskia offers the following simple formula: “The intensity of art export is thus to be seen positively dependent on the size of the national heritage and negatively on the national income.”⁷⁹ On both counts France was particularly susceptible to the illegal exportation of goods that would have ordinarily been protected under its cultural heritage laws.

All of this changed, however, when in July of 2000, after 10 years of lobbying the French government to have the monopoly law repealed, EU officials finally prevailed and the French auction market was made open to foreign competitors.⁸⁰

In addition, auctioneers were permitted to guarantee minimum sale prices, royalty taxes were capped at U.S. $13,500 for twentieth-century art, and the TVA tax (value-added tax) on imports was lowered considerably.⁸¹ This last measure would ensure that more cultural goods would circulate through the Parisian market, thus increasing the international reputation of its auction houses. Significantly, Aillagon was instrumental in having the TVA tax law altered. In an editorial assessment of the Breton sale published in the Drouot Annuaire of 2003, he reaffirms his commitment to further relax the laws governing the art market, stating that he would like to simplify and improve the system of export certificates as well as make changes to the TVA governing the importation of cultural and artistic goods.⁸² Aillagon's efforts to alter this 500-year-old legal apparatus seems to have paid off, because he observes that the Breton sale “mobilised professionals, collectors, and media throughout the entire world, putting Drouot and Paris at the center of the art market.”⁸³ Indeed, Drouot marked a 15% increase in profits for the 2003 fiscal year, despite what had been a difficult market in other sectors.

Therefore, it would seem that the state had a vested interest in having the Breton collection go to sale at auction. As the European Union was becoming more integrated economically, it was important for France to assert itself as a major player, establishing Paris as the capital of the European art market. After having played second fiddle to Sotheby's and Christie's for 50 years, the Breton sale was a golden opportunity for France to capitalize on its legal reforms and victoriously reenter the international art market. In what could have easily been a description of the Breton sale, Heskia lists the essential requirements for a successful art market:

The Breton sale easily satisfied all criteria: 4,100 lots were hammered down, more than €40 million changed hands, and several art market records were shattered. There were highly sought–after works from the likes of Man Ray, Jean Arp, and Joan Miro; 36 lots sold for more than €150,000 and 6 for more than €1 million; and the media coverage was both international and comprehensive. There could have been no doubt in anyone's mind that the Breton sale would catapult Paris back onto the international art market.

GLOBALIZATION AND THE NATION STATE

As pressures to integrate global economies mount, the possibility for nation states to govern their proper cultural patrimony with independent authority will increasingly be called into question. In an address to UNESCO not 2 months prior to the Breton sale, President Chirac emphasized the importance of maintaining cultural diversity amidst commercial assimilation and continued to advance his administration's proposal that the international community adopt measures designed to prevent cultural homogenization. Chirac then went on to describe the details of such an agreement: “It would state that cultural diversity belongs to the common heritage of humanity, that it is a right which each State can claim.”⁸⁵

Listing the rights and obligations of individual states in regards to the protection of this common heritage, Chirac places a special emphasis on the freedoms of the nation state, maintaining that it would remain the “states' right to support creation by affirmative policies, appropriate action and mechanisms of their choice.”⁸⁶ Taking on this international project, aimed at the protection of national heritage, France is once again positioning itself as an international arbiter of cultural heritage. Chirac's personal investment in the construction of the Musée du quai Branly, for example, devoted to the arts and civilizations of Africa, Asia, Oceania, and the Americas, might be read as an effort to once again locate France as the cradle of civilization.

Of course, all this suggests that the protection of the Breton collection might have been a priority for such an administration. But the financial stakes involved in the sale were simply too high. Maneuvering the complicated process of European economic integration, while simultaneously navigating an increasingly global market, requires compromise. The state did not acquire the entirety of the collection. It would seem, however, that the long-term financial benefits of having such a highly prized collection go to auction outweighed the state's responsibility to cultural patrimony. That said, the state did not absent itself entirely as many have maintained. With 335 preemptions, in addition to what the state had acquired from Elisa and Aube over the years, French public institutions are in possession of a significant portion of Breton's original collection. As Aillagon stated in his interview, it was the express interest of the state to acquire those works that would fulfil an historical and didactic function, such as works that would carry on the French tradition of fashioning citizens through the appreciation of cultural patrimony. It would seem, however, that it was also the express interest of the state to assert itself within the context of a newly emerging global economy as the world's foremost cultural authority. An open letter published in Libération offers a good summary of the multiple interests involved in the decision to allow the sale to go ahead as planned:

Those works essential to the national heritage would be preserved and those that were not would go out into the world as material symbols for the exceptional cultural sensibility of the French.

This view, as expressed by the anonymous writer, has much in common with that of Aillagon, who argues that cultural objects are to serve a pedagogical function rather than to be preserved for the sake of preservation. Once the didactic has been achieved, once the state has selected which strategic objects are necessary to its aims, the remainder is free to be exchanged on the market. Indeed, this point of view has much in common with that expressed by John Henry Merryman in a recent issue of the International Journal of Cultural Property. Arguing for what he terms “cultural property internationalism,” Merryman maintains that cultural patrimony should not be limited to the confines of national borders but understood as the legacy of all of humanity. He goes on to argue that “excessive regulation … violates rather than serves the international interest” because it “does not provide optimal conditions for the preservation of the cultural heritage of all mankind or its optimal distribution for access, study, and enjoyment.”⁸⁸

According to Merryman, it is up to the art market and licit trade in cultural goods to ensure international access, an argument with which the French state would seemingly agree. For both Merryman and Aillagon the use value of a collection is related to its accessibility; neither sees a worthwhile benefit in acquiring or maintaining collections that remain in storage or whose access is otherwise limited. Therefore, although it was important to Aillagon that certain strategic objects be acquired by the state, once this was done it was better that the remaining pieces of Breton's collection be spread throughout the world rather than hoarded by Parisian museums where they would be redundant if on display and pedagogically useless if stored behind the scenes.

This understanding, however, of the interplay between the preservation of national heritage and the art market, is largely contingent on the question of access. In the preceding statement, penned by our anonymous open-letter contributor, American school children have been imagined through the lens of a paternal cultural authority—one that in France has been traditionally linked to the state. But the belief that Breton's objects would eventually find their way into the sights of American school children is perhaps naïve; the more likely possibility is that such objects have become part of private collections. In this regard, it might be that both Aillagon, acting on behalf of the French state, and Merryman have confused access with exchange. As markets continue to integrate and international commerce develops standardised practices, the question remains: Will the French state be able to maintain its domestic position as the guardian of cultural heritage?