French artist Claude Rétaud, who stood at the crossroads of painting and conceptual art, died on May 27 in a retired house in Boulogne-Billancourt, France, near Paris. He was 80 years old.
His daughter, Ninon Luto, said he had suffered from Alzheimer’s disease for about a year and a half, but the cause of death was unknown.
Mr. Luto, who spent most of his career in Paris, is better known in Europe than in the United States, as he does not speak English, travels very little, and his work was exhibited more often in Paris. Was being done.
He became famous in the 1970s for the paintings he called “Definition / Method”. This was actually a series of instructions for creating a painting. One of his signature “protocols” was to paint the canvas in the same color as the wall on which it hangs, as they are called. He didn’t do this himself. Rather, he asked the “person in charge” (art collector, museum representative, or independent curator) to produce the work according to his specifications.
These monochromatic works have connected him to both avant-garde artists like Kazimir Malevich and minimalists like Robert Ryman and Ad Reinhardt, but his artistic ideas are more philosophical than matter. It was a target, said Julie Mohangi, senior director of the Perotin Gallery in Paris, since 2010.
“Many artists of that era were working on conceptual art and radicality, but I have to say that Claude wasn’t part of any movement,” she said in an interview. “He knew what was happening to artists of this generation. He was friends with many of them, but he didn’t belong to any group.”
Mr. Luto’s terrible process of iconoclasm destruction represents a break from the past, overturning the basic notion that painters are painters. Instead of painting, he wrote the text. Still, his work was collaborative and potentially open-ended. His “protocol” could be painted and repainted as the person in charge deems appropriate. As a result, he said, “The painting will never be completed.”
“He made a huge contribution to the history of painting,” Morhange said. “He is one of the only artists who do not know what his work will look like in the future, and it will continue to be his work.”
Claude Robert Georges Rétaud was born on October 25, 1941 in Troyes-Moutier, France, to Lucien Rétaud and Beatrice (Carteau) Rétaud. His father was a real estate broker dealing with local agricultural real estate.
Trois Moutiers (name means “three houses”) was a very small town, and he quickly made it bigger. The nearest school is in the town of Saumur, about 25 miles away, where he boarded from the age of about eight until he graduated at the age of fifteen.
“He wasn’t very close to his parents because he didn’t live much with his parents,” his daughter said. “My grandparents also didn’t like what he did as an artist. They wanted him to have another kind of career.”
After graduating from elementary school, Luto attended Nantes’s Lycee, then moved to Bordeaux, where he attended Sciences Po Bordeaux, a political science institute. Ninon Luto said he had little interest in formal study and rarely attended classes, but graduated thanks to his classmate Annie Scanps. “She worked hard to get him to graduate,” Rutault said.
After graduating, the couple moved to Paris, where Scanps engaged in marketing and subsequent banking. They got married in April 1968.
By that time, Luto had already begun to work as an artist, creating mixed media paintings using acrylic paints and drawings incorporating cutouts from the Parisian evening newspaper Le Monde.
When they were waiting for the birth of their first child, Mr. Luto decided to renew their apartment. One afternoon, when he was painting in the kitchen, his paintbrush wiped out one of his canvases hanging on the wall. It may or may not have been a coincidence. (“He has never used the word’accident’,” said Ninon Luto.)
“He stopped for lunch and decided to come back and paint the whole picture,” said Natacha Polarert, a curator who had known Rutault for ten years. “That has become the basic protocol. The wall must be painted in the same color as the wall.”
That year, Luto unveiled his first protocol at his studio on Clavelle Street in Paris, drawing his first significant critical attention. Since then, the space has “became a legend for a generation of young French artists and curators,” Morhange said.
Achille, the son of the couple, was born in 1973. Due to an undefined birth defect, he never learned how to speak or walk. Rutault has become the main caretaker of his son, who works from home.
Staying home with his son limited the options for traveling for art events and opening, Ninon Luto said, but he didn’t consider this a problem. “He always said that it helped him work, think, and question the world,” she said. “He did everything he could to make his son happy, despite having a sad life.”
Most of Mr. Leto’s work was related to writing. Since 1973, he has written over 650 “dé-finition / méthodes” and published in two books. The first was published in 2000 and the second was published in 2016 with the most complete list.
“Claude called himself a painter,” Porat said. “Everyone else called him a conceptual artist. It’s true that he didn’t touch the paint or canvas, but instead he painted.”
Mr. Luto held three solo exhibitions at the Pompidou Center in Paris in 1992, 2002 and 2015, and one solo exhibition with Picasso’s paintings at the Picasso Museum in Paris as well. His work has been exhibited many times at other individual and group gallery shows.
In 2014, at the age of 73, he held his first solo exhibition in the United States at the Emmanuel Perrotin Gallery in New York. In 2020, he held a solo exhibition at the Pacific Design Center in Los Angeles.
His wife died four years ago, and her daughter said her death was a decisive factor in his health. He was depressed, she said, and found it difficult to focus. In 2020 he was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.
“She was the first person he presented his idea to. She was the first person to read back what he wrote before he presented it to others,” Ninon Rutault said. rice field. “She usually had the last word of the exhibition. If there was something she didn’t like, it was removed.”
The last exhibition of his work during his lifetime, “Claude Luto: Proposal to Peter Nadin, 1979.” Realized in 2022 “will be off this spring in Manhattan’s Lower East Side. It was held at the Paradise Gallery. It was the realization of a series of instructions he devised for the owner of a pseudonym gallery that had space on West Broadway in the late 1970s. For the show, Nadin chose to paint the spaces and canvases in flashy bright lemon yellow.
Rutault recently lived in Beaucresson near Paris after his son was moved to a home care facility near Paris. He spent his last days in a retirement home near his daughter’s family and asked him to stay there instead of going to the hospital.
In addition to his daughter and son, he is surviving by two grandchildren.
Rutault was convinced that Polarit would continue his work beyond himself.
“His greatest contribution was to create an unfinished work,” she said. “It was very generous. In that sense, not many artists accepted that their work would be permanently filled.”
