Dominique de Villepin: ‘Artists show the way, they ask the right questions’

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a former French prime minister, Dominique de Villepin lives in a fabulously appointed apartment on a smart street near the Place de l’Etoile in Paris. He moved here recently, but the walls are already covered with his considerable art collection. There are works by Anselm Kiefer in the hallway and the salon, and in his bedroom is a large white landscape by the Paris-based Spaniard Miquel Barceló. On another wall, an epic explosion of red: a reworking of Goya’s “Third of May” by the Chinese artist Yan Pei-Ming. On the bookshelves of his drawing room, masks and tribal figures from several continents have been placed with great consideration. Large windows overlook a generous strip of gardens, where de Villepin — at 69, fit and tanned — begins his early-morning jog.

De Villepin has had a long career in diplomacy and then politics, but never at the expense of his passions for art and literature. “These are the things that allow me to breathe,” he says. Literature also pervades his collecting: he owns inkwells used by Stéphane Mallarmé and Rainer Maria Rilke, and has portraits of Baudelaire by both Fantin-Latour and the Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin. So feted were his obsessions during his political career (minister of foreign affairs and then the interior, before being made prime minister under Jacques Chirac from 2005 to 2007), they were lampooned in a comic book called Quai d’Orsay (home of the French foreign office).

His biographer has spoken of finding him in his prime ministerial Matignon office at a time of crisis, deep in conversation with a Chilean poet. De Villepin has composed books of poetry himself; published an account of Napoleon’s 100 days a few years before he was appointed prime minister (when he promised, perhaps rashly, to implement reforms in the country’s employment structure); and even managed to write a book while in the Matignon. “It’s called The Insomnia Hotel. It’s about literature and painting,” he says.

Although de Villepin is still touring the world, dispensing strategic advice to governments, foundations and private companies, he is digging in deeper to the world he so loves. In 2020, he co-founded a gallery in Hong Kong with his son Arthur, which he describes as being “by collectors, for collectors”. Housed over three floors, it has the interior of an upscale French home. There, Arthur, who has lived in Hong Kong for 10 years, is introducing Asian collectors to painters including the American George Condo and the late Hans Hartung. “It opened in March,” says de Villepin, “just as Covid struck. But it’s been an interesting time for us. We offer a tailor-made service, so that didn’t stop. And now Hong Kong is reopening, there is a new enthusiasm and optimism.” The current exhibition is work by Marie de Villepin, his daughter, who also sings and acts; she is showing rhythmic abstract paintings inspired by the movements of birds.

De Villepin readily admits he felt constrained by political life. “If you want to do it as well as possible, you need discipline, you need a very tight schedule. Which gives you a very strong desire to transgress.” He tells me about a trip to Mexico City, where he slipped off to the Museum of Anthropology for an afternoon. (“It’s my oxygen.”) His mutual antipathy for the rather more technocratic Nicolas Sarkozy was well documented, though de Villepin says his rival has discovered a cultural life. “He’s been watching movies and reading books,” he says. Emmanuel Macron, meanwhile, “was full of ideas and projects at the beginning, but culture has not been a reference point for the last five years”.

When he was in government, de Villepin sought out the company of painters Pierre Soulages and Zao Wou-Ki instead. Both were part of the Paris School, a group of mostly immigrant artists that had sprung up after the second world war. “Artists show the way, they contradict the certitudes that we hold. They ask the right questions,” de Villepin says. “They show directions that can be taken by humanity.” He started collecting Zao in the 1980s — “a small watercolour” — and in the 1990s, the pair became friends.

They holidayed together in the south of France, painting en plein air. “I would be next to him, making awful things but trying to understand how he was reacting to what he was looking at,” says de Villepin, who has a large stash of his own work — figurative works in oil, watercolours and pastel — hidden away. In 2006, when Zao had hit an inspirational wall, de Villepin, then prime minister, invited him to La Lanterne, a hunting lodge in Versailles at the disposal of the French presidency. “I told him to bring his brushes, and as soon as he arrived he got to work.” A watercolour of pink roses, which hangs in de Villepin’s drawing room, is the first piece he produced there.

Now Kiefer is a great friend too, he says, as we look more closely at “La Couronne Noire”, a huge canvas from 2005 depicting a snow-covered ploughed field in which sits a chair laid with a bundle of kindling. Lines of poetry by Paul Celan are written across the dark grey sky. “We have a common interest in Rimbaud and Celan. We both believe in the importance of history and memory.” As foreign minister, de Villepin commissioned Kiefer to make a major work in the cellars of the Quai d’Orsay. “But I moved to the Ministry of the Interior two months later, so it never happened.”

De Villepin’s collecting is motivated by research and knowledge. “The key actors are the artists, and I like to get to know them,” he says. “That’s what I tell new collectors: don’t leave the responsibility for your choices to the market. A real collector will always find time for something they are really looking for, even when they are very rich, have big companies, have a lot of responsibility. And people who put work into storage, well that’s another thing.” For him, a painting has a sacred dimension that has nothing to do with the consumer world.

Exhibitions at the Villepin gallery in Hong Kong have included The Art of Hope, featuring those Paris School artists who turned their war-driven flights from persecution and deprivation into inspiration and ambition in the French capital. And war is also the focus of a lecture that de Villepin tours around the world. “It’s on Napoleon, I’ve given it many times,” he says. “In Russia, in Asia. And everyone likes it very much, but they never follow the lesson: that war is not the answer.” Indeed not. Art is.

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