Pierre Wat – Berthet-Aittouarès
Berthet-Aittouarès grants Carte blanche to Pierre Wat as part of the exhibition “The gallery is celebrating its 40th anniversary”, from May 29, 2026
Nearly 15 years ago, Michèle Aittouarès called me and said, “We don’t know each other, but we love the same things—we should work together.” She was right. The years that have passed have shown that what would become our plan—working together on the things we loved—was also a beautiful definition of friendship. The carte blanche that Michèle and Odile are offering me on the occasion of the gallery’s 40th anniversary is generous proof of this, and an opportunity for me to explain how, over all these years, I have followed in the footsteps of this shared taste: seeking in art the traces of our humanity.
By selecting from among the gallery’s artists, I am bringing to light a thread that runs from Tal Coat to Yann Bagot, from Hans Hartung to Antoine Schneck—that of artists capable of transforming the gesture into an embodied sign, one that tells us what Henri Michaux called “the adventure of being alive.”
- Pierre Wat, April 2026
Pierre Wat is a professor of art history at Panthéon-Sorbonne University. A specialist in European Romanticism, he has published Naissance de l’art romantique (Flammarion, 1998; reprinted in the Champs Arts series, 2013), Constable (Hazan, 2002), and Turner, menteur magnifique (Hazan, 2010). He is the author of numerous studies on contemporary art: Pierre Buraglio (Flammarion, 2001), Claude Viallat (Hazan, 2006), and Frédéric Benrath (Hazan, 2016).
Most recent publications: Pérégrinations. Paysages entre nature et histoire (Hazan, 2017) and Hans Hartung, la peinture pour mémoire (Hazan, 2019).
In 2023–2024, he served as the curatorial director of the Nicolas de Staël retrospective at the Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris and the Fondation de l’Hermitage in Lausanne. In 2025, he curated Anna-Eva Bergman and Hans Hartung, And we’ll never be parted, at the Kunsthalle Praha in Prague, and Paysages de marche at the Musée Courbet in Ornans, an exhibition exploring the relationship between landscape and walking in the 19th century.
Antoine Schneck, Giuseppe, tirage sur 8, photographie, tirage pigmentaire sur papier contrecollé sur Dibond – 100 x 120 cm
Courtesy Galerie Berthet-Aittouarès.