Daniel Cordier, the spy who became art lover

Daniel Cordier – or rather Daniel Bouyjou, because he will not take the surname of Cordier until much later – was born, officially, on August 10, 1920 in Bordeaux in a very easy family. But his true birth, the one where he really became himself, fruit of a revolt that seized him at the bowels, came twenty years later. On June 17, 1940, he heard Marshal Pétain on the radio announced his decision to conclude an armistice with Nazi Germany. It bursts into sobs. He doesn’t know it yet, but his life has just changed. This very young man rocked by extreme right ideas, who could have led a comfortable life of a provincial notable, begins for free France. He is spied on and right by Jean Moulin, discovers art thanks to the latter and became, after the war, one of the most active gallery owners in Paris and a very large donor with museums.

Entry into resistance

“” You have to go! ” This idea is a constant in the life of Daniel Cordier, ”notes Sylvie Zaidman, historian and director of the Paris Liberation Museum. Because Daniel Cordier is a brawler, a fighter. The beautiful thoughts that do not be accomplished in action, procrastination: very little for him. At three years old, he had to undergo the very conflicting divorce of his parents, at a time when breaking a marriage was rare and particularly infamous. Soon, he is placed in boarding in Saint-Elme, in Arcachon. Daniel Cordier is not a model student, and his schooling is tumultuous. In 1928, his mother, who remarried, presented him the one she called her “new dad”. Cultivated, sporting, he arouses the admiration of the young Daniel who, growing up, marries his political ideas: those of Action Française. When the war broke out, this fervent patriot listed by the stories of the Great War wants to prove that he is like his elders “a full man”. He wants to get involved. But he is not yet an adult, and his father, René Bouyjou, refuses to give him his authorization. Daniel fuels and breaks relations with his father. When Pétain announces an armistice with Nazi Germany the following year, the young man no longer holds. There is no question that France, this big country, dark. With the help of his stepfather, he embarked on the last boat leaving Bayonne for England, which is then the only country to continue fighting against Nazi Germany.

Barely out of the boarding school, he landed in England on June 25, 1940. “We were children […] It is something that also touched General de Gaulle to see that the only people who had rallied him, they were children, “recalls the one whose act of commitment in the” Legion of Gaulle “, which becomes the free French forces, already bears the name of” Cordier “.

In this free France, the young Maurassian learns to pose the mortars, walk in step, and meet people with ideas different from those in which he was raised – like the philosopher Raymond Aron. The world, like love for Arthur Rimbaud that he admires, is to be reinvented. However, if he sees his comrades going to join General Leclerc in Africa, consuming his brake on him. Consequently, he makes a decision: engaging in the intelligence services. He learns to function a radio station as how to code messages, or the behavior to be adopted in the event of arrest by the Germans. During the night of July 25 to 26, 1942, finally, after two years of training, Daniel Cordier, alias BIPW, equipped with false papers and a fictitious identity, was parachuted near Montluçon. Its order of mission as a radio operator for the Central Intelligence and Action Office (BCRA) is to feed France with information emanating from resistance movements and vice versa. But barely arrived, Jean Moulin, alias Rex, head of all agents of the “action” section of the BCRA in the unoccupied zone, engages him as secretary. For a year, Daniel Cordier corded documents and made the link between the representative of General de Gaulle in France and the leaders of resistance movements, and the BCRA officers. In June 1943, when Jean Moulin was arrested in Lyon by the Gestapo, a cordier, although devastated, continued to work with the successors of Rex, sent by London. However, when he learns that the German intelligence services have his identity photo, this witness to the creation of the secret army or the resistance council asked, between the end of December 1943 and early January 1944, to be relieved of his functions and join London.

For the love of art

The trials have profoundly transformed it. Sent by Jean Moulin to Paris, Daniel Cordier was turned upside down by an elderly man accompanied by a little boy, carrying the yellow star. “I would have liked to kiss this man and ask him for forgiveness for having been anti-Semitic because, all of a sudden, I had the feeling that it was a crime,” he said. Anti -Semitism as far right ideas now belong to its past. But his journey is not only political. Alongside Jean Moulin, he discovered art. “He had so much this passion that his cover in resistance was a modern art gallery in Nice and that one of his false identities in Lyon was that of a decorator artist,” he says. “When we are in the street, at the restaurant or in any place where we risk being heard, I will start talking to you about art so as not to be suspected,” said Jean Moulin, committing him. On the day of the first advice of the Resistance, Daniel Cordier recounts in his book of memory Alias Caracalla (2009) that Jean Moulin took him to a gallery exhibiting Vassily Kandinsky, then offered him theHistory of contemporary art by Christian Zervos (1938). He promised him, too, that one day, when the war is over, he would make him discover the Museum of the Prado. When a few months later, in 1944, after the death of Jean Moulin, he won England via Spain, Cordier decided to visit this museum that Jean Moulin held for the most beautiful in Madrid. Bosch, Goya, El Greco, Vélasquez upset him. He returns to see them daily. “It was like love meetings without worry, without anxiety. And probably, precisely, this drunkenness came from what I had expected so many beings in life and which always escaped me in them, this perfect communion, I found it in this company, “he says. At the Liberation, Daniel Cordier is 25 years old. Looking for his way, he tried his hand in painting and enrolled in the Academy of the Grande Chaumière, in Montparnasse. He met a young painter there, Bernard Réquichot (1929-1951). The latter will be one of the artists he will defend with ardor when he will open his gallery. Because if he exhibits his works once or twice, Daniel Cordier soon realizes that he does not have the qualities and skills to become a full -fledged artist. But he began to buy his first works: a watercolor by Henri Michaux, who is then known as a writer but not as a painter, works by Chaïm Soutine, Georges Braque, Georges Rouault, Jean Dewasne, whom he discovered in the Salon Nouvelles in 1946 and, above all, Nicolas de Staël, who is just starting to emerge. Over the years, the idea of becoming a merchant has imposed itself on him.

Gallerist with a strong personality

In 1956, Daniel Cordier opened a gallery on rue Duras (8th arr.) Which became one of the most important on the Paris scene. He affirms an original taste, “somewhat derived from surrealism, apart from Dewasne, with dreamlike artists, post-surrealists …”, describes Alfred Pacing, honorary director of the Center Pompidou and co-commissioner of the exhibition. If Daniel Cordier is particularly attached to bringing out artists who are still little known, he also became the exclusive merchant of Jean Dubuffet, whom he met in 1952. In 1959, his gallery moved rue de Miromesnil (8th arr.), In the heart of the Galeries district at the time, before opening branches in Frankfurt and New York, which was not very common at that time. It is within it that the international exhibition of surrealism was held during the winter of 1959-1960 organized by André Breton and Marcel Duchamp. It attracts a considerable crowd. In 1962, he dareed to organize an exhibition of art brut, this art of madmen and marginalized theorized by Dubuffet. However, in 1964, the same year when the Grand Prix of the 32nd Biennale of Venice was awarded to an American, Robert Rauschenberg, this gallery owner who has become one of the most important on the Parisian artist slammed the door. He announced in a very violent text his decision to close his gallery, reproaching collectors, museums and public authorities their shyness, their “safe” taste and their lack of commitment to current French artists. Without doubt this brutal closure is however also linked to Dubuffet’s decision to leave the gallery … “The latter, in fact, ensured the commercial balance and the notoriety of the gallery which defended many artists still unknown …”, recognizes Alfred Pacing.

Donations to the French state

But Daniel Cordier does not leave the artistic scene. When Georges Pompidou, who became president in 1969, decided to restore to Paris his place as a cultural capital by opening a museum on the Beautiful set which will bear his name and launch a large exhibition on current French art which is held at the Grand Palais in 1972, Cordier is invited to enter the organizing committee. The following year, the one who fights to expose the artists of his former gallery and who joined, ten years later, the acquisition committee of the Center Pompidou made a major first donation to the State: a set of works by Bernard Réquichot, then in 1977, for the inauguration of the Center Pompidou, around forty paintings by Henri Michaux, a masterpiece of Dubuffet and Swedish Öyvind Fahström. Other donations will follow, allowing many artists to access institutional recognition. “His curiosity never satisfied will lead him to many acquisitions of young artists, such as Bernard Bazile, Robert Combas, Jean Le Gac, Jean-Michel Meurice, Jean-Pierre Raynaud, Bernar Venet, Claude Viallat, etc. », Notes Alfred Pacing. In 1989, the 500 works given to the Center Pompidou by Daniel Cordier were gathered in an exhaustive publication and a large exhibition. A consecration for this great donor with a taste as safe as it is daring. But he doesn’t stop there. For ten years, he acquired some 800 objects from Africa, Asia, Oceania or popular art, to confront them with the works of painters he loved and supported. “These are the most humble objects of distant cultures that gave me the change of scenery that I have always demanded from art,” he confides. Daniel Cordier has not dedicated his life to art for many years. Invited in October 1977 on the set of the television program “Les Files de l’evis”, he found himself facing Henri Frenay, former chief of the combat resistance movement. The latter accuses Jean Moulin of having been an accomplice of the Communists and of having betrayed General de Gaulle and the resistance fighters. Tétanized, Daniel Cordier notes that he failed to answer him. He therefore devotes what remains of his life to doing so. For twenty years, he wrote a colossal biography of Jean Moulin, before writing his own memories. Centennial, he died in 2020.