Arles (Bouches-du-Rhône). In 2030, the Musée Réattu will receive a large part of the Alfred Latour collection (1888-1964), currently held in Lausanne by the Alfred Latour Foundation, while the textile part will join the Musée des tissus et des arts décoratifs in Lyon. This donation includes more than 300 paintings, 700 watercolors and Indian inks, 700 vintage photographs, a few dozen negative films, hundreds of modern prints made by the foundation as well as a collection of glass plates. For Claude Latour, the artist’s nephew, who founded the foundation, and for Pierre Starobinski, its director, this will be a further step in the work carried out for more than twenty years for the protean rediscovery of the work. For Arles and the Musée Réattu, this upcoming donation is part of the work undertaken over the past eight years with the Alfred Latour Foundation to promote the artist’s creations, but also to rehabilitate a whole hidden part of the history of the museum that Jacques Latour, his son, directed from 1947 until his sudden death in 1956.
It is a work of memory that the museum director, Daniel Rouvier, has undertaken since the first exhibition organized in 2018 by the Foundation at the Espace Van Gogh in Arles. This exhibition had brought to light the totally unknown photographic career of the engraver, book illustrator, typographer, poster designer and painter, designer for textile printing. Internationally recognized during his lifetime, he is a member of the Union des artistes modernes (UAM) as a “graphic artist”, alongside Sonia Delaunay and Le Corbusier, with whom he was close.
Another exhibition was presented in Eygalières, in the Alpilles, about thirty kilometers from Arles. The artist had bought a farmhouse there in 1932 without water or electricity and had settled there permanently after the war, needing to withdraw, to find silence and nature in order to create. “It was in the landscapes drawn and painted by his father that Jacques Latour, his first son, born in Saint-Étienne in 1918, developed a taste for archaeology. It was there that he later took part in the excavations carried out before the war by Fernand Benoît, director of the Arles museums, archives and library”, explains François Vatin, a professor at the University of Paris-Nanterre who has been working on the history of Jacques Latour for several years. Mobilized in 1940, the young man had to interrupt his studies at the École du Louvre and then, upon returning to Eygalières, worked in the Resistance with his father. Alfred covered the activities of his son, a captain in English intelligence. Arrested in April 1944, tortured by the Gestapo, Jacques Latour was deported to Dachau in Germany.
“Two years after his return from Dachau, he was called in April 1947 by Cyprien Pilliol, then communist mayor of Arles, to take charge of the city’s museums and monuments, without a manager after the departure of Fernand Benoît who had compromised himself with the Vichy regime, says François Vatin. His appointment was validated by the management of the Museums of France, which invited him to follow a training course in museography in Paris with Georges Henri Rivière, founder of the Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions.
Alfred Latour (left) in his engraving studio in Eygalières in 1956 and Jacques Latour (right) on “Les Alyscamps” in Arles in 1948.
© Alfred Latour Foundation, Lausanne.
Public attacks
His mission? To renovate and reactivate the city’s museums, including the Musée Réattu, damaged by Allied bombing. With Marielle Latour, daughter of the Lyon engraver Philippe Burnot, whom he met at the École du Louvre and married in 1948, he opened the municipal museum to contemporary art and invited artists such as Valentine Prax, Franz Priking and Ossip Zadkine, whose splendid work the museum acquired OdalisqueIn 1951, he organized the first Van Gogh exhibition in Arles, inaugurated by Gaston Defferre, then deputy of Bouches-du-Rhône and Minister of the Merchant Navy.
However, these exhibitions are not well received by a part of the population. “When Jacques Latour, as part of a group exhibition, hung paintings by his father, he was attacked by former communist resistance fighters, even though he had always taken care not to devote a personal exhibition to him,” underlines Pierre Starobinski. “The situation became tense in 1954 when Fernand Benoît publicly attacked the redevelopment by Jacques Latour of the pagan lapidary museum carried out at the request of the management of the Museums of France and under its control”, continues François Vatin. At the end of the war, the rivalries and tensions between the different Resistance networks were not extinguished and the voices of certain sympathisers of the Vichy regime were still heard. At the beginning of 1956, Jacques Latour was seconded to the Cantini Museum in Marseille, temporarily without a permanent position, thanks to the intervention of Gaston Defferre, mayor of the city for three years, while Charles-Raymond Privat, SFIO mayor of Arles since 1947, appointed Jean-Maurice Rouquette as project manager at the Réattu Museum. An appointment which, for Jacques Latour, meant an ouster. A few weeks later, he died suddenly at the Cantini Museum, while an Aristide Maillol exhibition was being taken down, a sculpture of the artist in his arms. Arles would quickly pass over in silence everything he had undertaken for the city’s museums. Alfred Latour died six years later from a ruptured aneurysm in his workshop in Eygalières.
“The first work by Alfred Latour to enter the collections of the Musée Réattu is a painting of Collioure, offered in 1970 by Jean Latour, Jacques’ brother, who at the same time made a significant donation of drawings, engravings and paintings to the Musée Ziem in Martigues”, notes Daniel Rouvier. It was only in 2018, thanks to a donation from the artist’s nephew, that a second painting by Alfred Latour entered the museum, a refined view of Saintes-Marie-de-la-Mer, now visible in the exhibition devoted to Alfred Latour’s textile design creations in its links with the photography he produces (1). The Musée Réattu reinterprets the work: “A major exhibition on illustrated books is planned for 2027 with the museum and the foundation [suisse] Martin-Bodmer », confides Pierre Starobinski. Also underway is an exhibition project at the museum on the reconstruction of Arles after the war, which will restore Jacques Latour to his rightful place.
(1) “Alfred Latour. A Look at Form”, until October 6 at the Musée Réattu, Arles.
