Galerie Claude Lemand

ARTISTS’ TRIBUTE TO NOTRE-DAME.
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Preface by Jack Lang, President of the Institut du monde arabe

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Testimony by Claude Lemand

Like mil­lions of other viewers around the world, I was struck by the tragedy of the fire that dev­as­tated Notre-Dame in Paris. It brought back to me painful mem­o­ries of the war in Lebanon. Jack Lang wit­nessed the fire with his own eyes from the ter­race over­looking Notre-Dame at the top of Jean Nouvel’s building. His inter­ven­tions on Radio and TV encour­aged me to trans­form my emo­tions and sad­ness into a pos­i­tive and gen­erous pro­ject, in the same vein as the dona­tion we just did to the Museum of the Institut du Monde Arabe.

The morning after the fire, I sum­moned a small group of artists from the Arab world, whom I was very close to and who fea­ture promi­nently in our dona­tion. Those artists were also struck by this fire that rav­aged a mon­u­ment which has stood for almost a thou­sand years, a symbol of a European and uni­versal civil­i­sa­tion. They know it well and they feel part of its legacy just as much as French and European artists. They pro­duced per­sonal art­works to convey their com­pas­sion, the dia­logue of arts and uni­versal values between the East and the West.

I hope that this exhi­bi­tion of con­tem­po­rary art­works will give a brighter, more pos­i­tive, more uni­versal and humanist image of the Arab World and its dias­poras, dif­ferent from the images of despo­tism, terror and obscu­ran­tism that bring death to these coun­tries’ bodies and minds, and every­where else in the world.