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man Fine Arts, 1974.CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI
French
Christian Boltanski is not, strictly speaking, a
photographer. He frequently describes himself as
a painter though he does not utilize pigment and
canvas either. He is an artist who works with sev-
eral mediums and utilizes photography—usually
found images—by implementing them into his ins-
tallation pieces and artists’ books. He has remained
thematically consistent throughout his career, as
the subjects he returns to most often are childhood,
absence, and death. His aim has always been to blur
the division between art and life, and to touch his
viewers on a personal level without being overtly
didactic or sentimental.
The artist’s biography is somewhat elusive, lar-
gely because much of his artwork has involved the
propagation of false stories regarding his past. He
was born in Paris just two weeks after the city’s
liberation in 1944. His mother was Catholic and his
father was a Jewish-born doctor who converted to
Catholicism at a young age. Despite his conversion,
Boltanski’s father had to feign disappearance dur-
ing the occupation and hide in a narrow crawlspace
in the family apartment. As a child Boltanski felt
like an outsider among his peers, and at the age of
11 was allowed to leave school to be instructed by
his parents and two older brothers. He did not
return to school, and is self-taught as an artist.
The environment of postwar France has continu-
ously influenced the tone and subject matter of Bol-
tanski’s work. He began developing his artistic
practice in the late 1960s, a time of political and
social upheaval culminating with the May 1968 stu-
dent rebellions. His early projects bear a resem-
blance to the Arte Povera works in Italy made
around the same time. Like many artists of his gen-
eration, Boltanski became interested in the dereifi-
cation and dematerialization of the art object as a
means of subverting the art market. Never pledging
allegiance to any singular medium, Boltanski em-
braced a variety of techniques for his early pieces,
including mail art, experimental film, ephemeral
sculptures, and found objects.
He became particularly interested in creating fic-
tional histories in the guise of autobiography, and
told true and untrue stories about his own childhood
using visual mediums. Yet the stories he related are
not remarkable; he purposely emphasized the most
banal possible events and objects in order to convey
a sense of universal childhood that any viewer might
be able to relate to. His earliest utilization of photo-
graphy involved inventories of personal objects he
associated with his childhood, from vacation snap-
shots to pictures of old toys. In a 1972 artist’s book
entitledTen Photographic Portraits of Christian Bol-
tanski, 1946–1964, the artist showed snapshots of 10
different people posed in the same location, ar-
ranged in order of age from 2 to 20 years. Each
bears a caption identifying the figure as Christian
Boltanski, but only the last image is a true portrait of
the artist. Boltanski found photography to be parti-BODY ART