La galerie fête ses 40 ans — Carte blanche à Pierre Wat — Berthet – Aittouarès Gallery — Exhibition — Slash Paris

In about 1 month: May 29 → July 18, 2026

To mark four decades of activity, the Berthet-Aittouarès Gallery is presenting a trilogy of events. The first, running from May through July, offers carte blanche to the art historian Pierre Wat, who has assembled a selection of works by artists associated with the gallery. From Tal Coat to Vera Molnar and Yann Bagot, these figures have long traveled in parallel with the gallery’s history.

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“Nearly fifteen 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. Time has shown that what became a program—working together around what we loved—was also a fine definition of friendship. The carte blanche that Michèle and Odile have extended to me for the gallery’s fortieth anniversary is a generous affirmation of that bond, and an opportunity for me to reflect on how, over the years, I have followed in the footsteps of this shared taste: the search, in art, for the trace of our humanity. Drawing from the gallery’s artists, I trace a line that runs from Tal Coat to Yann Bagot, from Hans Hartung to Antoine Schneck—artists capable of transforming gesture into an embodied sign, one that tells us what Henri Michaux once called ‘the adventure of being alive.’”

Pierre Wat

Pierre Wat is Professor of Art History at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University. A specialist in European Romanticism, he is the author of Naissance de l’art romantique (Flammarion, 1998; Champs Arts reissue, 2013), Constable (Hazan, 2002), and Turner, menteur magnifique (Hazan, 2010). He has also published extensively on contemporary art, including studies devoted to Pierre Buraglio (Flammarion, 2001), Claude Viallat (Hazan, 2006), and Frédéric Benrath (Hazan, 2016). More recent books include Pérégrinations. Paysages entre nature et histoire (Hazan, 2017) and Hans Hartung, la peinture pour mémoire (Hazan, 2019). In 2023–2024, he served as scientific curator 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 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 nineteenth century.