Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski – The Holocaust as a life-shaping memory

Christian Boltanski was born on 6 September 1944 in Paris, shortly after the end of German occupation. His father was a Jewish doctor of Ukraine birth and his mother a politically left-thinking catholic, whilst his brother is a renowned French sociologist. The Holocaust belongs to Boltanski’s coining memories also because of his Jewish roots; the commemoration of the Shoah followed not only his childhood but also became an important part of his artistic work. Dark themes of death and transience are omnipresent in the artist’s installations – connected through the motif of memory which was an indispensable key to life for Christian Boltanski. These memories are not always specifically authentic, as in the pseudo-documentations of his life which he meticulously created: These take the form of small books or articles in art journals in which he mixed his own biography with memories of his friends and acquaintances, appropriated their family photographs and gave them deliberately false references. In doing so, the individual became a distorted image of society. 

The Inventare of a human life as artistic installation

Christian Boltanski is known for his Inventare, comprehensive installations composed of the personal possessions of real and fictional people. They are ultimately a consequential development of his artistic beginnings in the late 1960s when he filled display cases with children’s toys and sweets to outline the characteristics of a regular childhood. He moved from toy guns, hand-made balls of earth and sugar lumps to whole rooms decorated with the possessions of dead, unknown people which the artist sourced primarily from various flea markets. According to the art historian Armin Zweite, this combination of the useless and banal acquires its meaning only through the conceptual world of the viewer who is inevitably unable to resist the speculation that precisely these ostensibly uninteresting, meaningless objects were of great importance to a particular person who has died and has disappeared. They are mementos, the associated memory of which remains withheld from the audience – and exactly for this very reason arouses great curiosity and sympathy and urges critical questioning of one’s own existence. 

Christian Boltanski’s art is an archive of memories

Alongside his object art, Christian Boltanski also developed a strong interest in photography and became a popular artist with his innovative installations, participating in Documenta in Kassel for the first time in 1972. The artist did not rest on his success, but experimented further, and in the 1980s, created mysterious shadows of forms on the walls for his installations. For the installation El Case (The Cold Case), he arranged photographs from the Spanish tabloid newspaper of the same name in which the offenders and victims of more or less serious criminal cases could be seen. Christian Boltanski received prizes and honours for his art, including the Kunstpreis Aachen in 1994 and the Praemium Imperial in 2006.

Christian Boltanski lived and worked in the French community of Malakoff, south of Paris, until his death on 14 July 2021.