Born in 1965 in the United States, Eric de Chassey, normalian, doctor in art history, professor at the Université François-Rabelais de Tours, former member of the Institut universitaire de France, has combined a solid classical education with a rare knowledge of contemporary art, as well as academic excellence to an intense and recognized activity of art critic and curator.
Among the many works and exhibition catalogues of this specialist of the transatlantic fertility of modern and contemporary French art, we can mention Decorative Violence: Matisse in the United States, Effective painting: a history of abstraction in the United States, Platitudes: a history of flat photography.
Member of the scientific review committees Heritage and of the magazine Outlook, he has organized numerous conferences on art history, especially on the first years after the Second World War.
He has curated several notable exhibitions: Abstraction/Abstractions, Provisional Geometries at the Museum of Modern Art in Saint-Etienne, Made in USA at the Bordeaux Museum, Social body at the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris; Matisse – Kelly: Plant Drawings at the National Museum of Modern Art, Centre Pompidou and the Saint Louis Art Museum. He also informed contemporary creation during the first edition of The power of art, in 2006.
Frédéric Mitterrand, Minister of Culture and Communication, is pleased to see a young director at the head of the Villa Medici guided by a sense of continuity between creation and history, action and research, actuality and heritage.
The vocation of the Académie de France in Rome, created by Louis XIV in 1666, is to welcome artists or researchers already engaged in professional life in order to enable them to carry out a personal project on the land of the arts.