As part of International Women’s Day, decorations were presented to Anne-Françoise Jumeau, Véronique Nora-Milin, Aline Vidal, Jacqueline Ada, Gaëlle Lauriot-Prévost, Michèle Armand, known as Mimi Barthélémy, Jacqueline Dulac and Véronique Gens

These eight women that François Ozon films in the sour and squeaky tone that
belongs only to him, it could be you who are gathered today
on the occasion of this tribute to the women who make and honour culture,
in all its diversity. Echoing this scholarly composition, you form
today a bouquet of talents, multiple, varied, eclectic,
essential talents in each of your professions, from architecture to art
lyrical, from cinema to literature without forgetting the song, this expression
of popular culture so important in the struggles of women and in
the construction of the image of the woman today.

Dear Jacqueline Dulac,
If I may, I would like to begin by quoting the one that was your
master, the one who revealed you to the song, and with whom you share a
love, a wonder for life, the one we called the
«Crazy singing», Charles Trenet: «Blue, blue, our childhood was a
paradise: it’s all too late today”. I lean in with
a tender nostalgia on the music of the sixties that shaped my
sensitivity, and remember what I appreciated above all in your
songs: the subtle marriage of grace and simplicity, depth and
softness, images of Epinal and poetry.

Very young, you discover with Charles Trenet your vocation
singer. However, you must respond to your parents' concern
and you decide to take classes in painting and drawing, that
finally you will give up to work your voice and borrow
behind the scenes of Parisian cabarets. It is with determination that
1962, you get commitments in the cabarets of the Rive
left as The Golden Horse, Jacob’s Ladder, where still The Caveau
Bolée, a place frequented by Baudelaire and the writers of the
“fantastic”.

1963 marks the beginning of a triumphant career with the release of your
first «super 45 laps» at Barclay I believe in you, year you
share Bobino’s stage with poet Georges Brassens, on which
you will perform regularly once success sits, and go to
with another icon of sixties, just as radiant as you,
Françoise Hardy. Autumn 1965 was a springboard in your career,
you are revealed to the public through the show Le Palmarès des chansons,
presented by Guy Lux and Anne-Marie Peysson, which brings you to the
scene of Bobino opening part of Charles Trenet. It was then that Eddy
Marnay comes to offer you his song Those of Warsaw with which
you won the Rose d'Or d'Antibes on June 27, 1966 in front of Michel
Delpech and Michel Polnareff, among others.

After this success, Michèle Senlis and the late Claude Delécluse,
among others, the Lovers of Verona, It is beautiful life or the
Happiness performed by Jean Ferrat, come to present an opus that
was your flagship title, When one is happy, and that allowed you to record
your first album 33 tours Contre Jour, awarded in 1968 by the
grand prize of the Academy Charles Cros. From this happy collaboration
real jewels like Venice under the snow, the Horses
or this beautiful opus Dawn is not just a cry.

Then a particularly singular and traumatic accident darkens
your life. June 27, 1969, three years to the day after the Golden Rose
of Antibes, during a gala in Brittany, you agree to enter alone
in a cage with four lions to have you photographed in their
presence, hoping, very generously, help the tamer shunned by the
circuses. Lions attack you, and you owe your life only to your
impresario came to your rescue. Follows a long and painful
period of hospitalization, a test of courage and humility that strengthens
your love of life.

Once you’re back on your feet, you’re back on your international tours,
and release many albums with eloquent titles: It’s wonderful
to live, Mosaic or Need others.

You have worked with the greatest artists of your generation, I
Jean Ferrat, Francis Lai, Dominique Pankratoff, Michel Bernard,
Eddy Mitchell who wrote S.O.S Amitiés in 1981, to name but a few
some.

Dear Jacqueline Dulac, your passion for life, your vibrant voice and
your sensitivity makes you a great lady of French song.

On behalf of the President of the Republic and by virtue of the powers that we
are conferred, we make you Knight in the order of the Legion
of honor.

Madame Michèle Armand, Dear Mimi Barthélémy,
When I think of you, your story, I can’t help but have to
Victor Segalen’s phrase in The Immemorial: It’s
bad sign when words are denied to men that the gods have
designated to be guardians of the words”. You are, in my opinion, a
guardian of the memories of the Caribbean, a rediscovered voice of the imagination
and mythology of Haiti. You have spread the breath of
folk tales, you to whom the desire of adaptation in metropolis had
literally cost the voice. Your work on the traditional sung tale
Haitians left a new type of story to the Francophone culture
musical. Voice and identity are for you related parties, which is why
when studying in Paris your aspiration to be a French like the
other, stifles in the oblivion your original culture, loss of identity,
total alienation as you say, made you lose the treble in the
voice.

After a childhood spent in Port-au-Prince, you continue your studies
Sciences Po and Paris X University where you get a
then a master’s degree in Spanish literature. Curious about other
civilizations, you do not resist the call of the open sea and go
Republic of Honduras. This is where you go to meet the
black Caribbean Indians, the Garifunas. This meeting was of great importance
capital, because it has enabled you, through them, to penetrate your
own culture, to connect the Caribbean to the unconscious of its ancestors
African. Indeed you are working with the Garifunas at a show,
Loubavagu or the other far shore in which they reclaim their
history forgotten after their deportation in the 18th century. You return
then in France, enriched with a «mirror» experience and you
undertake a thesis on the promotion of minorities through theatre.

It was at a meeting you organized at the Alliance
French singer Jo Archer from Rabat on tour at the
Morocco, where your first husband was a cultural attaché, that you
you are set to recite. It is thanks to the curiosity of the Moroccans that you
you are asked the question of your identity and your wealth
cultural. You have found your voices. You begin to tell
drawing on the Haitian oral tradition, you weave with your two
languages, French and Creole, stories with the aim of transmitting and
to donate the cultural wealth of the Caribbean.

Since the late '80s, you’ve been telling stories, stories that
told you children, or those recorded by the
Caribbean ethnologists, alone or with musicians in centres
libraries, private apartments, schools, cultural
prisons and hospitals. Your shows reflect two main axes: the
a theatrical encounter of stage writing and orality,
the evocation of a personal and collective history as in
witnesses The ebony roundel, Soldiers-Chestnuts, The last letter of
the Admiral, who in 1992 received the Arletty Prize for the Universality of the Language
French or pebble games. And in a second time, a work
on the singing tradition of the tale with L'oranger magique, La reine des
to whom the 3rd Evry Actors Festival awarded the Golden Becker in
1989, but still Tendez sing love or Voyage en papillon.

Your company Ti Moun Fou - name that originally was the nickname of which we
you were very different from the children in your community
social - desirous of contact with the Creole population, groups
artists such as Serge Tamas, Amos Coulanges or Elodie Barthélémy,
your daughter painter and visual artist with whom you shared the
A very beautiful death scene in your play.

Beyond the epics of remembrance, the stories of current miseries, you
consider the tale as one of the most vivid expressions of the
culture, as a means for the peoples of the Caribbean to
recapitulate their founding myths and as a recasting of speech
popular in its imaginative and heritage dimensions.

After the terrible earthquake in Haiti, you strongly
involved in helping your fellow citizens. In your show Ma
after January 12, we find stories from the
Caribbean which speak of rebirth, excesses, the good use of the
but also love of nature.
Dear Mimi Barthélémy, I am particularly pleased to
tribute to your work which is a model of generosity and a call to
the enchantment of the world. I wish to greet all those who,
have contributed to the existence of minority languages in the Francophonie,
and salute the memory of your second husband, Guillermo Cardet, who
a precious support in this quest. I am moved to honour today,
day of celebration of all women, not only the granddaughter of the
Haitian President Louis Borno, the daughter of the late Dr.Maurice Armand, officer of
the Legion of Honour, but also and above all to honour the
muse of Haitian culture.

Dear Mimi Barthélémy, on behalf of the President of the Republic and under
powers vested in us, we make you a Knight in
Order of the Legion of Honor.

Dear Véronique Gens,
Allow me to be irreverent, I whose life has been crossed
by the opera, I who long to make this moment of grace a place
accessible to the greatest number. Because what is opera? If you want
well follow the provocative irony of Georges Bernard Shaw: an opera,
is a story where a baritone does everything to prevent a tenor from
sleeping with a soprano».

You will have understood, it is for me a great joy and an immense
to welcome you in the salons of the Ministry of Culture and
Communication. I am indeed very pleased to pay tribute to a
of the greatest French personalities of the lyric scene, at a
artist who embodies with precision, modernity and depth, reveal
the intimacy of the most famous roles in the lyric repertoire, but also
Salute the quality of your interpretations that have helped promote
the baroque music.

Your career has always been about encounters and
reason. Your story is also that of the passage under the fire of the
ramp of a chorister who likes to dress up. Originally from Orléans, you
start singing at age 3 with your older sister in a choir
children. Then in class at the Orléans Conservatory, one of your
teachers makes you meet William Christie, Bill like you
call her, pioneer in the rediscovery of baroque music, which
from 1985, you will play in Lully’s Atys choir with
Hervé Niquet; next to you Marc Minkowski played bassoon and
Christophe Rousset was at the continuo. Strong of the confidence you
grants the leader, you are led to gradually interpret roles
Phébée in Castor and Pollux de Rameau or in The
Fairy Queen of Purcell and are embarked in the tours
International Flourishing Arts.

After ten years in the baroque repertoire, you
realize that your voice needed a little more amplitude, that’s when
that you accept the Mozartian roles offered to you by Jean-Claude
Malgoire: Cherub, first and then the Countess, always
in the Marriage of Figaro, Fiordiligi in Cosi fan tutte or Vitellia, your
in the Clemency of Titus. Your triumph in the role of
Donna Elvira in Don Giovanni, in turn Carmen heady and Adjani
revenge of the murderous Summer, before finding for Zerline the most
touching accents of protective tenderness, as summed up well the
journalist Eric Dahan, under the direction of Claudio Abbado and in a
directed by Peter Brook. You found the natural to enter
in a character so that it sounds right, marks a decisive turning point
in your career and takes you to the greatest stages
on the stage of the Amsterdam Concertgebouw, the
Scala, Queen Elizabeth Hall, Berlin Philarmonic.

A flash occurred in the lyrical world and it bears the name of
Véronique Gens. You travel the world with high orchestras
authority and delight conductors that we no longer present,
I think of Myung-Whun Chung, Jean-Claude Casadesus, Marc
Minkowski, Daniel Harding or Sir Neville Marriner. Singer and
tragedy actress, you also dedicate your talent with the troupe of
Christophe Rousset to interpret as much the best known tunes as the
more unknown to the general public of the tragedies of the French opera,
Lully to Berlioz.

I don’t forget the long list of albums you record and
many have been rewarded with international awards but
can’t quote them all, so I will remember Mozart’s Airs, the Cantatas
Handel and French Melodies. The breadth of your repertoire equals
that of your voice and force admiration, you are also elected Artist
Lyric from the Year 1999 to the Victories of Music. I know you
dream of singing certain roles: Desdemone, Verdi, Poppée de
Monteverdi, and the Marechale of Strauss, I wish you very sincerely
to achieve this.

Dear Véronique Gens, I recognize in you an immense artist,
passionate and careful, thoughtful and rigorous, fine and deep and I want to
to pay warm tribute to your style, all in nuances and
reliefs, which is distinguished by the contribution of an extraordinary sensitivity.
On behalf of the President of the Republic and by virtue of the powers that we
are conferred, we make you Knight in the order of the Legion
of honor.

Dear Jacqueline Ada,
A film is not only a story that the cinema sells, but also
a culture, a country, another type of consumption”. This quote from
Bertrand Tavernier is a special example of the work you are
CNC since 1991. At the same time, it highlights the role of cinema in the
the spread of foreign cultures, a mission you never cease to
develop and contribute so effectively.

Born in Algeria, in Blida, you are forced to leave your native country,
with your family in 1962. After a brief visit to Paris, you
move to Avignon where you are doing your schooling. You get through the
a DEA in sociology at the University of Montpellier, which focuses on
migrant workers. Your multiple roots, both Arab, Jewish and
French, and your experience, since childhood, of immigration influence
naturally the choice of your research topic. Very quickly, you will
show willingness to work on each other’s cultures, including
on the meeting between these cultures.

After a promising career at the centre
University of Avignon, you choose to settle in Morocco, with
your husband and daughter; a way to go home, you say.
You teach sociology there for eight years before returning to
France, in 1984, and to join the Ministry of Culture at the service of the
personnel. But in 1991, you joined the CNC as
mission for the South Fund, in the service of external relations, to the
Directorate for European and International Affairs. Created in 1981, the
Fonds Sud cinéma has the particularity of being interdepartmental. It is co-financed
and co-managed by the Ministry of Culture and Communication and the
Ministry of Foreign and European Affairs. In 2007, you
appointed Head of the Cooperation Department in the Business Directorate
european and international.

This decisive step offers you the opportunity to promote cultures
through the cinema. You are thus responsible for
the objectives of the Fund, which include promoting
the expression of cultural diversity through support for the
cinematography. This major task was carried out with audacity and
tenacity thanks to your unfailing commitment. To have myself
chaired, for two successive terms, the committee responsible for
South Fund, I was able to see the scope of the work to be provided and the need
a considerable personal investment.

Thanks to the Fonds Sud, you have been able to promote artistic creation and
meeting between French and foreign film professionals. The
Fonds Sud has revealed many talents in a collaboration
with France and contributes to strengthening the
dialogue between countries and cultures. As Jean-Claude recalls
Brialy in Le Ruisseau des singes, Cinema has the virtue of filling
your curiosity, through all kinds of encounters that can transform
your life».

Among the works you have supported, many have been
acclaimed by critics and rewarded by numerous festivals, I
among others Destiny and Alexandria again and again by Youssef
Chahine, Rithy Panh Rice People, Atiq Lands and Ashes
Rahimi, Divine Intervention by Elia Suleiman, Caramel by Nadine Labaki, or
Central do Brasil by Walter Salles. The golden palm of the last
Cannes Film Festival, Uncle Boonmee, the one who remembers his lives
Apichatpong Weerasethakul, was born and took
Public support through the Southern Fund, through your work.

You also wanted to develop partnerships
and actions to strengthen cooperation between professionals
By promoting the creation, diversity and circulation of
works, you account at best for an open design of the
culture, lived as a space of free trade, made of meetings,
crossing geographical territories.

Dear Jacqueline Ada, on behalf of the President of the Republic, we
Make a Knight in the National Order of Merit.

Dear Gaëlle Lauriot-Prevost,
Your professional career has unfolded brilliantly, since more than
20 years, closely mixed with that of Dominique Perrault. He is
It is impossible not to associate you with this special identity which
Since 1989, you have been designing,
develop and share with him the joys and doubts of the profession
as artistic director of his agency. This brand, known as
Perrault» is also yours, since it is the fruit of a reflection that you
feed and evolve together for many years.

Your commitment to him takes its source in the formation you
follow at the Camondo school, which plays a key role, for more than sixty
for the evolution of interior architecture and design
to which she prepares, within the Institution of Decorative Arts. At the end
of the 1980s, wanting to become an interior architect is not a
both the legitimacy of the discipline, which nevertheless falls under and the arts
and architecture, was late. This shows the audacity and
passion that was already driving you.

Already in 1989, one year after graduation, you have
engage alongside Dominique Perrault, to never leave him again. You
support it in the design of prestigious projects, which have made
to make known the rationalist requirement, the elegant simplicity and the originality
the National Library of France,
flagship project for the agency that left an inimitable footprint in the
the Velodrome and the Olympic Swimming Pool of Berlin; the Cour de
European Justice; the Olympic Tennis Centre in Madrid or
the Ewha Women’s University in Seoul, which received multiple awards.

The interior fittings you create invite you to this
introspective dive into the heart of the building that does not always reflect
exterior. They show the architect’s intentions in their
intimate dimension, its will to make beautiful in the useful, to think its
architecture in the daily use of the people who inhabit it. As
artistic director, you are the key link in the quality of the project
of the agency, whose requirements are as much technical
artistic and human. At the end of the skills chain, it is
you who are responsible for appearance and consistency
finals.

As a designer, you know how to marry the rational and the poetic,
to combine functional and comfortable, to have spaces and
lights, as you have done tremendously, for example, to
through the air and golden intimacy of the European Court of Justice. It is
in these «details», which have nothing insignificant, which are also reflected in the
face of the finished building, its identity and the entire personality of its
architect.

But your eyes go beyond the field of design and architecture
interior. The use you make of metal mesh is an example
the most brilliant. Your projects in the field of design, such as the Chair
Lemma published by Sawaya and Moroni in 2009 or the Armchair Tricot in 2008
at Poltrona Frau, attest to your precise research on the mesh. From
the construction of the National Library of France – where you work
together with a man whom I am fortunate to count beside me, the
Director General of Heritage, Philippe Bélaval – you decide to
30,000 square metres of silver wire to dress the
walls, floors and ceilings. From an industrial product often
considered cold and rigid, the metal mesh finds with you a
new function: it becomes an autonomous structure, it dematerialises the
volumes, creates intermediate spaces, plays with light, rethinks
the concept of separation or partitioning. Gold or silver, it is
adornment, drape or jewel. Today, we no longer count the new
buildings inspired by your work.

Dear Gaëlle Lauriot-Prevost, you sail with ease
of detail to large structures. It seemed to me that
last August, at the inauguration of the Pavilion
of the Venice Architecture Biennale, where you have
beautifully staged, with Dominique Perrault, the difficult
of the 21st century metropolis through a
outstanding scenography.

What you have managed to accomplish, dear Gaëlle Lauriot-Prevost, is
the combination of rigour and audacity, geometry and finesse, and
inspiration for future developments. I see it as a
immense chance for French architecture, especially in the time of the Grand
Paris. My department’s role in this project, as you know, is to ensure
the architectural quality of its construction and this intelligence of the
landscape” which is both a principle and a guide to action.

Dear Gaëlle Lauriot-Prevost, on behalf of the President of the Republic, we
Knight in the National Order of Merit.

Dear Anne-Françoise Twin,
Just a few weeks ago, I was receiving here David Trottin, one
the founding members of «Périphériques», an association composed of
architects who share their skills and enthusiasm for
implement a strong architecture of new methods.

Today I welcome you with such pleasure. The O.V.N.I.
architectural «Peripheral», constituted on the basis of three pairs,
has enriched you with a spirit of sharing, complicity, and above all with
important theoretical reflection on architecture. Faith in the benefits of
mutualisation has also pushed you to create and integrate the collective
«French Touch». Architecture according to the «French Touch» is first and foremost
a shared adventure, a common desire to produce buildings
an “optimism”, a term that you have made your
and is so characteristic of the inventiveness, excellence of the
French creation.

At the agency, dear Anne-Françoise Jumeau, you evoke yourself
“creative games”. I remember Max Jacob saying, “Art
is a game. Too bad for the one who makes it a duty!" These games have everything from
even for frame an active «thinking laboratory» because you like to see the
“heckled” thinking. Among the collective’s achievements, I remember
first of all the «Café Musiques» by Savigny, all in cubes and colors;
from the Centre régional des Musiques actuelles in Nancy, the “Autre Canal”,
another cube, hollowed out this one, marked by its bright red pediment; it is finally the
the musical complex of the association Banlieues Bleues in Pantin. Your
works have been rewarded, notably with the special mention of
the Silver Equerre 2006 for the construction of the Atrium of the
Jussieu, admirable «architectural origami», as you called it.

Dear Anne-Françoise Jumeau, your contribution to visibility and
success does not prevent you from keeping your
independence. Graduate of the Paris-Villemin school of architecture since
1987, you quickly distinguished yourself by winning several awards
important. In 1996, you add a rope to your bow with a certificate
of the Landscape School of Versailles, translation of
your constant concern for dialogue between disciplines.

Always sensitive to the forms and uses of cultural facilities, you
are at the origin of the molting of Café Charbon in Nouveau Casino, in the
district of Oberkampf, which has become a concert hall known for
its aesthetic, acoustic and programming qualities. Seduced by the
contemporary design nimbé interior decorations but also
of 19th century atmospheres, you also realize, always with Louis
Paillard, the «Delaville Café», an atypical café-restaurant-nightclub
Parisian Boulevards. More original still, you have dressed the
quays François Mauriac of an amazing floating musical complex, the
«Jonx», with a concert hall and recording studios.
Alone or with «Peripherals», you did not hesitate to produce
new collective dwellings, such as those in the CAZ (Zone
Cardinet, rue Frémicourt or rue Rebière in Paris.
The latter saw the development of a magnificent project «Autrement à
Rebière» under the leadership of the Office public d'aménagement et de
construction of Paris, for which you played a role of architect
coordinator. Your habitat skills are recognized:
High environmental quality to development composed of houses
you invent, you innovate, you experiment.

You have always taken care to respect urban, social and
cultural, sometimes in search of a new identity or places of expression
The European Union has a strong
quality of a construction is to be inserted with harmony and relevance
in its environmental context.

Dear Anne-Françoise Jumeau, because you represent this
original architecture, intelligent and promising for tomorrow, at
name of the French Republic, we make you a Knight in order
of Arts and Letters.

Dear Véronique Nora-Milin,
Little daughter of the painter Eugène Carrière, you are a woman whose
life has been crossed by art. Journalist, you are also a producer and
film director of audiovisual magazines and documentaries. Car, child of the
television, immersed in the «society of the spectacle», the image-movement
fascinates you.

You started your career in the 1970s in publishing as
Then you become, two years later,
responsible for the press department of Jean-Jacques Pauvert, then
from Calmann-Lévy, you the little daughter of the painter friend of Verlaine,
Mallarmé, but also Anatole France.

But it is on radio and television that these media have shaped the
society of the Glorious Thirty, which you are planning for yourselves. You then
pioneers who invent the codes of mass media. In
with Louis Dandrel to launch the new
France music formula then, in 1976, you integrate the writing of
Paris-Ile de France on FR3 - general information and culture - before
“Culture” in national newspapers: Evening
3 and 19/20. You will exercise your talents for eight years, putting
your love of art at the service of a pedagogy destined for the greatest
number; thus you demonstrate that the audience and quality can be
reconciled and clean house.

You then work with Pierre Grimblat. You become a producer and
Director of the cultural magazine dedicated to plastic arts, «Plastic»,
broadcast on Antenne 2 between 1990 and 1991.

When this magazine is terminated, you decide to leave the service
to become an independent author and director.

You then make many documentaries, for the channels of
where the taste of travel and distant lands coexists with your
strong taste for painting and the arts. From Vietnam to Senegal, the
Burma to India via Tibet, you travel the world to the
search for the index that reveals, the landscape that transfigures, the
and fascinates. You work with National
Geographic, you are selected several times in a festival
as the International Festival of Audiovisual Programmes
of Biarritz, you collaborate with the magazine «Reportages» on TF1,
but also with Canal Plus and public broadcasting that appreciate your eye
and your art of storytelling. You don’t forget the visual arts and
make remarkable documentaries about Marina Picasso, about the writer
Raymond Roussel, on the painter Balthus. You know how to grasp the humanity of
the artist at the same time as the creation is being born and
You have thus helped to educate our gaze on the world, to
to bring art into the «strange skylight», for the sake of transmission,
with a constantly renewed demand.

You have also undertaken considerable work - which has required you
eight years of worldwide research - as author of the Catalogue
Eugène Carrière’s Raisonné. The one who was the friend of Rodin and the poets
symbolists, the one to whom we owe several cycles at the City Hall of Paris
and at the Sorbonne, he who was also committed with determination to the
combat Dreyfusard, alongside Bernard Lazare and these young people
who listened to the librarian’s loud and authoritative voice,
Lucien Herr became a familiar “companion”.

You are currently working on writing a biography of this back
maternal grandfather you love so much, that painter they say
often official, which inspired in its clear-obscure monochromes several
the great names of the avant-garde. It is this figure that links you to a
artistic fiber that you have never stopped implementing in your
different trades.
Also, dear Véronique Nora-Milin, on behalf of the French Republic,
we make you a Knight in the Order of Arts and Letters.

Dear Aline Vidal,
When Andy Warhol states that The art of business is the step that
succeeds art”, he loudly proclaims the need for market value
art, which allows the artist to hope for recognition and above all
find an audience. You were predestined to art and its universe, with a
father engineer architect, inventor of a building material of
and a mother a painter.

After studies at the Paris 4 Institute of Art and Archaeology and at the Ecole
of the Louvre, you have been added to the list of
curator of museums. Thus, before being an experienced gallery owner,
specialist in contemporary art, you are moving towards a career
as evidenced by your collaboration in Beaux-Arts
Arts Magazine in 1984, and publishing your guide All You
wanted to know about museums without daring to ask, if original, appeared
in 1985.

On the occasion of your stay in New York in 1985, your career
takes a new direction. At this time, young
very promising galleries open their doors, like those of Leo
Castelli and Illéana Sonnabend in particular, and essential artists,
such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, to whom a magnificent
exhibition was recently dedicated to the Museum of Modern Art of
Paris, renew artistic practices and aesthetic codes. This
stay will be decisive and not lead you to promote art by
the museum’s intermediary, that is, after public recognition
of the work or the artist, but rather from the
search for new artists, unknown or emerging, and
contribute to the dissemination of contemporary art and the writing of its history.

Drawing inspiration from this artistic scene that characterizes the lower
east side» New York, you open your own gallery in a place at
underground accents, an artist’s studio in the 14th arrondissement. Your
deep interest in art and your great knowledge of it you
make emerging practices welcoming. This is from the
meeting of new artists in fairs, exhibitions and biennials
art you gradually enrich the fund of your gallery. These
maintain your enthusiasm and attest to your
professionalism, as you keep up to date
of the novelties.

In 1989, the success was such that the gallery moved to 70 rue Bonaparte
in the 6th district. You will present your first exhibition
dedicated to Andy Goldsworthy, a young Scottish artist
Land Art and met at the Venice Biennale. You choose by the
two main types of exhibitions: those devoted to
artists - you then give a large place to Belgian artists - and
Others, with thematic content and bringing together various artists, such as
“coloring” or “kitchen and outbuildings”, to name a few.

Became a reference in this little world of art
contemporary», whose novelist David Lodge could have made his honey,
you continue your task of promoting talented artists.

The gallery Aline Vidal thus appears as a directory always
contemporary artistic practices. It reflects the
current trends, when it does not simply play a role of
and guide. Your gallery is world-renowned and participates in the
major contemporary art fairs since 1991 such as FIAC, Art
Brussels, Loop, Paris Photo, or Art Basel, with François Morellet
in 2009.

In addition to promoting contemporary art, your gallery
is also interested in design and architecture, not forgetting your
consulting with collectors and professionals
of art.

Member of the Board of Directors of the NSM Life Foundation
1998 to 2008 and, most recently, a member of the
Aid Commission for the first exhibition and catalogue of the
Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP), you also work for
a stronger presence of contemporary creation in politics
public.

Because today I wish to reward your work, which
contributes to the cultural influence of France abroad and to the
promotion of the French visual arts scene, dear Aline Vidal, on behalf
of the French Republic, we make you Knight in the order of
Arts and Letters.