Ladies and gentlemen,
Dear friends,
I am very pleased to welcome you here tonight, and to celebrate your new promotion as Masters of Art. It is a very rare ceremony, in the image of your trades and your know-how. A very precious ceremony, in the image of the materials you work with, the gestures you perform, so meticulous and so sensitive.
What is rewarded here is a virtue: this concern to transmit and to make live techniques, which sometimes had to be revived only to your passion, after having been long forgotten. You have the desire to see them last, the patience to teach them, and you know that they will continue to flourish through your students.
What we celebrate here is a talent: to make use of these skills acquired, deepened, reinvented over the years, in a new space of creation, ours, the contemporary. A space and a time where matter and finesse more than ever regain their right. A space and a time where the object of the past finds new vigour and where it is combined with the forms, usages and expectations of today.
How can we not be moved, imagining Céline Bonnot Diconne holding in her hands the testimony of dailies that have long gone? Leather slippers, Cordoba leathers, find with you a new life, thanks to your restoration work. Marie Heran will undoubtedly learn a lot by your side.
Leather is also the material worked by Yves Reeman, and his student François Claessens. How rare are the sheaths and gilders on leather! You have gone into books in search of forgotten techniques, while giving them a new topicality, like these polychrome carved leather wall hangings that are among your creations.
When one looks at Jacques Bréjoux reconstructing the paper of yesteryear, in his Moulin de Puymoyen, on the banks of the Charente, one suddenly thinks of these first pages of lost illusions, which begin in the lower-Angoulême, where the author recounts all the history of the paper and the printing work that made long body with the history of the city. Amandine Camp will learn by your side how to fill the gaps in the manuscripts, what you do for the Louvre as well as for the Library of Congress.
With Armand Klavun and Cédric Verdier, who have been working together for a long time, since the second is the employee of the first, it is a little more to the east, at the foothills of the Massif Central, that we will discover another technique, meticulous and ancestral: thatch. To be a leader today, to work the straw, rather than the reed, to preserve the ancient character of the houses or eco-museums rehabilitated, it is a profession so rare that you wished at all costs to make it continue.
The material of Hervé Obligi and his student, Camille Berthaux, is stone, the material with which «we never get bored» according to his own words, whose interest lies in resistance as much as in changing colors. Hard stone marqueter, we owe you among many other things, the pavements of the Hotel de la Païva, on the Champs Elysées. Transmitting your art also means being able to devote yourself more to creation.
It is a similar ambition that convinced Sylvain Le Guen to pass on his expertise as a restaurateur to Yolaine Voltz. There are these materials so particular, the bone, the mother-of-pearl, the horn or the scale, which require precise techniques, a mastery of art very rare as that of the tablemaker-fan, who lives today in the cinema as in the jewelry, New experimental ground for the master you are.
Creation is also at the heart of the daily life of Jean-Marc Schilt, Master of Meisenthal and glass blower at the International Glass Art Centre. Glass blower, you work with renowned designers today. Jasper Morrison, among others, comes to you to find expertise. You yourself say that exchange with the creator is the best school. I have no doubt that Sébastien Mauer, who has been at the CIAV for many years, will acquire at your side a part of this know-how.
For Bertrand Cattiaux, the training course was first on the ground, with the attendance of rare organs. You have already thought about it: Virgile Bardin, your student, will become familiar with the techniques that vary according to the times. With you, French harmony holds one of its great masters, restaurateurs and creators.
I cannot conclude this portrait gallery without finally evoking the very particular art of Fanny Boucher: the gravure. This transfer of image on the copper plate to the cut-and-soft printing with so disturbing character, you say, linked to these fleeting appearances of the image. There is something precarious and definitive at the same time, in the action you are taking, which is always the subject of long discussions. With Antonin Pons-Braley, your student, you seek to transmit as much as to irrigate new ideas your work. That’s probably what makes your partner so rich.
In a few minutes, you will come to join the very rare and precious team of art masters of France. For twenty years, since my Ministry made this distinction on baptismal funds, only 124 women and men have received it. It has enabled so many students to carry in their turn these skills of which they are now the depositories.
Twenty years later, it was time to include it in our texts, as I wanted to do in the bill I have been presenting to parliamentarians since the fall. Not only by recognition, but by choice: because your crafts and all the crafts of art, design and fashion, are today skills and techniques that are essential to the development and influence of France. My Ministry, like the Ministry of Crafts and Industry, is responsible for promoting it.
So it was created 20 years ago. And we know that in twenty years, the economy has changed, habits have changed, the conditions in which art teachers work have changed, vocational training has changed. It was also time to evaluate and evolve. Thanks to the support of the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation, whose commitment to the arts and crafts is well known here and whose presence I welcome among us Director Olivier Brault, we have been able to obtain a study of very high quality, which provides a solid basis for reform. One of the main challenges concerns the student’s place within the system, the value of his training and his integration into the world of work.
All this makes it necessary to build a true training framework. As with positive experiences in art schools, the art master will build a transmission plan and the student his personalized training program.
The status of the student will be consolidated. In particular, we will ensure that the contract between the student and the art master is completed and enriched if necessary, so that it corresponds to his needs.
We will work to open the training path and personalize it, so that the student can be trained in other transversal disciplines that will be useful to him to conduct his own activity: management, language learning… The art schools under my ministry, its workshops and factories are a resource that we will put to greater use. Openness is also about international mobility and the experience of other modes of transmission. We will expand that.
Finally, we all know that people learn throughout their lives, especially in these occupations. The duration of the training must be adaptable to the projects. We have so far set a 3-year framework, but it could be 2 or 4 years. In these new conditions, so that the relationship between the Master and the student is as solid as possible, we will establish a clear contractual framework.
It is at the Institut National des Métiers d'Art, of which I greet President Gérard Desquand that it will be the responsibility to guarantee these new provisions. He will be able to count on the support and the competition of the Bettencourt-Schueller Foundation and those of the General Directorate of Artistic Creation.
My dear friends, as you will understand, I am deeply attached to your professions. I measure their richness, creativity and beauty every day. You also know how attached my Ministry is to this work, since it has nearly 1200 professionals of the crafts, in its manufactures, its workshops of creation and restoration. I know nothing more powerful than this vocation to create and preserve works of art. I know how the conditions under which you operate it, I know that your companies are undergoing profound changes, and that these changes are not going without difficulty. But we all know here what you bring to our country, to its industry and to its influence. You will soon be able to count on the help and support of the Crafts Support Fund that I wanted to set up. It will be operational in the first quarter of 2016. I am delighted that Ateliers d'arts de France is contributing to this.
Thank you to each of you. Thanks to the Master of Art, who are no longer simply creators or business leaders when they transmit, but attentive and generous smugglers. Thank you to the students, engaged in a journey of excellence and demand, and bearers of both personal and collective ambition. I don’t forget that the word masterpiece comes from your professions, the crafts of art.
Thank you.