Yves Hernot Shortlisted for the Archibald Prize, the 74-year-old memory-broker has solved in his own way what Proust called the ‘incomprehensible contradiction of memory and nothingness’.
An Ali Baba’s cave. I don’t know where to cast my eyes in this overflow of knick-knacks of all kinds, photos, rare paintings and Mambo vases. It’s motley, cluttered and nothing looks the same. But in the end, I found my breadcrumb trail. Is this an analogy with my meeting with Yves Hernot? I’d made an appointment to meet him in Sydney, just off Hyde Park, in his flat beyond the clouds, a penthouse as well-stocked as a museum back room. He opens the door to me with a firm but tender handshake, a velvety gaze behind his smoked glasses and the obligatory use of the formal form: the tone seems to have been set. I thought I was meeting one of those old wolves who likes to think of himself as a surrogate father to every new person he meets. As a contender for the prestigious Archibald Prize, he undoubtedly knows that he is the hope of a nation awaiting the consecration of the portrait of a Frenchman. I’ll soon see that I’ve got it all wrong. As soon as we were seated, he suggested that we get on a first-name basis and told me all about himself with disconcerting ease. Yves Hernot? The name already aroused my curiosity, my father’s first name and a surname worthy of a Swiss watchmaker. A magician returning from the past, Karl Lagerfeld, the fashion designer, who would meet Picasso, the painter. ‘I’d like to make love until I die,’ he says outright. His father, a Franco-Tunisian who owned orchards in La Soukra, near the Tunis golf course, was a scientist, including director of research at the Institut National de Recherche Agronomique. He spent five years in a prison camp in East Prussia, in Kalingrad, Russia. His Belgian mother worked for the Red Cross, helping French prisoners to survive by sending them parcels. That’s how they met, through parcels and correspondence. Marie-Louise Rooms, known as ‘Malou’, was decorated at the age of 22 for her role in the Resistance, from which I would be tempted to say that Yves derives his love of medals, one in particular: the Order of Merit that the Consul General of Sydney Anne Boillon presented to him on 1 January 2021. His parents are eminent and his life a jigsaw puzzle, an archipelago, a game of clues. Multicultural, yet he says he feels more Belgian than French. He was born in 1950 in Chaudfontaine, Belgium, to parents with a taste for beauty: one a fan of Berber jewellery, the other a collector of Roman coins. It was in Tunisia, when he was a teenager, that he had his artistic epiphany: Roman architecture, Roman mosaics, Roman paintings; the young man from a good family was in love with ancient Rome and ephebic bodies. Like his mother, he also loved Tunisian art, textiles, jewellery and woodwork. The years 1967-1980 marked his non-conformist period. Yves was an anti-system rebel, an activist with the Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, and devoted to abstract expressionist painting. His masters were Soulages, Hartung, Bellmer, Tapies, Rothko and Otto Dix. In 1975, Yves moved to Sydney and also spent a good deal of time in his studio in São Paulo, based in the Edificio COPAN, built by a certain Oscar Niemeyer. In Yves Hernot’s life, nothing is left to chance. His compass is aesthetics.
If he had to define himself, he’d say that ‘he’s a bit of everything, but especially a philanthropist in recent years’. He also describes himself, by accident, as ‘suicidal last week’ but says he’s ‘feeling much better today’. So much the better. Reference is made to his friend who shared his life for 48 years and who left the world a short time ago. The wise 74-year-old combines philanthropy with daily discussions with the group of artists he guides and advises. Is this just another way of staying young? More like a necessity: ‘I want to give back what I’ve been given’. You’d bet big, though, on everything he wasn’t given, which he had to go out and find for himself, by dint of courage and ideas. His family was expelled from Tunisia in July 1964, losing everything in the process. Young Yves arrived in Paris penniless. No matter, his talent enabled him to enter the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, ‘the best school in the world’, and to graduate with honours in 1974, having won the Académie des Beaux-Arts prize that year. Not at all devious, Yves Hernot seems to be the same then as he is now. He is calm, thoughtful, cultured, sharp in everything. Mischievous at times, but always demanding. I even manage to wring a few brief smiles out of him here and there, offered at the bend of one of his bon mots. With little interest in public affairs, he feels that his heart is on the left and his wallet on the right. Is this due to his need to give back? Trying to retrace the route that led him to this flat today, he remembers Sydney 50 years ago: a village in which he was ‘more sensitive than today’. Others might quickly feel alienated by this account of the past, but on the contrary, it interests me. The truth is that it reveals as much as it reveals.
Landivisiau. The original village. In Finistère, a land of wind and stone. This is his hometown, where he was honoured as a local boy with the Medal of Honour of Landivisiau in 2020. It’s also where the memory of his mother lurks, in this land of contrasts, a land that preserves the traces of his illustrious ancestors, and of which he is understandably proud. ‘I’m not French, I’m Breton’. An avid collector of history and knowledge, Hernot likes to make an inventory of the objects that fill his ivory tower to the brim. So many memories accumulated to better exist. And never topple into nothingness. It’s when he tells me that he doesn’t miss anything about France, that he doesn’t miss anything that would have come from over there, that we feel him at his most touching, stripping off the clothes of the strong, self-assured man for a few moments. He even adds: ‘Perhaps this article might be of interest to French newspapers’. That says it all. Artistic is the key word in his life: you look at the paintings one by one, all in different styles, but yes, you look at them, one by one, tirelessly, with the same candour. The result is a wealth of classical paintings, signed chairs from the Petit Trianon that you can’t sit on for fear of wearing them out, various objects and medals, too. He is not a romanticist by any stretch of the imagination, and prefers to think of the works in his collection as ‘investments, a bit like buying a flat’. He even admits: ‘I don’t buy them for their beauty, but because their value will go up’. Venal, then? We understand that it’s more a question of a framework on which to rest on stormy days. And there have been quite a few of those in Sydney recently, and in Finistère, literally ‘the end of the earth’. CQFD.
From head to toe, he looks solid and grounded in his large flat. His grey hair falls straight across his forehead. His dark glasses, which he takes off for a moment to reveal a more tender and shy look than he is willing to let on. A chunky woollen jumper. Apart from his pretty brown moccasins, undoubtedly Italian, he is not dressed up, nor does he seem to have seen fit to dress any differently from when he was alone. There’s no need to ask him about the place of money in his life. He’s got it, and he lets us know. With a pirouette, he lists the (high) prices of the works of art stored all over his living room. He has good taste and a nose for the right artists: Goubalathaldin, William Young, the Bali Nine. There’s even a Streeton, the great Australian painter. Not forgetting to mention that, as he has no children, he will have to leave his collection to museums. However, for these legacies, he will have to select the museums according to their collections, their affinities – and his own. It’s a time-consuming task to which he devotes his days. Not because he considers his departure imminent, but rather because the man is organised. Yves Hernot has a sense of humour, and sometimes you get the feeling that it wouldn’t take much to laugh out loud with him. As soon as the meeting begins, he talks about his former beauty and the problems he had in Tunisia due to ‘too many suitors’. He smiles as he recounts the cancellation of his arranged marriage to the daughter of the Beylicale family, descendants of the family that ruled Tunisia. A sign – if any were needed – of the creative chaos swirling around the man.
After five decades in Australia, Yves Hernot is now talking about his three-month trip to Europe, starting in September. Belgium, because he ‘has to go there’. Dublin, where he has quite a few cousins. The man is clearly on the move, having just returned from six weeks in Bangkok.
As we talk, I realise with great joy that I’m probably looking at the last Earl of Hyde Park, with a will and a fire in his belly that nothing can extinguish. And if that’s not enough, how else can we explain this third attempt to win the prestigious Archibald Prize? If he has the tan of a healthy man or one who has spent hours in the sun watching the world spin around him, his whole life could be summed up in this room overflowing with relics of the past. Photos of his parents, the ashes of his friend. His flat, so far away and yet so close, populated by people who are no longer, suddenly seems like a desert island where an old child, shipwrecked by grief, is stranded in search of the treasures that time, its walls and its shelves have buried there.
Olivier Vojetta
Discussion about this post