The Toulouse-born artist Jean-Marc Bustamante has been appointed as director of the École Nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris (Ensba), France’s most prestigious art school, after the controversial departure of its former head Nicolas Bourriaud earlier this year.
The announcement yesterday, 2 September, by the ministry of culture ends weeks of speculation about who will take over after Fleur Pellerin, the French culture secretary, dismissed Bourriaud in July.
The French magazine Le Canard Enchainé reported that Pellerin had lined up Eric de Chassey, the director of the French Academy in Rome, for the post, a move denied by the ministry of culture. Nadeije Laneyrie-Dagen, a professor of history of art history at the École normale supérieure graduate school in Paris, and the art critic Stéphane Corréard were among eight candidates.
Bustamante, who has works in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Tate in London, has taught at Ensba since 1998. He represented France at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and was the artistic director of the contemporary art festival Le Printemps de Septembre from 2012 to 2015.
The ministry of culture says in a statement that “Bustamante wants to put the artist at the heart of [Ensba], and raise the college’s international profile by placing it among leading institutions in a global context.” But following his appointment, Bustamante told our sister paper Le Journal des Arts why he thinks the higher education system is too rigid in France, saying: “When a student shows me his work, he always needs to justify it, give a logical reason, as if poetry did not exist… In Germany, artists exist for their work.”
Earlier this year, the ministry said that the higher education institution needed a “new impetus”, adding that the new director must ensure a greater social mix of students so that “the exceptional education [received at Ensba] is not reserved for a select few”.
