Sylvie Rondeau and her children are doing their utmost to publicise and promote the work left by Champagne-based photographer Gérard Rondeau, who passed away unexpectedly in 2016.
When the great artist photographer Gérard Rondeau suddenly died in 2016, he left behind a multi-faceted body of works predominantly consisting of portraits, as well as studies on the landscape, cultural heritage and various other subjects. Since his death, his wife Sylvie has kept a watchful eye on the thousands of negatives preserved in drawers at the family home – where the photographer’s small prints also reside – and has put the largest items in temporary storage at the Hôtel du Marc in Reims. This is fortunate because the main difficulty in managing a heritage collection of this magnitude lies in finding the space required to store this amount of material in the first place. The next challenge is organising the collection. “We were lucky that Gerard was very meticulous in categorising his work – it was all sorted chronologically up to the early 2000s and then by subject matter thereafter,” acknowledges Sylvie Rondeau, who alongside her children is entrusted with bringing the artist’s invaluable work to life.
This is a mammoth task, with monthly requests coming in for many of Gérard Rondeau’s negatives and printed pictures. Although Paris-based gallery Baudoin Lebon and Agence VU’ represent the photographer’s work when these requests involve his most widely published photographs, all other enquiries are passed along to Sylvie Rondeau, who is then tasked with tracking down individual photos for exhibitions, magazine features and editorials. Sometimes this can take days. “Fortunately, there are 35 published books featuring Gérard’s photos,” she says. “They are a really important resource for me, as I can find shots more easily through access to such a large bibliography.”
In addition, Gérard Rondeau kept all the framed shots from exhibitions of his work, and his wife also has many boxes of prints at her disposal that she can look through and, over the longer term, have digitised in high definition by the Dupon Laboratory in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which had a long-standing working relationship with her husband when he was alive. Only around 10% of the negatives have been digitised so far, and the last comprehensive inventory of these was carried out back in 2004, which shows that there is still a great deal of work to be done to safeguard and circulate the work left by the artist. A task for a specialist organisation, as its scope clearly extends beyond the capabilities of the photographer’s family alone.
It is Gérard Rondeau’s portraits that are particularly sought after – often portraits of artists commissioned for the newspaper Le Monde, with whom he worked for several decades. The broadsheet’s editorial team selected a portrait by Gérard Rondeau to illustrate the obituary of painter Pierre Soulages when he died several months ago. And when the photographer died back in 2016, art critic Philippe Dagen reflected on his particular style of portrait painting in a column for Le Monde: “For Rondeau, capturing an image was crucial only insofar that the viewer could sense the subject being weighed down by what happened in the past – there’s a history that can be deciphered in the lines on their face and in what they’re wearing – as well as by what may happen in the future, from a smile or a look of anger. Regardless of their age and situation, the people captured by Rondeau are complex, complicated beings, so we can only speculate about what lies behind the image.” A beautiful tribute to the power of his work, which has a depth rarely seen. Sylvie Rondeau has also been contacted for book covers, including recently for Les Vivants et les autres, the French edition of Angolan author José Eduardo Agualusa’s latest novel, as well as for the new French editions of Camus’ The Plague and The Stranger, “which were very popular during lockdown”, and for a portrait of Jean-Paul Riopelle, arguably Quebec’s greatest painter. Partner of Joan Mitchell and friend of Paul Rebeyrolle, his portrait was painted by Gérard Rondeau and will take centre stage at his dedicated retrospective in Quebec this summer.
Gérard Rondeau has left a colossal body of work and his wife intends to share it with as many people as possible. Although she has a few ideas in mind for books, these are currently in the planning stage, as her main priority is to organise two annual exhibitions of Gérard Rondeau’s photographs. “It’s not exactly straightforward. I’ve become a curator just like that, on my own. Gérard died very suddenly, so he hadn’t passed any information on to me. Preparing for an exhibition requires a great deal of research, decision-making and work – people can’t imagine all it entails when they visit afterwards.” Sylvie Rondeau is taking personal responsibility for the exhibition. “I’m very familiar with Gérard’s expectations in this area. That’s why I’m trying to exhibit works in line with what he would have wanted to see.” After being contacted by groups keen to exhibit Gérard Rondeau’s work, there are certain steps in the process that his wife has been able to outsource. The gallery hosting the exhibition, for instance, takes care of the grant applications, insurance contracts and transport, among other things.
Rondeau’s wife is supported in showcasing his work by the Gérard Rondeau association, presided over by writer and journalist Jean-Paul Kauffman and including some of the photographer’s close friends, such as author and academic Frédéric Vitoux, publisher and journalist Olivier Frébourg, the founder of Éditions des Équateurs as well as musician Miguel da Silva. Since it was founded in 2008, the association has sought to promote, publicise and champion the photographer’s work. To shine a light on its efforts, association members may be required to fundraise for projects in the future. “They are all a tremendous help in raising awareness of Gérard’s work, spreading the word and putting us in touch with people who could exhibit or publish it,” highlights Sylvie Rondeau, whose three children support her in her numerous efforts. “My daughter carried out an inventory of all the framed photographs. It’s a big job, without which we would find it impossible to select the right photographs for an individual exhibition’s needs,” she says. Updating the artist’s website is another major challenge – and one they struggle to keep up with. A family model that is pushed to its limits given the scale of the task involved. And one that may need additional support with the collection in order to move forward and give more visibility to the Champagne-based artist’s unique research.
>> Read our article on Gérard Rondeau’s work here
