"Have we finally swallowed what they want us to believe, that there is a popular culture and another that is not for all of us?"

This summer, at the Marguerite and Aimé Maeght Foundation [which brings together thousands of works of modern and contemporary art, in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the Alpes-Maritimes] , while browsing the exhibition "Art & Life" by the British sculptor Barbara Hepworth (1903-1975), I discovered a committed woman who, like other artists from the Abstraction-Création collective, believed that creation and abstraction in particular could participate in social transformation and the fight against fascism. She wrote in 1937: "The language of color and form is universal and not reserved for a particular class... It is a thought that gives the same life, the same expansion, the same individual freedom to everyone."

I find myself saying to myself: "That is indeed a bygone thought, a thought of the ^20th century," and I am stunned by these words spoken in the secret of my heart, much more stunned than if I had uttered them before an assembly. So I utter them, I silently carry them forward, I write them in this platform because they shame me and because I dare to believe that they are not mine.

Besides, everything in me rebels against them, everything I still believe in, my entire journey. In the 1970s, when I was a teenager and bored at the Cannes high school, where I lived at the time, I came hitchhiking alone to the Maeght Foundation. I don't know what could have given me such a desire. Nothing predisposed me to feel any interest in painting, which I only knew from books. And that was already a lot.

Thanks be to the history and geography teacher who, before the summer holidays, at the end of secondary school, gave me, without a word of explanation, four volumes of a General History of Painting , including The Great Masters of Modern Painting , which I would discover, in real life, at the Maeght Foundation, in the heart of an exhilarating architecture. Braque, Staël, Tapies or Giacometti, I was dazzled.

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