The collection of writer and curator Daniel Abadie: ‘His total commitment to artists will be deeply missed’

Daniel Abadie was just 18 and still at school when he published his first poetry magazine, Strophes (‘Stanzas’), from his parents’ home on the outskirts of Paris in 1963. The black-and-white publication, featuring texts by the poets Max Jacob and René Char, revealed a schoolboy passion for Surrealism in its heyday and a love affair with the 1920s Marxist magazine Philosophies, edited by Pierre Morhange, Henri Lefebvre, Georges Politzer and Norbert Guterman. In the febrile intellectual atmosphere of mid-1960s Paris, Abadie’s fanzine attracted interest from the avant-garde, and before long the precocious editor was making a name for himself on the city’s art scene.

Over the next 60 years, until his death in 2023, Abadie forged a unique path as a curator and writer. He devised groundbreaking exhibitions for the Grand Palais, the Centre Pompidou and the Jeu de Paume, and reintroduced the public to artists such as the Italian painter Alberto Magnelli and the American Surrealist Dorothea Tanning.

Abadie was a bold and assertive personality, as characterised by Catherine Millet (Catherine M.) in her autobiographical novel Commencements, which recounted their lives as twentysomethings in Paris. His enthusiasm for art was honed by his devotion to Surrealism, and he used its tenets to great effect, finding imaginative and subversive ways of sidestepping technical and bureaucratic hurdles.

‘He gave new visibility to key figures in French abstraction — often swimming against the current of prevailing trends,’ says his friend and colleague, France’s former Minister of Culture, Rima Abdul Malak.

On 30 September 2025, Collection Daniel Abadie, Une vie d’artistes is offered at Christie’s in Paris, featuring works by many of the artists the curator and writer championed over the course of his career, among them Jean Dubuffet, Wassily Kandinsky, Sophie Taeuber-Arp and Zao Wou-Ki. ‘His sharp, generous gaze and his total commitment to artists will be deeply missed,’ says Malak.

Here, we look back at his career through seven of the works on offer.

Jean Hélion, Nu renversé, 1949

In 1970, Abadie co-commissioned the exhibition Hélion: 100 works 1928-1970 at the Grand Palais. At just 25, Abadie was committed to reintroducing the work of Jean Hélion to the French public. The artist had left France for New York in 1934, where he had something of a Damascene conversion to figuration. This was a seismic shift for the painter, who — together with Jean Arp and Theo van Doesburg — had been a pioneer of abstraction in Paris, celebrated for his biomorphic forms.

Nu renversé (1949) is from a body of work made between 1949 and 1951, in which Hélion inverted the female figure — an important step in his evolution from abstraction to figuration. The work was painted during his marriage to Pegeen Vail, daughter of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim, at a time when Hélion, inspired by the Symbolist Charles Baudelaire, was looking for beauty in the everyday aspects of modern life.

Dorothea Tanning, Sans titre, 1965

In 1977, Abadie wrote the poem For Dorothea Tanning, which describes a surreal dream: ‘Under the curtain of shadows, biting into the flesh of silence, the offence of the morning…’ The curator had contributed significantly to the rediscovery of the American Surrealist when he curated a retrospective of her paintings and sculptures at CNAC (the National Centre of Contemporary Art, later absorbed into the Pompidou) in 1974.

Central to the show was a collection of soft anthropomorphic sculptures, inspired, said the artist, by a dream. The works were arranged in a faux hotel room, a dark interior in which the sculptures hung off the walls like alien life forms, echoing the unsettling atmosphere of her paintings. Abadie considered Tanning to have created some of the most meticulously rendered images of the Surrealist movement: playful, erotic and immersed in the miraculous.

Jean (Hans) Arp, Objets célestes, 1962

When the Centre Pompidou opened in 1977, Abadie curated one of its first exhibitions, a thrilling survey of the cross-cultural dialogue between Paris and New York between 1945 and 1975. With the rise of Nazism in Europe in the 1930s, many avant-garde artists had escaped to New York, where their subversive innovations found a home in the city’s burgeoning art scene.

After the Second World War, ex-servicemen from the US came to Paris on G.I. Bill scholarships and settled in the bohemian Left Bank, keen to embrace the city’s reputation for cutting-edge art. Soon, these interlopers were imparting their spirit of North American urbanism to the mix of cultural influences that shaped modern abstraction. Abadie was one of the first curators to recognise this vibrant cultural synthesis, in the exhibition Paris-New York: 1945-1975, which featured, among others, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, Pierre Soulages, Sam Francis and Niki de Saint Phalle.

Alberto Magnelli, Coordination, 1957

Abadie played a key role in the rediscovery of the Italian artist Alberto Magnelli, a pioneer of European abstraction who forged a singular path between Futurism, Cubism and geometric abstraction. In 1986, Abadie curated a major retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, re-establishing Magnelli as a daring innovator who explored the interplay between shape, line and curve to create rhythmic masterpieces.

Coordination (1957) is a key example of the artist’s experimental ‘Fork Graffiti’ series, in which he used the teeth of a fork to animate the painted surface to strikingly original effect.

Jesús Rafael Soto, Gran blanco, 1966

In 1994, Abadie became director of the recently refurbished Jeu de Paume in Paris, transforming the institution into an innovative gallery for contemporary art. Abadie was no stranger to the building, having overseen a major exhibition of the Venezuelan artist Jesús Rafael Soto in 1977. The painter had arrived in Paris in the late 1950s as part of a wave of young South American artists keen to embrace the avant-garde happenings in the French capital. He quickly became part of the Kinetic Art scene, participating in exhibitions with Alexander Calder, Duchamp and Victor Vasarely.

An audacious composition combining oil paint, steel rods and fine nylon wire, Gran blanco (1966) featured in the Jeu de Paume retrospective, which championed the artist as a dynamic force in late abstraction.

Jean Dubuffet, Texturologie XXVII (sable et argent), 1958

Abadie joined the board of the Fondation Dubuffet in 2007. Six years earlier, he had staged the grand centenary exhibition of the Art Brut pioneer at the Pompidou, which featured more than 280 paintings and 100 drawings, and incorporated all the artist’s great innovations, including his ‘Corps de dame’ cycle and his final ‘Non-lieu’ paintings of the year before his death in 1985.

His Texturologies of the late 1950s are arguably some of his most accomplished pieces, combining paint, sand and soil into granular compositions that echo the ‘all-over’ technique pioneered by Jackson Pollock in the 1940s. Dubuffet wanted to create the impression of a ‘living sparkling material’ reminiscent of the Earth, but also of the cosmos glittering with stars, prefiguring many modern artists’ fascination with the Space Race in the following decade.

Fabienne Verdier, Flux, 2008

In 2013, Abadie curated an exhibition of Fabienne Verdier’s work at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges. The painter had attracted Abadie’s attention for her ability to integrate traditional Chinese painting into her vast abstract canvases. ‘Impulse and mastery, science of the past and spontaneity of the moment,’ he wrote. ‘Fabienne Verdier’s work does not play with opposites, she reconciles them.’

Born in Paris in 1962, the young Verdier honed her skills in the traditional arts on a scholarship to Chongqing in China in the early 1980s. Through studying calligraphy and painting, Verdier developed an expansive gestural style which she used to convey nature’s life-giving force and energy on canvas.

Collection Daniel Abadie, Une vie d’artistes will be on view at Christie’s in Paris, 25-30 September 2025, before the sale on 30 September