Interview with Jean-Michel Attal
From the wondrous discovery of a gallery in Paris in the late 1970s to opening his own art centre in 2024, Jean-Michel Attal has nurtured an enduring passion for contemporary art.
Our Head of Art Banking Services Laurent Issaurat met with the collector who is also an ambassador for abstract and contemporary creation.
Tell us about how you first fell in love with contemporary art.
It all started in the late 70s when I met the journalist Guillaume Durand, who became a friend. His parents owned a gallery in Paris, and while I come from a literary family that loves classical music, art was always secondary. When I visited Guillaume’s family gallery my eyes were opened; art became a world of my own in which I could thrive. Looking back, I see this as one of life’s lucky encounters, a discovery of the world of art and its extraordinary energy.
Fifty years on, how has your artistic sensibility evolved since falling in love with your first pieces?
I have always been fascinated by abstraction — first the French abstract painters of the turn of the 20th century, then by the post-war American painters up to the 1970s. Mark Rothko, Donald Judd, Robert Morris and Franz Kline very much informed my appreciation. From there, my interests grew to include other media like photography, installations and video. My current interest is in figurative painting: artists like Gerhard Richter — with his masterful combination of abstraction and figuration — are simply breathtaking.
When did you become a collector?
At the time I didn’t realise I was building a collection; I simply bought works that resonated with me and made me happy, without any expert advice or investment in mind. Today the collection includes both emerging and established artists like Soulages, Sol LeWitt, Lee Ufan and Miriam Cahn. The 500 or so works I’ve collected over forty years are held together by a certain artistic radicalism and their sociological and political dimension. And that they are far from decorative.
In 2024 you opened a space in Paris dedicated to art. Tell us about that.
It marked the third chapter of my life as an art lover, after a phase of learning about art and building up a collection. The space is called LAC — Loukoums & Art Contemporain — as a nod to my love for the Orient and lakes in all their beauty. Rather than a gallery, LAC is a space for discovering emerging artists and where talents can potentially find collectors of their art, commission-free. It both gives exposure to artists and is a venue for conferences, poetry evenings and dance performances.
We also have a programme for school pupils from age 11 and open our doors to the general public on Saturday afternoons.
Is your family involved in this endeavour?
My children grew up surrounded by art, whether hung on the walls at home or in the museums and galleries we went to. This influenced them to varying degrees: one of my children is an artist! I never involved them in my acquisitions, though they were all deeply impressed when LAC opened. It shone a new light on the collection I’d built up over the years, and some of the works were completely new to them.
What advice would you give to newcomers to the contemporary art world?
People very often hold back and don’t dare step into galleries or museums, thinking they know nothing about art, when in fact you need to train your eye. That means getting out there and looking at artworks and recognising that there are some you like and others you don’t. That’s already a big step — and the most important one at that!
Jean-Michel Attal
With more than four decades of dedication to contemporary art, Jean-Michel Attal has established himself as a respected collector and advocate of artistic creation. After a distinguished career as a business notary specializing in commercial real estate, he founded the LAC (Loukoums & Art Contemporain) in Paris in 2024, an independent cultural space dedicated to supporting emerging artists and fostering dialogue around contemporary art.
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