The great expectation

This tireless “searcher” has been building up one of the world’s most beautiful collections since the 1980s. He is often criticised, but his “artists” defend him tooth and nail.

With his slim build, round-rimmed eyeglasses and white hair, this cheerful chain smoker looks like an eternal adolescent. André Magnin calls himself a “researcher”, a “searcher”, a “curator” but never an “art dealer” — the label that fits him best. He also dislikes being dubbed an “explorer”, despite bearing a passing resemblance to Indiana Jones.

Yet Mr. Magnin, a French citizen, is one of the greatest names in contemporary African art. He has spent the last three decades travelling the length and breadth of the continent to spot talented artists and buy their works, sometimes paying them three times more than what they ask for. A “kingmaker” who helped boost the prices of Congolese painter Chéri Samba and the Beninese visual artist Romuald Hazoumé, Mr. Magnin gladly invites guests into his bright apartment on boulevard Voltaire in Paris, decorated with many artworks throughout. He is welcoming, but says nothing about himself or his family. Just that he was born in Franche-Comté and that his earliest childhood memories, which were “decisive” in his life, are inextricably bound up with Madagascar, where he lived from age three to seven.

The young Mr. Magnin hung out with hippies in Lozère. In the 1970s, the happenings’ heyday, he became interested in art performances in Düsseldorf, Germany. One thing led to another and, thanks to people he met, in 1987 he became assistant to Jean-Hubert Martin, curator of the “Magicians of the Earth” exhibition. Two years later, he exhibited contemporary art from Africa and Latin America for the first time in France at the Pompidou Centre and La Villette in Paris. Although the shows came under fire from critics, Jean Pigozzi, the billionaire photographer, philanthropist and son of the man who founded the automaker Simca, contacted him.

Mr. Pigozzi dreamed of amassing the world’s biggest contemporary African art collection. He gave Mr. Magnin carte blanche and everything it took to root out works in difficult places, such as Mozambique during the civil war and Mobutu’s Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of Congo.

The Geneva-based Pigozzi collection boasts over 15,000 pieces, ten times more than that of Sindika Dokolo, the greatest African collector. It has travelled the world, from Houston’s Museum of Fine Arts to Washington, D.C.’s National Museum of African Art, Turin’s Agnelli Pinacoteca, Bilbao’s Guggenheim Museum and London’s Tate Modern. This geographical and institutional itinerary allowed him to fill his own address book, make his mark and arouse the curiosity of major collectors now interested in African art, such as François Pinault, who owns the Palazzo Grassi and the Punta de la Dogana Museum in Venice.

By 2009, the self-described “art searcher” was standing on his own two feet. In Paris, he founded Magnin-A, which is not a brick-and-mortar gallery but asks the catalogue’s artists to participate in various events. For example, he invited Omar Victor Diop to Paris Photo in November 2014, which helped send the young Dakar photographer into the art world’s stratosphere. The Grand Palais hosted a show of his latest series of self-portraits, “Diaspora”, which sold like hotcakes. The champagne flowed like water at Magnin-A’s booth.