Jennifer Flay: sharing art's universal truths

Despite her piercing eyes and chic black attire, the acknowledged ‘grande dame of the French art world’, Jennifer Flay, is not intimidating or très snob on video call. Chatty and at ease, she kindly brushes off tech issues as she explains how, in 1999, she lost nearly everything she had worked for over the previous two decades.

At the time, the kid from West Auckland turned celebrated Parisienne art dealer had exhibited globally important artists for nearly a decade. These included her good friend and lasting inspiration Felix Gonzalez-Torres, whose 1996 death Jennifer describes as “still crushing”.

But being driven home one night, Jennifer was thrown through the car’s back window, landing on her head and breaking her neck (among other serious injuries). Recovery from the 1999 accident was slow and traumatic: she suffered memory loss, fatigue and vertigo – walking was impossible. Persistent neurological issues meant, by 2003, “it was the end of my gallery”, she says.

It was also the end of a dream. Wildly intelligent, Jennifer arrived in France on a French government scholarship in 1980, after receiving a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Auckland aged just 20. (She majored in French as well as art history, as her father had insisted she take a language at Auckland Girls’ Grammar School and she didn’t want to “waste” that hard-earned prior knowledge.)

After postgraduate study at the University of Nice, her smarts, empathy and bilingualism led to an informal apprenticeship with several leading French art dealers. “Extremely lucky”, she often travelled to New York to liaise with the likes of Jean-Michel Basquiat, before opening her own gallery in 1991.

Great art, says Jennifer, is about universal truths. “I’ve always been so fascinated by artists who delve into their inner selves and find something very personal and particular that manages to say something universal,” she says.

“It happens not so often, but we’ve got to be at least aiming for something that is going to concern and move everyone.”

She credits “amazing” University of Auckland Emeritus Professor Tony Green for her realisation that “I didn’t have to put footnotes on all my comments”. She recalls Tony instructing students to ‘look at the painting – tell me what you really see’.

“It was so scary! It upturned everything we [art history students] had learned to do,” she says. “It was so giddying – exhilarating, too.

“When I decided I wanted to work with artists of my generation, the belief that my personal vision and interpretation were valid really came from Tony Green. You can’t work with contemporary artists, early in their practice, if you depend on authors to tell you what you are seeing.”

The next chapter of her life, however, was even more influential.

Jennifer was still recuperating from the car accident when she was asked to become artistic director of the Foire Internationale d’Art Contemporain, or FIAC – Paris’s contemporary international art fair. “I thought, no, I’m not well enough; I don’t have the force to do FIAC,” recalls Jennifer.
Globally, the art fair system moves billions of dollars, but FIAC had gone downhill, and friends advised her not to compromise her own hard-earned reputation by taking the job.

But she changed her mind. Why? “In the 1980s, my generation, my friends, we all got a lot out of FIAC,” explains Jennifer. Letting it go to seed, she says, “would make us irresponsible for the younger generations”.

She went to work with “the same commitment as if it was my own gallery”. She helped move FIAC from the city’s periphery back to the Grand Palais in the heart of Paris and set up an annual additional temporary art fair building, in the Louvre courtyard no less.

A collector of mid-20th century furniture herself, she pioneered the inclusion of design within the global art fair system. Taking sole charge as FIAC general director from 2010, she led the transformation of FIAC into what the arts media has lauded as “the crown princess of the European art fairs”.

But her influence reaches even further. In 2016, a year after terrorists killed 130 people in Paris in France’s worst peacetime attacks, the Guardian proclaimed Paris was using ‘art and activism to regain its soul’. It attributed this mostly to another brainchild of Jennifer’s – FIAC’s privately funded free programme of sculpture, held all over Paris, including in the Jardin des Tuileries.

Like rescuing FIAC itself, Jennifer sees ensuring free access to art as a responsibility: “Everybody should have the possibility of discovering art in places that are not intimidating, not expensive, in a natural way.”

She engaged art students to be guides, who could discuss the sculptures “in terms as simple or as complex as was appropriate”. Those who enjoyed the art included young families, schoolchildren, and marginalised populations such as the homeless and sex workers who did not feel comfortable entering public art galleries, but who loved seeing sculpture in the park.

“I was like, wow, perhaps we are making a difference,” says Jennifer.

La France is certainly grateful for her significant contribution to the country, bestowing on her the Chevalier rank of the Légion d’honneur in 2015, and the ultimate rank of Commandeur of the prestigious Order of Arts and Letters in 2021. In April, she was among those listed on Forbes France’s 50 over 50 list of game-changing women.

Yet she was just as thrilled to receive a special recognition award from the UK Friends of the University of Auckland last year.

“It’s recognition from my own country, where I began, from my source, my origin, and that’s important to me,” she says.

She comes back to New Zealand occasionally – she’s next returning in December for a nephew’s wedding. Family is important – her mother, a nurse, died when Jennifer was just 14; her “hero” father, a tailor, continued encouraging her interest in art. Her sisters both work in health: Sarah Flay is a midwife in Seattle and Briar (Elizabeth) Peat is deputy head of the medical programme in the University’s Faculty of Medical and Health Sciences.

Jennifer also carries New Zealand’s landscapes in her heart, describing them “like a secret garden … so grandiose, so sublime”.

Having left FIAC’s successor (Swiss giant Art Basel) late last year, Jennifer, at 66, is now contributing her expertise, networks and vision to the Fiminco Foundation, which includes a vast multidisciplinary cultural venue on the outskirts of Paris. The foundation wants to expand overseas.

“It’s a new challenge, absolutely,” she says, with relish. “I love new beginnings.”