…and indeed, emerging from the elevator at the Jewish Museum in NYC at mid-day on Friday, November 14, 2025, I came face to face with this striking piece by Christian Boltanski (1944-2021) — an artist I have admired over four decades for his elegaic, memory-laden constructs, assemblages, installations, and videos pulsating with gloomy reminiscence. There it was: Depart/Arrivee, his 2015 appeal and affront to one’s senses that I had seen in its inaugural American iteration at the Marion Goodman Gallery soon after the artist’s death, “resonating deeply with the Jewish Diasporic experience of forced departures and new beginnings,”
It made me more than sad this time around: rather, profoundly grateful for having experienced Boltanski’s atrium-scaled pyramid of discarded clothing, Personnes (Persons/Nobodies); and the intimate Lycee Chases, three rows of vintage photographs of girls framed by old tin boxes, illuminated by black overhead lamps and strung with fibers of electric wire, a chiaroscuro hymn to lost childhood.
What else could we expect from a child born in Nazi-occupied Paris during the nearly two years his parents, a Jewish-Ukranian doctor and Corsican mother, were hiding beneath the floorboards of his family apartment; an artist who spent a lifetime recounting historical trauma, “not about politics so much as the destinies of the dead intertwining with those of the living;”
I did not want to turn away — depart — from Boltanski’s characteristic motif of ever-present lightbulbs, realizing I had arrived — arrivee — after two minutes of disturbing rumination at the threshold of his by turns illuminated, diminished vision.
[Depart-Arrivee. Christian Boltanski. 2015. Light bulbs and electric wire. Purchase: Gift of the Aronson family in honor of the Jewish Museum staff. 2025-85a and b.]
