Biography

March 1995

Jacques Cloarec @Angelo Frontoni

Jacques Cloarec – a Breton as his family name suggests – was born in Brest in 1938 under the sign of Pisces. He began his professional life as a schoolteacher in Brittany, where he took a keen interest in Celtic folklore and created and directed several groups of dancers and musicians. In 1960, he left to teach in Paris, and later took part, unenthusiastically, in the Algerian war. In 1962, he met Alain Daniélou, who had founded the Institut international d’études musicales comparées in Berlin.
He lived in West Berlin for fifteen years, then five years in Venice, where Alain Daniélou opened a branch of his Institute. His first job was to classify and record an important collection of photographs that Alain Daniélou and Raymond Burnier – the friend with whom he lived for over fifteen years in a mansion on the banks of the Ganges at Benares, a Swiss photographer and member of the Indian archaeological service – had gathered during their time in India. Never having visited India himself, Jacques Cloarec became familiar with the architecture of most of the great medieval temples, notably those of Khajuraho, Bhuvaneshwar and Konarak, as well as a dozen lesser-known temples such as Aihole, Ossian, Sirpur, Deogarh, Chandpur, Amarkantak, Parasnath and Abu, Sarnath and Sanchi, and so on. Thanks to this photo collection, he viewed the whole of India in spirit, since Burnier and Daniélou had brought back documents from Kulu, Malabar, Almora, Nagaland and Tamil Nadu. He also accompanied groups of classical musicians invited by Alain Daniélou to tour Europe, including the Dagar brothers, Sharan Rani, Pattadmal, Lakshmi Shankar, as well as groups of dancers, the Kathakhali troupe from Kerala Kalamandalam, Yamini Krishnamurti and others. He helped organize Indian music and dance festivals in various European cities, and became secretary of an association of directors of the most important European festivals, aimed at giving concrete expression to Alain Daniélou’s desire to invite Indian classical musicians and dancers to the same major events as Western musicians and dancers.
From 1965 to 1980, he was technical director (with Alain Daniélou as artistic director) of the prestigious UNESCO collection of traditional music records, reissued by Smithsonian Folkways Recordings, with recordings by him of a large number of musicians. From his travels, he built up an extensive collection of photographs of landscapes, architecture and, above all, of dancers and musicians from the East in general and India in particular, which have been reproduced in numerous encyclopedias and music magazines, as well as on the cover of many traditional music records.
In 1980, Alain Daniélou decided to retire to a place near Rome. Jacques Cloarec gave up his post as Secretary General of the Berlin and Venice Institutes to become Alain Daniélou’s collaborator in his work as a writer. It was during this period that Alain Daniélou wrote many of the works for which he is famous. Throughout this period, Jacques Cloarec acted as Alain Daniélou’s literary agent, publishing his works. When illness overtook Alain Daniélou, Jacques Cloarec remained at his side until his death in January 1994.
During his long stay in Italy, Jacques Cloarec also became interested in the musical aspects of Italian theater. In particular, he photographed the performances of composer Sylvano Bussotti, in Palermo, Florence, Verona, Rome and elsewhere.
Since 1985, the great choreographer Maurice Béjart repeatedly allowed him to follow his productions, including Le Martyre de Saint Sébastien and Kabuki at La Scala in Milan, both dominated by Eric Vu An, La Métamorphose des Dieux in Brussels, dedicated to Malraux, and also 1789 et Nous, a Béjart Ballet Lausanne production at the Grand Palais in Paris.
A member of the Salon d’Automne de Paris, Jacques Cloarec has exhibited his photographic work there every year since 1982. In 1984, at the Genazzano Festival near Rome, he exhibited his tribute to Sylvano Bussotti, an exhibition that was completed and repeated in L’Aquila (Italy) in August 1987, and at the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence in May 1988 for the Maggio Fiorentino. His first major retrospective exhibition took place at the Galerie Régine Lussan in Paris in November 1986, as part of the prestigious “Mois de la photo”, under the title L’Opéra à Nu, Entre Corps et Décors. The Salon d’Automne in Paris paid tribute to him in November 1988, with Images-Grimages, Les maquillages de théatre.

As Alain Daniélou’s executor, Jacques Cloarec has endeavored to keep Daniélou’s work available to those seeking a fuller understanding of orthodox Hinduism and its extreme tolerance and, in particular, certain forms of Shaivism, as well as those seeking to understand the world around us.
Jacques Cloarec has supervised the classification and recording of the extensive documentation left by Alain Daniélou, collaborating with the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne for the photographic material (over 8,000 negatives) and, for the texts, with the Cini Foundation in Venice, to which Alain Daniélou bequeathed his extensive library containing a number of unpublished manuscripts on Indian music. He has also collaborated with UNESCO and the International Music Council on the reissue of record collections; he has coordinated the work of three French specialists, Michel Geiss, Christian Braut and Jacques Dudon, on the design of a new musical instrument based on Alain Daniélou’s theories, and he has spurred the republication and translation of Alain Daniélou’s works, the latest of which – and not the least strange – being the musical scores Daniélou composed for the dances he performed in the ’thirties.

Alain Daniélou’s many commemorations include two exhibitions in Venice in March 1995 (Living in India, an exhibition of photographs by Alain Daniélou taken in the 1940s, and an exhibition of memorabilia, including letters from Tagore, Indira Gandhi, etc.), an exhibition of drawings illustrating his world tour in 1936, and an exhibition of watercolours at a gallery in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris.
Collaborator and pupil of Alain Daniélou for over thirty years, steeped in Hindu philosophy, culture and religion, Jacques Cloarec now devotes his time to conveying the concepts his master instilled in him.