The French Art Rental Libraries and their collections 1982-2022 – ARP_Artotheque-Recherche-Patri

The first public art rental library was inaugurated fifty years ago in France. More than half a century has passed, yet the lack of recognition of this cultural institution, its actions and its collections is such that the French word "artothèque" raises questions. Unevenly distributed over the territory, art libraries were experimented, like the “Maisons de la culture”, in the 1960s, before being developed in the 1980s, at the same time as the FRACs, by the Ministry of Culture in order to reinforce the policy of decentralisation and cultural democratisation and to allow the public to encounter contemporary creation. The ambition of the Ministry of Culture was strong. It encouraged the acquisition of original contemporary artworks, initially multiple works, to build up a collection with a view to lending them to individuals. The art rental library is for the work of art what the library is for the book. What do the art rental libraries keep on a national scale? What do we know about the works acquired by these institutions with public money? Nobody knows. This absence leads to a lack of global vision of these collections, and to an underestimation of their quality and value.
This observation of a lack of recognition and visibility of art rental libraries and their collections, at a time when the commemorations of the cultural policy of the 1980s have begun, led the ARP team to set up a project on French public art rental libraries and their collections 1982-2022. The objectives are to collect, for the first time on a national scale, information on the collections of public art rental libraries in order to develop and exploit the first database on art rental libraries and to carry out an unprecedented historical study in order to place these establishments and their collections in the history of cultural institutions.