bernard derroitte | for the love of paper

Written by Miranda K. Metcalf | Published 4 dec 2019

Talking with Bernard Derroitte, for me, is like finding a long lost twin or maybe meeting up with a childhood friend that you haven’t seen in decades but they still share many memories with you, even those you have forgotten. Derroitte has been in the business of selling and advocating for prints and works on paper since 1998, yet, he, like me, has a passion and belief in the craft that goes far beyond merely transactional. There are only a handful of us out there who are doing what Derroitte and I do, those who have dedicated our lives to being communicators for printmaking without a personal practice of our own. One of my first impressions of Derroitte came when I met him at a print fair. He was there representing his gallery Armstrong Fine Art and I was there with Davidson Galleries. We were talking about some of the ins and outs of the logistics of the print trade when he posed the question, “Why aren’t we offering free shipping to people? The contemporary consumer has come to expect that when they are purchasing over a certain amount. How much would it really cost us over the course of a year in comparison to the sales it would attract?” This might seems like a small thing but I can’t tell you how refreshing it was to find someone who was thinking about the print trade as a living business and one that can and should be adapting to collectors’ changing expectations. My other fellow dealers, no shade, would tend to get stuck in a self perpetuating cycle of doom and gloom about the print market and fine art galleries in general, seeing the entire experience through a negative bias that colored everything. In Derroitte I found a kindred spirit, someone who’s excitement for and belief in this medium was energizing and creative. And as you will read and listen to with the release of the podcast, someone who believes in the future of the print advocate as deeply as I do.

Derroitte was born and raised in Brussels, Belgium and describes a childhood in a way that sounds nothing less than beyond charming to someone who grew up in a semi-rural town in Washington State. He grew up speaking French at home and Dutch and Flemish in School. His father’s family was in the arts and, since the family didn’t have a car until he was eleven or twelve, they took excursions by train to cultural destinations. The family traveled together all over Northern Europe seeing the sites, from major museums to village churches, and Derroitte enjoyed it all. But the real highlights were their trips to Florence. Derroitte’s first visit to Florence came when he was six years old and he still remembers it vividly. He describes a Florence that probably most of us will never see again. One that wasn’t overrun with tourists and so perhaps, if you were lucky, you could steal a moment alone with some of the great works of the Italian Renaissance. Derroitte describes standing in front of Sandro Botticelli’s Birth of Venus at six or seven and being completely spellbound by it. When he speaks of it you can still hear the awe in his voice, the feeling of being entranced by the work. The experience of seeing works in person and the effect they can have on you, the way we experience their physicality, and their scale, big or small, is something that Derroitte still carries with him and was a large part of how he came to fall in love with paper decades later. We bonded over this shared joy in seeing works in person. He recounts an experience that I had as well that remains one of my all time favorite art viewings: seeing Albretch Durer’s 1500 self portrait. Durer looks directly out at the viewer, staring back at you across 500 years, not having aged a day. It stops you in your tracks and  for two print boffins, feeling that connection with the big guy is akin to something spiritual.

“People tend to forget art is a physical experience,” Derroitte says “The scale of it matters.” He recalls how he was long fascinated by the mosaics of Ravenna and had studied them most of his adult life. On his 40th birthday, the day of his 40th, he managed to finally see them in person. “No matter how familiar you are, nothing can prepare you for that it.” he remembers. 

With his European travels and his familiarity with Germanic languages, Derroitte went on to study German and English, and received as a degree in art history while in Germany before returning to Brussels for his masters. While studying there, he met an American woman who was the daughter of two German immigrants. They started dating and in1998, she left Germany to go to medical school in Chicago. Derroitte says of the time, “I remember thinking, well, if we’re going to give this a shot, I guess I better go with her.” A marriage and two children later, it seems like that was shot well worth taking. He is now getting towards the point where he will have lived in The States longer than anywhere else and he became an American citizen last year.

He arrived in Chicago in the autumn of that year and it was only a matter of days before Derroitte found himself working for Richard Armstong at Armstrong Fine Art. Derroitte had been interested in all kinds of art from classical painting to street arts and dance and he still is, but this is when his professional life with paper began. He needed a job, of course, but also he found in Armstong an incredible mentor. Armstong introduced Derroitte to the business, to his connections, and let Derroitte try anything he wanted as long as it wasn’t going to sink the gallery. This was their relationship until Armstrong retired and sold the business to Derroitte. Since then Derroitte has been running Armstong, and more recently, Mesh Fine Art Gallery full time.

While Derroitte may not have been a paper person before Armstong, it didn’t take long for him to fall and fall hard for the medium. For Derroitte it came back to that physicality. He talks about how people like to shop for clothes in person so they can feel the texture of the fabric in their hands and points out that most paper we work with is cotton as well. If the paper is old it will have a smell, if it is small you hold it and flip it over, if it is large you get to feel the awkwardness of moving it around. There is an intimacy in the physicality of prints and works on paper that is beautiful and unique and this intimacy is how prints were historically experienced. Throughout the history of printmaking most prints were not kept in frames. Think about how relatively recently, thin, clear glass would be affordable enough to place over works of art in a domestic setting. Prints were kept in portfolios. They would be pulled out, held, passed around and discussed. The viewing of prints was an active, embodied experience. It was something that was shared or enjoyed in solitude, but it was an activity rather than a passive consumption. Their scale and the ability to hide them away also meant that prints could be so much more subversive than paintings. You could put things in prints that one never could in a painting: the political, the erotic, the inflammatory or the treasonous. These were sheets of paper collectors could tuck away, only to share with a select few of people. Derroitte still encourages people to experience prints this way, particularly his more devoted collectors. When you have things in portfolios the viewing becomes a special moment. Holding a print in your hand allows the eye time to wander over an image and discover the hidden details, to let the image tell it’s story to you in its own time.

For the most part, Armstrong Fine Art didn’t work directly with contemporary artists, but Derroitte always had an interest in doing so and through this interest came the founding of Mesh Fine Art Gallery. It is the way that artists work that captured his attention and his interest. Walking into people’s studios and seeing what they are doing, the spaces they work in, the time and isolation they give to their practice, instilled in Derroitte an interest in being the person that helps get these works out into the world and into the hands and homes of those who will love them. “I want to give those quiet voices a stage.” Derroitte says of starting Mesh. 

Mesh has been around now for over a year and represents a little over 20 artists, mostly printmakers, but a few who work exclusively in drawing as well. Derroitte looks for artists who tell him a story that he hasn’t seen told in that way before and do so with a technical skill that shows their dedication to excellence. He likes work that is narrative, but this doesn’t have to mean figurative. It is work that pulls the viewer in and then offers more once you arrive. It’s works of art that don’t give everything all at once. Careful to mention he doesn’t have anything against Pop Art, he does point to Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe as an opposition to this kind of visual language. “With an image like that, it is Marilyn Monrone in pink. Great. There she is, in pink.” he says. Work like that just does a different kind of job in the art world and Derroitte is looking for work that is perhaps a bit more coquettish in its storytelling.

When looking to the future Derroitte will openly say that the traditional way that galleries exist is disappearing fast, the overhead of those white walls is just getting to be too much. He runs the numbers on a small space he had his eyes on for years in Chicago, and how he came to the conclusion it just wouldn’t be feasible to start something there. Rent is one thing, but then there’s staff, refreshments for openings, insurance, promotion and adding it all up, you're looking at needing to make several hundred thousand a year to break even. Nowhere in the numbers he runs for me does he mention paying himself. When I point this out to him we both laugh and take a moment to reflect on the irony of the way art dealers are represented in the media versus the many gallery owners we know who pay their staff more than they pay themselves. 

These traditional gallery models are simply no longer sustainable, at least not at the scale at which people like Derroitte or I would be operating: art gallery as small business. There is also a bit of a fallacy when it comes to the internet being a magic wand for reaching collectors directly. As both he and I have found in journey through this brave new art world, we are competing with people with much deeper pockets for your attention. Pine|copper|lime may have a newsletter, but corporations have six figure advertising budgets and marketing departments. Yet Derroitte is quick to point out that it is precisely because traditional gallery spaces are disappearing that the work we do is more important now than ever before. Just because trade has become tougher does not mean that it has become moot. Derroitte very aptly says that we need, more than ever, to create compelling narratives. We connect people to the world beyond a singular image and through our storytelling and welcome people into the world that we love so much. “If you’re counting you’re not in the right place, if you want something of passion. We’re in the world of art because we need it, we know we need it.” Derroitte says.

Derroitte is an optimist about the future of the art world. People will order all kinds of things on the internet, give their credit card information, and have faith that it will show up in a day or two. People spend $500 taking friends out to dinner and then days later not remember what they ate. People buy things online, people spend money on fleeting experiences, and given these two undeniable facts he finds it curious how little of the art trade has moved online. He does believe though that it will. There has been a huge transformational shift in the way that we consume information in the past 25 years. It used to be, if something wasn’t printed it didn’t exist, but now we have switched to screens and those flat, glowing things are very good at holding our attention. We are going to need to learn how to turn them off and walk about.

“We will go back to the analog world, sheets of paper and canvas, whatever else holds these physical presences in our lives that we get to hold, the same way we hold people who are dear to us. That will happen. They will realise that the screen is an access point, but the real thing happens outside. The screen is just what gets us there.”

I have so much admiration for what Derroitte is doing, the energy and creativity he puts into keeping people connected to prints and shining a light on those doing incredible works on paper, as well as a great deal of gratitude for his support for pine|copper|lime since the beginning. We are all very lucky to have him in our corner.

Mesh Fine Gallery can be found at:

https://meshartgallery.com

Armstrong Fine Art can be found at:

https://armstrongfineart.com