Amin Jaffer’s new chapter in Paris

The Rwanda-born Indian curator, who has made the French capital his home, on the Al Thani collection’s first museum, his new book, and the importance of private collections

Writer, curator, collaborator, colonial furniture specialist: Amin Jaffer wears his titles effortlessly. And in the last couple of years, he’s added another one — that of Paris denizen — after he uprooted his English life of 25 years to move into a hôtel particulier (a grand townhouse) on Quai Voltaire along the Seine.

The move made sense. An “éminence grise of the international art world”, as an Architectural Digest article calls him (Jaffer is on the cover of the magazine’s 10th anniversary issue this month), he was “spending a lot of time in Venice, and the commute to London was becoming taxing”. But more importantly, his newest project, a private museum for the Al Thani Collection, is in the city, at Place de la Concorde’s Hôtel de la Marine.

“Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani was looking for a more permanent place to house the treasures of his collection,” says Jaffer, recalling how at the time, the French government body Centre des Monuments Nationaux was thinking of converting the former storage space for royal tapestries at the Hôtel — a four-year, €132 million restoration project. “They proposed that the Al Thani Collection could exhibit its masterpieces there.” With a 20-year agreement in place, acquiring a Parisian pin code thus gave him a twofold advantage, both with work and keeping up his continental way of life. (The last few weeks alone have seen Jaffer travel to Seville and Carmona in Spain and Parma and Venice in Italy.)

The view of the Louvre from his third floor flat definitely tipped the scales in its favour. (The photos he shares on his Instagram, @aminjaffer_curator, are proof enough.) And the fact that Vivant Denon, the first director of the museum, had once been a resident in the 17th century building. Moreover, as he explains in an email that he squeezes in between flights, he’s always had a special connection with the Louvre. As a six-year-old, he had visited the museum with his mum, spending an entire day exploring its rooms, a Polaroid camera clutched tightly in his hands. He still has the photographs. “The adrenalin rush of seeing a great work of art inspired me then — as it does now,” he says, adding how by the time he turned 10 he had visited most of the major museums in Europe. “Other seminal moments include an early visit to the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Brussels and a trip to Rome to see the Vatican collections.”

But he nearly missed his calling. Born into an Indian business family in Kigali, Rwanda, a career in art wasn’t an option growing up. His subjects in university were economics and commerce! That is, until he chose the history of French opera and French Renaissance châteaux as his first year electives and reignited his love affair with the arts.

Today, Jaffer, who is in his early 50s, is not only the chief curator of the Al Thani Collection, but also works with leading museums around the world in a “curatorial role, focussed on public projects, exhibition programming and producing catalogues”. His resume includes long stints at the V&A Museum in London as curator and as the International Director of Asian Art at Christie’s.

“Born in central Africa, educated in Europe and America, I do feel something of a hybrid and I am drawn by works of art that are born from the encounter of two — or more — civilisations,” says Jaffer, who has recently “been fascinated by the fusion of Spanish and Amerindian culture, particularly in the domain of painting”. This ties in beautifully with the Al Thani Collection and its catalogue of more than 5,000 works of art drawn from across world civilisations.