Daniel Filipacchi | |
|---|---|
 Filipacchi in New York in 1988 with many of his magazines | |
| Born | 12 January 1928 |
| Spouse | Sondra Peterson |
| Children | 3, including Amanda |
Daniel Filipacchi (born 12 January 1928) is the Chairman Emeritus of Hachette Filipacchi Médias and a French collector of surrealist art.
Filipacchi wrote and worked as a photographer[1] for Paris Match from its founding in 1949 by Jean Prouvost.[2] Filipacchi later claimed never to have enjoyed taking photographs, despite earning early notoriety as a "well-mannered paparazzo".[3] While working at Paris Match and as a photographer for another of Prouvost's titles, Marie Claire, Filipacchi promoted jazz concerts and ran a record label.[4] In the early 1960s, at a time when jazz was not played on government-owned French radio stations, Filipacchi (a widely acknowledged jazz expert[3]) and Frank Ténot hosted an immensely popular show on Europe 1 called Pour ceux qui aiment le jazz ("For those who love jazz").[5]
In the 1960s, he presented a rock and roll radio show modeled after Dick Clark's American Bandstand and called Salut les copains, which launched the musical genre of yé-yé. The show's success led to his creation of a magazine of the same name.[6] The latter was eventually renamed as Salut! and built a circulation of one million copies. Filipacchi played American and French rock music on this radio show[7] beginning in the early 1960s. Both he and this show are credited with playing important roles in the formation of the 1960s youth culture in France.[8]
Filipacchi acquired the venerable Cahiers du cinéma in 1964.[9] Cahiers was in serious financial trouble and its owners appealed to Filipacchi to buy a majority share in order to save it from ruin. He hired a number of new people and redesigned the journal to look more modern, zippy, and youth-appealing.[10] The revolutionary May 1968 events in France affected the subsequent evolution of Cahiers into a more political forum,[11] under the influence of Maoist director Jean-Luc Godard[11] and others. Filipacchi lost interest in the magazine and sold his share in 1969.[11]
But he remained involved in that world, starting more magazines and acquiring others, such as Paris Match in 1976.[2] He owned specialty magazines, for instance, some were for teenage girls (such as Mademoiselle Age Tendre) and others for men (such as Lui,[12] which Filipacchi had founded in 1963 with Jacques Lanzmann.[13] He also acquired Newlook and French editions of American magazines Playboy and Penthouse.[14][15])
In February 1979 Filipacchi bought the then-defunct Look. He hired Jann Wenner to run it in May 1979[16] but the revival was a failure, and Filipacchi fired the entire staff in July 1979.[17]
ARTnews has repeatedly listed Filipacchi among the world's top art collectors.[18] Art from Filipacchi's collection formed part of the 1996 exhibit Private Passions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.[19] His collection (along with that of his best friend, the record producer Nesuhi Ertegün) was exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 1999 in Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, the Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections - an event described by The New York Times as a "powerful exhibition", large enough to "pack the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from ceiling to lobby".[20]
Although Filipacchi sued the Paris gallery which sold him a fake "Max Ernst" painting in 2006 for US$7 million, he called its notorious forger Wolfgang Beltracchi (freed on 9 January 2015 after serving three years in prison for his forgeries) a "genius" in a 2012 interview.[21]
His father, Henri Filipacchi, who was born in İzmir, Turkey, descended from shipowners from Venice, hence the Italian family name.[22] Filipacchi has three children. The eldest of these, Mimi, was from an early marriage.[23] He then had two children with fashion model Sondra Peterson: Craig and novelist Amanda Filipacchi.[24]
