Edmond de Taillac

I am interested in the art market for South Asian art during the interwar period. My work examines specifically the trade carried out by the archaeologist Gabriel Jouveau-Dubreuil (1885–1945) and the Asian art dealer C.T. Loo (1880–1957), in close collaboration with the musée Guimet. In 1924, the museum’s curator, Joseph Hackin (1886–1946), introduced C.T. Loo to Jouveau-Dubreuil, who from then on began supplying him with Indian images while based in Pondicherry, where he had been residing since 1909. To acquire religious images- often still worshipped- Jouveau-Dubreuil established a network of intermediaries drawn from the French-speaking Indian elite, which I aim to reconstruct by combining archival research, oral history, and digital visualisations. These intermediaries dealt directly with the individuals-whether priests or villagers- who were involved in these transactions, which were often shaped by unequal power relations. Thanks to this network, Jouveau-Dubreuil acquired for C.T. Loo and the musée Guimet more than 200 objects, now scattered across museums in Europe and North America. The DakshinArt Project, currently under development, seeks to trace the provenance, methods of acquisition, and current locations of these images, and to make this information publicly accessible through an interactive map and detailed entries.