Galerie Iris Clert
Iris Clert, born as Iris Athanassiadis in 1917 in Athens, moved to Paris in the 1930s. She joined, together with her husband, filmproducer Claude Clert, the French resistance during World War II. She was a famous art dealer and curator and from 1955 until 1962 she owned her first Iris Clert Gallery in Paris, where she supported artists as Yves Klein and Jean Tinguely, and thus is partly responsible for their fame. From 1962 to 1971 she moved her gallery to another address and started working with artists like Hains, Fontana, etc. Her one room gallery became an avant-garde hotspot and soon a great success. After the closure of her gallery she introduced Le Stradart, a transparent truck driving around with artworks, a travelling gallery as it were. In 1978 she wrote her biography ‘Iris-Time: l’artventure’. She died in Cannes in 1986.
Jef Verheyen met Iris Clert in 1956, through Raymond Dauphin.