François Baschet

It's been many years since I first met François Baschet and it's been almost as long that I wanted to write about him. He's probably the most astounding man, inventor, artist, sculptor, musical instrument maker, poet and philosopher, teacher and humanist of post WWII in Paris.

He is also known for holding an open house every Saturday at noon, in his ground-floor atelier rue Jean de Beauvais, near the Maubert market. Now, at 86, after a life full of adventures, he divides his time between Paris in the Spring and Summer, and Barcelona the rest of the year.

During the mobilization in 1940, he was drafted and sent with 39 other young men from town to town in a railroad car that had a sign “40 men and 8 horses” - never firing a shot. He had just finished his first year of business school because his father wanted him to become a business man and not an artist.

In 1942 he was sent to work in a factory in Germany as unskilled labor, from where he fled shortly before D-day to return to France and join the resistance. By the end of the war he was offered a mission in Argentina whose object was to gather information on eventual Nazis and infiltrate the Argentine intelligence service, under the cover of a Franco-Argentinian business company.

He spent 7 years there, getting interested in music. When he returned to Paris in the 1950th, he was a made man with an urge to put on a show.

Since life in Paris during those years was a never-ending party, it greatly stimulating his many talents as performer, musician and thinker. He wanted to study under Zadkin but instead he signed up for courses of sculpture at the Grand Chaumiere with Auricoste, after visiting Academie Jullian.

He'd already tinkered with the idea to produce a collapsible guitar with an inflatable sound box. With this instrument and a collapsible hunting horn made of six pieces of pipe and a grocer's funnel he performed at the then popular cabaret Rose Rouge, imitating folkloric music.

He proceded his exploration of accoustical instruments, greatly inspired by Chaldni's Euphone, Benjamin Franklin's “armonica” and Henri Pierre Maxime Bouasse's work.

With his brother Bernard who is an engineer-poet, he further explored the world of sound, acoustics and musical instruments, coming to the conclusion that a revolution needed to take place, in order to create a new generation of instruments. Being surrounded by musicians obviously helped, but the process took a while, working on various instruments, until a series of crystal instruments where created that created notes (and nodes) with the application of water by stroking the rods attached to acoustic amplifiers. The technical, acoustic and practical problems were solved, his instruments always having a sculptural aspect that made them unmistakable works of art, on which musicians could perform in public.

While his instruments were used by musicians – in 1959 the grand performance took place at the Salle Gaveau, - galleries and museums couldn't make up their mind whether they were art or musical instruments and first objected to showing them.

It took a while until the Baschet brothers were invited to show their work at the MOMA, and run into the US customs perplexity of allowing modern art to be imported free of charge but not musical instruments.

It took a trial to settle the matter, adding another amendment called the Baschet amendment that included artistic creations that also are sound sculptures as modern art free of import duty.

The instruments traveled around the world with the Baschet brothers and their performers and musicians. It was in Spain where he was asked to create musical fountains and François Baschet came up with idea to involve trade- and technical schools in the production of the fountains that were meant for public places. This project developed into a social trend-setter recruiting from the poor and unemployed youngsters, even delinquents, who found some sense of self-confidence in this work, besides learning how to cut and ply metal, and use tools they would never have dreamed of using.

In the late century François Baschet had become a well-known figure in the music and art-world, and he traveled widely around Europe, showing his sound sculptures in museums and galleries. He gave the opportunity to composers and performers to specialize and evolve with the instruments he has made and the many instruments he is still making.

On the side he naturally uses sheets of metal to twist them into the shapes of birds and animals, always having some kind of purpose beyond being merely decorative; he is making chairs (of which not one seems to remain in his atelier) and keeps producing at a tireless pace for posterity.