Jean-Daniel Allanche
(1940–2015)
DiedParis, France
BornSfax, Tunisia
BiographyFor the forty years that Jean-Daniel Allanche lived in his apartment in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris, he was constantly reimagining it as an evolving experiment in visual harmony, repainting its walls, floors, ceilings, kitchen cabinets, doors, and even the windows with murals of phantasmagoric creatures and abstract motifs such as galaxies of repeating colorful dots. Sculptures from Africa and India that he collected while traveling further adorned the space. His flowing gouache and oil paintings contrasted with the more rigid mathematical sequences and systems with which he filled numerous notebooks.All of this was unseen by the public until after Allanche’s death in 2015, when his daughter decided to share it with gallery owner Hervé Perdriolle. Allanche was instead known as a theoretical physics researcher and professor; between 1970 and 2001, he taught at the Université des Sciences Paris VII and at universities in Africa. Born in 1940 into a family of shopkeepers in the Jewish community of Sfax, Tunisia, he moved to France in 1958. He completed and defended two doctoral dissertations in the following years, one in 1965 and another in 1970.
Although his professional work was mostly concentrated on science, in his personal time he explored connections between music and color, languages, and the mathematics of gambling. He was particularly interested in understanding the chance and chaos of casino games, and densely annotated roulette wheels appeared in many of his notebooks. He wrote in 1976, “Life is a game that is exciting only if the stakes are high. It is our work (action) that makes the stakes important. They are our wishes for success in the form of elevations of matter or the possibilities of human beings. Solution: trying to become a musician, a scholar, a writer . . . is hard but necessary.”
The American Folk Art Museum has one of the major holdings of Allanche’s work, including several of his notebooks and a door from his Paris apartment—a fragment of his decades-long attempt to join science and art in one place. As he once wrote of his creation of this private world, “Loneliness is your palace where no one can come to settle there. This should strengthen you and not weaken you. . . . Always alone: no intermediary between me and me and between me and things.”
Allison C. Meier, 2025
This artist’s work was reviewed as part of “Rethinking Biography,” an initiative supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS).