Fifty Shades of Collecting: Jean Pozzi and his Islamic Collection
with Negar Habibi
This talk aims to document the life and art collecting career of Jean Pozzi (1885-1967), a French plenipotentiary Minister in Iran (in 1935) and Egypt (1939-1942).
Over the course of nearly 60 years, Pozzi collected more than 3500 art objects in his Parisian apartment, including textiles, carpets, manuscripts, album folios, ceramics, and tiles from the Islamic lands and beyond. Despite this, his career remains largely unexplored today, mainly due to the fact that his collection was widely dispersed to various museums, auction houses and heirs after his death.
We examine specifically his first collection catalogue, commented on and published by Edgar Blochet in 1930. Reviewing the keen Parisian interest in “Oriental” arts and crafts, and especially their appeal to renowned French couturiers and designers, we argue that Jean Pozzi’s catalogue may be seen as one of the persuasive Persian collections of the early twentieth century, providing the forms and tones that French industries of textile design and fashion sought before World War II.
About the speaker:
Negar Habibi is an art historian and lecturer of Islamic arts at the University of Geneva, Switzerland. She has been conducting extensive research on Jean Pozzi and his Islamic art collection since 2021. Habibi has authored multiple publications, including Ali Qoli Jebâdâr and Safavid Occidentalism, published by Brill in 2018 (in French), Shahnameh: The Book of Persian Kings, published by Pocket in 2021 (in French), and an edited open-access volume titled The Idea of the Just Ruler in Persianate Art and Material Culture, published in the Manazir Journal in 2023. Additionally, she has written several articles on artistic production and patronage in 17th-century Iran and Pozzi’s Persian Painting collection. Habibi’s second monograph will focus on Pozzi and his Islamic collection (now largely dispersed worldwide) and is expected to lead to a Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches (HdR) in France.
Above: “Portrait of a Young Persian”, Muḥammad Yusef, Isfahan, Mid-17th century, MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève. Legs Jean Pozzi, 1971, 1971-0107-0081, ©Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, photographe: André Longchamp.
To the left: “An Elegant Woman From Isfahan”, Isfahan, Mid-17th century, MAH Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève. Legs Jean Pozzi, 1971, 1971-0107-0063, © Musée d’art et d’histoire, Ville de Genève, photographe: André Longchamp.