« Monsieur Miroir », renee from Ceccatty and the beautiful Serge – Liberation

His name was Serge Tamagnot. He was born in Limoges in 1932, and he died in Paris, in a nursing home, in 2022. How to define the one to whom René de Ceccatty consecrates his new book, Mister mirror ? Tamagnot had become a photographer over time. We see him very well emerging at the exit of the artists, when he immobilized his stars with his flash, television animators, singers, actresses. He collected autographs, signed portraits. « His hunger for the celebrity of others was insatiable »writes Ceccatty, for whom « He was, with his instamatic, a mirror of everything that shone, whatever the source of this brilliance. »

In the pantheon of this curious character, we found Guy of the Cars as well as Léo Ferré, the Mime Marceau or Line Renaud. There were still not just stars. The « index of the main friends and correspondents of Serge Tamagnot », provided at the end of the book, has more than a hundred names, we meet Arletty, Jean-Louis Barrault, Sempé, but also Nicole Dupuis, receptionist at the Editions du Seuil, rue Jacob. The Moroccan lover Said Ould Didi precedes war photographer Christine Spengler, the writer Creusois Georges-Emmanuel Clancier is in the vicinity of the costume designer Juliette Chanaud.

Scrupulously, René de Ceccatty does and redo lists, as if to edge the blurred and fluctuating world of Serge Tamagnot. Who came to see him in the « House of old » Where has he lived his last five years? « Mr. Vilard often calls ». Who cared about him? Singers Armande Altaï And Egon Kragel, Brigitte Bardot, were one of them, as well as Arrabal, Bernadette Lafont and Juliette Gréco recognized him as a brother rather than a group. The actor Pierre Grammont, a former neighbor, accompanied Tamagnot until the end. Ceccatty and sorted him the faras of the inheritance. The photographer, the collector, had piled up books and papers in his latest studio. The bathroom and the kitchen were transformed into a cabinet of curiosities, the slightest surface disappeared under the memories, the clothes, the photocopies of his works that Tamagnot transported with him in plastic bags.

Serge Tamagnot was an artist. More than by stolen clichés, he distinguished himself by his surreal collages. History ends well. After his death, the collector Pierre-Guilhem Métayer decided to welcome him to his museum of contemporary art of the Saint-Sylvain chapel in Nevers. The archives took the direction of the IMEC (Institute Memoirs of Contemporary Editing). The writers take turns in the existence of the Bibliomaniac Serge Tamagnot, starting with Marcel Jouhandeau (Creuse sector) whom he met in 1959 when he was a painter on porcelain in Limoges. The handsome Serge, who arrived in Paris, is missing marrying the adoptive girl of the writer, becomes the handyman of the awful Elise Jouhandeau, before being that of the antique dealer and decorator Madeleine Castaing, no less odious, but who presents him in 1960 Violette Leduc.

It is because of her friendship with the author of The Boutard (disappeared in 1972) that René de Ceccatty came to see Serge Tamagnot in the winter of 1974. Françoise d’Eaubonne presents the young 22 -year -old Theard to the forties who then worked in a crêperie. The ecofeminist Françoise d’Eaubonne (1920-2005), now rehabilitated, died in misery. Tamagnot protected her. They campaigned together at the FHAR (Homosexual Front of Revolutionary Action) and founded a Jean Sénac committee in 1973, shortly after the poet’s assassination in Algeria. Is it to have fought so that we judge the real culprits that Tamagnot, in August 1974, was the victim of an assault? The death of Jean Sénac, then the consequences of the aggression are among the worst trials of this peaceful man, smiling, helpful. The first was the death of his mother and stepfather, hanged in 1944 for collaboration. The last is the disappearance of the singer, animator and diarist Pascal Sevran In 2008. He was not a lover but a precious friend of Tamagnot. Tamagnot’s homosexuality has not crossed that of René de Ceccatty. Friendship has linked them for fifty years, without excessive proximity. The definition of this link, its evolution over the years, included, is at the heart of the book. At the end of a tribute to Jean Sénac, Serge Tamagnot wrote: « What makes man live, if not love, friendship and admiration? »