Yves Plantin – Pursuing Professional Life with Immense Passion

A person’s professional life always poses a significant influence on their lifestyle; therefore, pursuing a career one is passionate about is critical. People are constantly reminded of this fact. Especially in the United States, this advice follows people from school and into their careers. As billionaire investor, Ray Dalio advises in his book Principles, “Make your passion and your work the same thing.” Doing so is said to be the path to success. Therefore, it can make people feel accomplished, which might contribute to other areas of their lives as well.

While pursuing a career with passion is known to increase work engagement and job performance, it’s sometimes unrealistic. As no one can deny the bitter reality of the world that some jobs don’t allow employees to focus on their interests, which can be due to the absence of work-life balance or added pressure. However, some still manage to carry out their professional life as a part of their passion. Yves Plantin was one of those intellectual figures!

Yves Plantin was stellar in the art and horse breeding industry. Also known for directing films and writing a book. Yves was born in Paris, and studied architecture at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in 1959. He was passionate about art from a very young age and his interests enabled him to work as an art dealer in Paris for twenty years, specializing in the period 1890 to 1930. During his artistic journey, he was successful in selling exceptional work of art to private and public collections, including the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, the New York Metropolitan Museum, the Mesnil Houston Foundation, the Musee d’Orsay Paris, and many French and European museums. His continuous efforts enabled him to co-found Galerie du Luxembourg. Plantin, his wife Francoise, his friend Alain Blondel, and Blondel’s wife Michele Rocaglia collaborated in 1967 to establish a gallery on Paris’s rue des Quatre Vents that mainly focused on artworks by painters from 1900 to 1925. This gallery first opened in 1968 on the rue de Tournon in a space shared with Alain Lesieutre. It was later named Galerie du Luxembourg because of its proximity to the Palais du Luxembourg (Senate). The gallery was relocated to 98, rue Saint-Denis, a former banana ripening plant in 1970 or 1971. Yves continued digging further into the aesthetic streams of Art Deco and Art Nouveau as he had much admiration for such styles. The retrospective work of many artists working in the 1920s and 1930s including Tamara de Lempicka in 1972, Burne Jones and the influence of the Pre-Raphaelites in 1972, Bernard Boutet de Monvel in 1974, sculptor Rupert Carabin in 1975, lacquer artist Jean Dunand in 1976 are featured in Galerie du Luxembourg.

After exploring the art of the world, Yves switched towards his life-long dream – horse breeding. His passion for horses began in the late 1980s when he migrated to Ginals in the Department of Tarn-et-Garonne to breed purebred Arabian horses. From 1994 to 1998, he was the chairman of the ECAHO Race Commission. He got the opportunity to represent AFAC in a variety of capacities since 1999. His accomplishments include fostering international competitiveness, improving racing standards, and facilitating the worldwide trade of horses and information.

Later in his life, Plantin wrote a book, Art Nouveau Belgium-France on January 1, 1976. This also gave him the grip of portraying artistic words in the shape of a book.

This intellectual personality departed from the world on July 11, 2022. It was Yves’s passion and dedication that he never considered his professional life a strict routine, rather he chose to enjoy it. This was the reason why he never took a break from his work and died doing what he always loved.