Daniel Filipacchi

Filipacchi in 1958

Filipacchi wrote and worked as a photographer[1] for Paris Match from its founding in 1949 by Jean Prouvost.[2] While working at Paris Match and as a photographer for another of Prouvost's titles, Marie Claire—Filipacchi would later claim never to have enjoyed taking photographs, despite earning early notoriety as a "well-mannered paparazzo"[3]—he promoted jazz concerts and ran a record label.[4] In the early 1960s, at a time when jazz was not played on government-owned French radio stations, Filipacchi (a widely acknowledged jazz expert[3]) and Frank Ténot hosted an immensely popular show on Europe 1 called Pour ceux qui aiment le jazz ("For those who love jazz").[5]

In the 1960s, he presented a rock and roll radio show modeled after Dick Clark's American Bandstand called Salut les copains which launched the musical genre of yé-yé. The show's success led to his creation of a magazine of the same name,[6] eventually renamed Salut!, which built a circulation of one million copies. Filipacchi played American and French rock music on this radio show[7] beginning in the early 1960s. The show and Filipacchi himself played an important role in the formation of a 1960s youth culture in France.[8]

Filipacchi acquired the venerable Cahiers du cinéma in 1964.[9] Cahiers was in serious financial trouble and its owners convinced Filipacchi to buy a majority share in order to save it from ruin. Filipacchi hired a number of his own people and redesigned the journal to look more modern, zippy, and youth-appealing.[10] After the revolutionary May 1968 events in France and the subsequent evolution of Cahiers into a more political forum[11] under the influence of the Maoist director Jean-Luc Godard[11] and others, Filipacchi wanted out of the magazine and sold his share in 1969.[11]

He started more magazines and acquired many others, such as Paris Match in 1976.[2] Some were for teenage girls (such as Mademoiselle Age Tendre) and others for men (such as Lui,[12] which Filipacchi founded in 1963 along with Jacques Lanzmann,[13] Newlook, and French editions of Playboy and Penthouse[14][15]). In February 1979 Filipacchi bought the then-defunct Look. He hired Jann Wenner to run it in May 1979[16] but the revival was a failure and Filipacchi fired the entire staff in July 1979.[17]

ARTnews has repeatedly listed Filipacchi among the world's top art collectors.[18] Art from Filipacchi's collection formed part of the 1996 exhibit Private Passions at the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris.[19] His collection (along with that of his best friend, the record producer Nesuhi Ertegün) was exhibited at the Guggenheim in New York in 1999 in Surrealism: Two Private Eyes, the Nesuhi Ertegun and Daniel Filipacchi Collections - an event described by The New York Times as a "powerful exhibition", large enough to "pack the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum from ceiling to lobby".[20]

Although Filipacchi sued the Paris gallery which sold him a fake "Max Ernst" painting in 2006 for US$7 million, he called its notorious forger Wolfgang Beltracchi (freed on 9 January 2015 after serving three years in prison for his forgeries) a "genius" in a 2012 interview.[21]

His father, Henri Filipacchi, who was born in Izmir, Turkey, descended from shipowners from Venice, hence the Italian family name.[22] Filipacchi has three children. The eldest of these, Mimi, was from an early marriage.[23] He then had two children with fashion model Sondra Peterson: Craig and novelist Amanda Filipacchi.[24]