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Philippe Briet’s passion with art was born when he was a high school student in Caen, Normandy in 1977.  Wanting to increase his fellow pupils’ interest and understanding of modern and contemporary art, he organized several exhibitions of the works of great artists at his school.  Featured artists included Marc Chagall, Sonia Delaunay, Javier Vilató, Jean-Michel Folon, and Jeffrey Wasserman.  In 1978, he befriended Sonia Delaunay in Paris, who generously created a poster for one of his shows. 

During this same period, Philippe also met many artists of the modern art generation, including Salvador Dalí (at Dalí’s home in Cadaquès), Marc Chagall (through his friend, historian René Huyghe – French Academician and former director of the Louvre), Vieira Da Silva, and André Masson.  In 1979, the renowned sculptor Arman introduced him to Andy Warhol, who received Philippe at The Factory in New York. 

By the time he was 22 years old, Philippe was responsible for the contemporary art program for the City of Caen.  He organized Rencontres, a traveling exhibit of contemporary French Art in Africa for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs.  Artists in this show included Jean Hélion, Jean-Paul Riopelle, Gérard Fromanger, Roberto Matta, and Pierre Alechinsky.  When he moved to New York at the end of 1985, his first goal was to meet painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, whose work had impressed him at a recent FIAC art show in Paris.  Philippe befriended the painter and remained close to him until his premature death: he was with Basquiat in Abidjan, Africa, to install his 1986 show at the Centre Culturel Français, observed Basquiat painting on numerous occasions at his studio, and even helped him prepare some of the backgrounds for the paintings.  He introduced Basquiat to the work of Joaquín Torrès-García and Saul Steinberg, and even to Tintin, the famous comic strip character created by Hergé.

Philippe opened the Philippe Briet Gallery in SoHo, Manhattan, in October 1987, with a show entitled Torrès-García: New York 1920-1922.  One Sunday in April 1988, he took Sylvain and some friends to the Studio Museum in Harlem, and was surprised to find it closed.  The museum’s bookstore was open, however, and inside, Philippe’s attention was drawn to a tall pile of books with an orange cover bearing a black and white photo of a man whose face he had not seen before.  This was a stack of catalogs for the Studio Museum in Harlem’s retrospective of Beauford’s works, organized by Richard A. Long in 1978. Beauford’s photo was on the cover.  The catalogs were on sale for $1.00.

Sylvain indicated that Philippe was entranced by the depth of the expression of Beauford Delaney on the cover photograph, and the images of the works that he saw in that catalog.  Feeling the importance of that moment, he bought a copy each for his friends. He later contacted Mary Schmidt Campbell, New York City Commissioner of Cultural Affairs and former Executive Director of the Studio Museum, to learn more about this amazing painter, and discovered that Beauford was deceased.  Campbell would introduce Philippe to several persons who knew Beauford personally, including Solange du Closel, Richard Long, and Al Hirschfeld.  Captivated and impassioned by Beauford’s work, Philippe moved heaven and earth to organize and present the first Beauford Delaney exposition since 1978.  Entitled Beauford Delaney [1901-1979]: From Tennessee to Paris, this show was presented in November 1988. It included roughly ten works from New York and Paris, including a portrait of Solange du Closel and a magnificant painting of Washington Square in New York.

According to Sylvain, Philippe felt that people who knew Beauford were much more cognizant and appreciative of the painter's personality than they were of his art.  Philippe embarked on a treasure hunt of sorts, finding some paintings in the homes of persons who had purchased them long ago, and not realizing their artistic value, stored them in basements or closets.  He recovered several that were in less-than-optimal condition, paid fair market value for them, and had these paintings restored.  His mission was to acquire Beauford’s works to showcase, not to sell, and to convince museums and the art press of the importance of these works.

Sylvain joined his brother in New York, and together the two pursued the work of operating a new SoHo gallery, which opened on Broadway in October 1989 with Don't You Know By Now, a show curated by jazz musician Ornette Coleman. Philippe and Sylvain would mount two retrospectives of Beauford’s work:  Beauford Delaney: A Retrospective [Fifty Years of Light] (1991) and Beauford Delaney: The New York Years [1929-1953] (1994).  Forty-seven paintings were hung at the latter exhibit, which was a remarkable feat given that only œuvre created between 1929 and 1953 were shown.  Most of these works were being shown for the first time in over fifty years.

None of the works shown at either of these exhibits were for sale.  The shows drew the attention of major newspapers and magazines (The New York Times, The New Yorker, Village Voice, Art in America, New York Magazine, Amsterdam News, Arts Magazine...) as art critics noted the quality of the works and posed the question "Why did Beauford Delaney disappear from American art history?" Shortly after this exposition ended, the Briet brothers closed the gallery and began to publish books about artists and their work. 

In 1995, Philippe Briet would collaborate with American poet Cid Corman, whom he had met in Japan, and American curator and publisher Richard Milazzo, to create a book of poetry dedicated to Beauford.  Cid Corman met Beauford in 1954 and wrote his first poems about Beauford during this period. The book is entitled Tributary (Edgewise Press, 1999); it contains fifty poems and five color reproductions of Beauford’s paintings. 

During the same time that he collaborated with Corman and Milazzo, Philippe wrote a draft essay about Beauford that he did not have the opportunity to finalize. It would eventually be published in the catalog for the 2007 art retrospective entitled Philippe Briet: Art. Art. Art., which was organized by Sylvain for the Conseil Régional de Basse-Normandie in honor of the 10th anniversary of his brother’s death, and presented at the Abbaye-aux-dames in Caen, France. 

Sylvain Briet has followed the status of Beauford’s gravesite since 2002.  He continues to hope that Beauford’s remains will someday be transferred to Montparnasse Cemetery, the closest place to where the painter lived most of his life in Paris, and where James Baldwin wanted to see his friend buried.  He is following the progress of Les Amis de Beauford Delaney regarding the placement of a permanent marker at the tomb at Thiais Cemetery.