‘He punched you in the stomach with horror’: the genius of Christian Boltanski

The great French conceptual artist, who has died at 76, was the conscience of contemporary art. His monuments to atrocities were huge and all-encompassing, awakening us to the suffering of others

Christian Boltanski first grabbed my attention in 1995, while I was watching a US news show. Among the murders and mayhem was a story about an artist putting thousands of items of lost property on display in New York’s Grand Central station. It was news because it was weird – the use of everyday things, unchanged, was still unusual in art then, not to mention the sheer scale of the installation in such a public place.

But beyond the sensation, it was heart-wrenching. Amid what private crisis did someone leave behind their football helmet, their Bible? And that was not all. These former possessions of unknown people, these enormous numbers of relics laid out for inspection in a busy railway station, resembled the clothes and shoes of the murdered millions in the Holocaust.

Related: Christian Boltanski: the artist counting the seconds till his own demise

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