How did Auschwitz break with the traditional modes of representing the human figure inherited from the Renaissance ? To what extent has this rupture become so ingrained in modernist discourse as to nowadays go, partly unnoticed ? Is contemporary art simply art after Auschwitz or is it, in a more complex way, an art made in the aftermath of the event ?
These are some of the questions that orientate this History of Art After Auschwitz. In many respects, by offering a new critical reading of the principles of artistic modernity and a genealogy of contemporary art, this extensive study is also an art counter-history.

He had written to Heller : "If you keep this painting clean, it will remain clean and fresh for five hundred years...". Dürer makes a date in the year 2000. Now that we have reached the announced deadline, what remains to be written about Dürer ? Interrogate this remainder : each one can go there of its compilation.
It took a skilled cartographer to place the rich cluster of the Dürer galaxy five centuries away in our sky, and to combine the lines of his master constellation before our eyes : the Burin of the engraver.

The more time passes, the more distant this work becomes, which, having aroused commentary on a par with the greatest of the twentieth century, has, compared to them, the disadvantage but also the singular strength of having been incarnated by its author. A "life-work", in Borer’s terms, a work made flesh, in action and in discourse, necessarily unfinished, interrupted by death and consequently calling for throne, homage, commemoration, just as it aroused fascination, even idolatry, during the artist’s lifetime.

Though most of them look and read like essays, these texts written between 2005 and 2017 should probably be regarded as work diaries, in which the painter Pierre Buraglio – author of a drawing series called “Drawing after… drawing about…” – trains his vision on other painters’ works. Decipher, describe and redraw a painting, read, quote and discuss the writings of the masters of the past : in Buraglio’s eyes, this is all one way to enrich your own pictorial language. To write is too see more – that could be the lesson of this book.

“L’hypothèse du désir” is composed of a conversation between the painter Leonardo Cremonini and the mediologist Régis Debray. It is followed by a biography by Jacques Brosse, completed by Pietro Cremonini. This ensemble is framed by the reproduction of thirty-two unpublished photographs of the painter studio, taken by Corinne Mercadier after the artist’s death to try to approach the universe of this artist through a “look that isolates the objects, as the picture of a memory”.

Very few concepts have had such a pervading influence as that of presence on the art, poetry and aesthetics of the XIXth and XXth century. Goethe, Rilke, Pessoa, Valéry, W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, Seferis, Yves Bonnefoy, but also C.D. Friedrich, Cézanne, Chirico, Chagall, Balthus, Giacometti, Rothko, Francis Bacon : all those poets and painters went in quest of the mysterious feeling of being there. All in different ways, of course, and yet with similarities that seem to invite a careful analysis. With L’Émerveillement, Pascal Dethurens a fascinating journey through the works of some of the greatest “seekers of being” of the last two centuries.

The window gives a particular vision to the spectator, as it frames the world as a painting. Both closed and open, it gives access to a certain reality. It is then no surprise that the window inspired painters and writers, from Goethe to Mallarmé and Shakespeare, and from Matisse to Vermeer. Their representations appear throughout this book, in a journey both literary and pictorial, giving different visions of the world.

This book examines the birth of painting, by studying the era when the drawings first appeared : the prehistory. Those proofs of the presence of creative beings among our ancestors never cease to amaze. But if the prehistorians focused on the practical purposes of those creations, Renaud Ego here focused on the desire behind those first paintings : the mental path that led to the genesis of art, and to the first representation of a world now gone.

This book, which covers a long history of female figurations, is organized around an unprecedented event, when the birth of photography allowed a number of women to seize a medium through which they could finally represent themselves and each other from the second half of the nineteenth century. The acquired power of self-figuration for these women contrasts in an extraordinary way with their position as models prevailing for millennia. Invoking little girls, mothers, night-lights, lovers, brides, enigmatic strangers, and revenants, the book writes a critical account of this major event that is both historical and personal. It explores how these photographic self-portraits, foremost among them those of American artists Francesca Woodman and Vivian Maier, help us through the trials of separation, death, and time, in a spirit of immortal creative joy.

Using a poetic and thematic thread integrating non-linear elements of Eva Gonzalès’s biography (1847-1883), this innovative literary art book relates the encounter between a contemporary writer and this remarkable painter.

The Garden of Aliof is the autobiography-in-essays of the Iranian painter, Farhad Ostovani. At the heart of the book are the author’s memories of a childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran, a culture he experiences as an abundance of colors, perfumes, foods, and unforgettable characters, all in an improbable landscape where deserts meet dense olive groves and mountains seem to rise from the sea.

“A painter’s last works are sometimes those in which he speaks for the first time. They make undone all that has been done before. They bring about time. They are the paintings of a birth.” Gaëtan Picon’s lucid meditation on the effect of time in art is based on a paradox : that very shaking of his hand which Poussin regarded as a sign of his age and the decline of his art, and in which Chateaubriand, for his part, saw the most wonderful feature of the great painter’s last works, is but the birth of the spirit of painting. This first reedition of Picon’s great essay of 1970 includes new essays by the poets, writers and specialists Yves Bonnefoy, Agnès Callu, Francis Marmande, Philippe Sollers and Bernard Vouilloux.

A great American painter, but also a professor of calligraphy and typography, Charles Pollock, Jackson Pollock’s eldest brother, left behind few echoes of his work before he died, in Paris. His daughter, Francesca, and his wife, Sylvia, then spent twenty years gathering, cataloguing, and finally introducing to the world his work and his life, both of them veiled in silence and privacy. But why and for whose sake did Charles Pollock erase himself ? What meaning are we to give to his oeuvre, and to his silence ?

A good way of understanding contemporary art in its complexity and diversity, along with its issues, could be to regard it as a syndrome, the particular symptoms of which may be easier to fathom as the whole. In exploring such themes as politic, stupidity, bad taste, literalism, the gestures and the experience of art, the lightness of things, the nothing and the not-much, and such figures as Guy Debord, Philip Guston, Cy Twombly, Vaslav Nijinsky, Robert Filliou, Niele Toroni, Richard Tuttle, Tony Smith or Michel Parmentier, Éric Suchère gives us keys to a better apprehension – and more fruitful criticism – of what we call contemporary.

This book analyzes in nine chapters some twenty major paintings of European painting, each illuminating the other, from the fifteenth to the twentieth century. From Pollaiolo to Bacon, through Botticelli, Raphael, Caravaggio, Guido Reni, Poussin, Ribera, Giordano, Munch, and ending with a sculpture by Mason, the chronological development elucidates in its center the thought of Winckelmann and Lessing, explicit prohibition of the figuration of the cry. It follows a conjecture on the origin of painting, whose truth gradually conquered is stated as follows : the origin of painting lies in violence, the image comes from a cry.
An unheard-of story then appears. At first rare, from far and wide represented by daring masters, the cry in painting reveals so openly the sacrificial foundation of all representation that its theoretical proscription in the Age of Enlightenment did not prevent its elective adoption by many "modern" painters. Now this exhibition of the repressed, where the imaging power of violence and the critical power of the cry are shown together, justifies painting as self-consciousness.

Géricault is known for his paintings of horses struck by lightning, for his portraits of children, the most disturbing in French art, for his heads of madmen which have no equivalent in the history of painting, and for his immense revolutionary and modern painting, Le Radeau de la Méduse, a masterpiece of Romanticism and a protest of life even in death. We also know that his life was brief and dazzling, his work unfinished but brilliant, and that his memory was revered by all the artists of the 19th century.
But we did not know what Jérôme Thélot shows here, that Géricault was also a thinker, as great as he was a great artist.

At the beginning of a socially promising career and a rather conventional body of work, Louis Soutter (1871-1942) was the victim - or beneficiary ? - of an existential breakdown that deprived him of everything, wife, career, fortune, and condemned him to spend most of his life in an asylum. But this social disaffection was to result in an extraordinary artistic liberation, which led him to produce, in virtual secrecy, a body of work that ranks him among the major artists of the twentieth century - and which leads to the hypothesis of a non-pathological madness.

The work of Hans Holbein (1497-1543), enigmatic, potential, prophetic, magnetized by the future, has waited for our postmodernity to release its symbolic energy. This provocative essay reverses the historical perspective and postulates that Holbein was influenced by Andy Warhol.

Dubuffet’s attitude at the beginning of his "career" : an anti-authoritarian and anarchist mood, a certain populism, the impulse to violate language, an ambiguous distrust of intellectuals, an allergy to Parisianism, the investment of culture as an empty fortress, and finally the choice of painting as the most ideologically subversive weapon.

Is Gérard Titus-Carmel a painter or a writer ? Both, he would himself answer, without a doubt. And indeed, the reader willing to plunge into these two volumes will discover a mind whose search for self-enlightenment relies equally on pictures and on words. While Au Vif de la peinture, à l’ombre des mots gathers Titus-Carmels’s writings on art, Écrits de chambre et d’écho collects his essays on literature, both books dealing at the same time with other painters’ and writer’s work and his own. Thirty years of reflexion of an important artist of our time.

“L’Œil d’Hermès” presents a study of the secret history of occidental painting, through a dialogue between two characters. The author offers a new vision of the signs’ signification and of the pictorial imaginary. Frédérick Tristan leads the way into his research with acuity and humor. By his side, we rediscover the works of art of Dürer, Titian or Delacroix. He creates links between them, lists the significant signs hidden in the shadows of the paintings, and open our eyes on details we never noticed.

Can we forget it ? The life of an artist is a struggle. Against oneself, against conventions and taste, against economic and sometimes political powers, but above all against the smugness of the parvenus, indifference and blindness.
Here are two examples to which Germain Viatte has attached himself. Nothing seems to unite Mondrian and Dubuffet - however, for both of them, it took until they were in their forties to reveal their radical and singular artistic personality, and to affirm its development and importance, despite the difficulties, the rejections, and thanks to the clear-sightedness of a few artists, writers, merchants, accomplices or amateurs, and finally the public authorities themselves, who allowed their work to become established.
By following the chronology of the documentary data very precisely, Germain Viatte, without fear of revealing painful or scabrous moments, illustrates in this essay a little-known or hidden aspect of artistic life in France since the beginning of the 20th century.

Yves Bonnefoy’s monograph on the painter Alexandre Hollan gathers nine essays written between 1989 and 2015 : thirty years of friendship and artistic companionship condensed in what could become a model of art reviewing. With each new essay, the poet takes his reflexion a step further, not straying from his original intuition, but not aiming either at formal or thematic completeness, thus following Hollan at the closest in each phase of his evolution.

Josef Kaspar Sattler (1867-1931) came from Munich to Strasbourg in 1891 in order to teach at the École des Arts décoratifs. There, he created A Modern Dance of Death, a series of 16 drawings pervaded with fantastic, violent, dark, bizarre, satirical visions, later to be copied and exhibited in Paris, London and Berlin, where it received acclaim from such figures as Alfred Jarry, Henri Graf Kessler and Edvard Munch. Wackenheim’s monograph offers a double perspective : while its second part is a thorough, richly illustrated study on the artist’s life and work, the first one consists of 16 short texts conceived as answers or echoes to Sattler’s masterpiece.

“Les Corps vulnérables” was composed by Jean-Louis Baudry between 1997 and 2010. 1200 pages to say the love and the mourning of the dear one. Here, “corps” (body) has different meanings : the common one, but also a symbolic one : the bodies are shadows that poets – visitors of the Underworld – have encountered, but also representations of memories and feelings. This work aims to gather everything that has been lived with the woman now dead, so as to maintain her presence and to explore the depths of memory.

First published as chronicles, read during performances with the composer Dominique Pifarély, “Fictions du Corps” is composed of forty-eight notes. Those short fictions question the relationships between a person and the community, through the portraits of typical characters reflecting an evolution of the bodies in the city. Several characters then appear, each one representing a kind of person who can be found in every community, and who contributes to make it lives. The illustrations of Philippe Cognée fill the pages with characters in transformation, echoing the words of the writer.

Written as an echo to Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf, Pierre Cendors’ Tractatus solitarius – a poetical fiction work written in a form that reminds of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus logico-philosophicus – takes us deep into the wild, non-human, essential part of mankind. A man embarks on a journey within himself that is to lead him to nowhere, an unexplored landscape of absolute silence where new strengths await him. The book is at once a literary tribute, a tale of evasion, a travel diary and a poetical treatise.

This collection of the interviews of André du Bouchet with Alain Veinstein, from 1979 to 2000, were originally broadcast in several radio shows on France Culture. These conversations are here published for the first time. André du Bouchet talked with Alain Veinstein freely, despite the fact that their conversations were recorded. Now, the reader can rediscover the voice of the poet, thanks to the transcription of his words.

Nothing as mysterious and universal as silence. And yet not all the silences we experience have the same cause. There is the silence of speechless emotion, the silence in front of creation, the silence prompted by horror. Titian grows silent looking at his own Venus of Urbino, just like the Italian film director Ettore Scola in the twilight of his life, Liliane, the main character of a movie by Jacques Rozier, while dancing a summer dance, or just any of us when facing with the atrocities of war. This book is a portrait of silence in art and life, an inventory of the silences that take hold of us as fathers, mothers, children, lovers or disciples.

Written after the exhibition « Chasse, chassé » (“Hunt, hunted”), “La Hante” is the story of the call of the wild. The scenes of hunting bring us back to basic instincts and bestiality, in the depths of forests where men and beasts can’t be distinguished anymore, where desire and death mingled, where one hesitates between the exaltation of the predator and the terrors of the child. The inks of Patricia Cartereau give birth to dreamy pictures, reproducing this call of the wild.