Thévoz (Michel) : Hans Holbein. Maniérisme, anamorphose, parallaxe, postmodernité, etc.

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.

2022 / 11,5x16cm / 192 p. / ISBN : 978-2-85035-078-8

Date de publication : 25 mai 2022

The 16th century is anachronistic. If we were to undertake the history of its avatars through the ages, taking into account its artistic productions with a delayed effect, we would see that it is curiously superimposed on our own ; and even that it reveals it to us for having been its construction site. Thus, Hans Holbein’s work, virtual, in potential, will have waited for our postmodernity to release its symbolic energy. In a way, one could say that Holbein was influenced by Andy Warhol, as if he had sensed a postmodern reading of his works. This book is an essay on the history of art in reverse, replacing reductive determinism with the liberating magnetism of a future gaze : our own.

Michel Thévoz was born in Lausanne in 1936. A philosopher and art historian close to Dubuffet, he was curator of the Collection de l’Art Brut from its foundation in 1976 until 2001. He has published some thirty works, notably on the art of madmen, suicide, spiritism, infamy, the reflection of mirrors, the pathology of the frame and the "Vaudois syndrome".

Foreign Rights

L’Atelier contemporain attempts to publish books of art and literature and books which associate artists and writers, with the concern to revive a dialogue between the literary and plastic arts.
The ambition is to explore the « paths of the création » through five collections gathered within the company : essays on art, written by artists, conversations and correspondences, monographs, and literature.