Too Much Gide

Douglas Johnson: French writers (1940-53), 15 November 2001

La Guerre des écrivains 1940-53 
by Gisèle Sapiro.
Fayard, 807 pp., frs 220, September 1999, 2 213 60211 5
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Correspondance: Marcel Arland – Jean Paulhan 1936-45 
edited by Jean-Jacques Didier.
Gallimard, 397 pp., frs 140, March 2000, 2 07 075789 7
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Dialogue des ‘vaincus’: Prison de Clairvaux, janvier-décembre 1950 
by Lucien Rebatet and Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, edited by Robert Belot.
Berg, 285 pp., frs 120, March 2000, 2 911289 22 6
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The Collaborator: The Trial and Execution of Robert Brasillach 
by Alice Kaplan.
Chicago, 320 pp., £9.50, December 2000, 0 226 42415 4
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... and resumed his career as a journalist. He had been held in the same prison, at Clairvaux, as Pierre-Antoine Cousteau, who had also worked for Je suis partout and had also been originally sentenced to death. The two of them planned to publish the conversations they held together but not while Cousteau’s famous brother, the oceanographer, was still ...

Bastards

James Wood: St Aubyn’s Savage Sentences, 2 November 2006

Mother’s Milk 
by Edward St Aubyn.
Picador, 279 pp., £12.99, January 2006, 0 330 43589 2
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... and how to escape it. He is also a drug addict, the fancy kind; he sometimes passes out at the Pierre and sometimes trawls the Lower East Side for smack: ‘His veins were becoming quite shy, but a lucky stab in the bicep, just below his rolled-up sleeve, yielded the gratifying spectacle of a red mushroom cloud uncurling in the barrel of the ...

Yellow Sky, Red Sea, Violet Sands

Richard Wollheim: Nicolas De Staël, 24 July 2003

Nicolas de Staël 
by Jean-Paul Ameline et al.
Centre Pompidou, 252 pp., €39.90, March 2003, 2 84426 158 2
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... living painter in the world’.A conversation of January 1950, reported by Staël’s friend Pierre Lecuire, does something to attenuate, or at least to account for, the seemingly paradoxical character of Staël’s commitment to abstraction. ‘Look,’ he said, pointing to a glue-pot and an ashtray, ‘here are objects, and this is just what I don’t ...

Golf Grips and Swastikas

William Feaver: Francis Bacon’s Litter, 26 February 2009

Francis Bacon: Incunabula 
edited by Martin Harrison and Rebecca Daniels.
Thames and Hudson, 224 pp., £39.95, September 2008, 978 0 500 09344 3
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... We are shown a photo from a 1961 Paris Match of Jeanne Moreau baring her teeth at Pierre Cardin in a starry sort of way: an image that never made it into the painting repertoire, though two curly brushstrokes besmirch the actress’s hair like livid topknots. It could be supposed that this was an idle brush wipe, or it could be interpreted as ...

At the Movies

Michael Wood: ‘Inglourious Basterds’, 10 September 2009

Inglourious Basterds 
directed by Quentin Tarantino.
August 2009
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... upon a Time in the Resistance, for instance, or David Lean’s Bridge on the River Seine, or Jean-Pierre Melville’s Shadows of the Army. The film opens with a homage to Leone, Morricone-style music (by Morricone, as it happens) on the soundtrack, and the words ‘Once upon a Time in Nazi-Occupied France’. Not Occupied France, you notice, or even ...

At the National Gallery

Peter Campbell: French Landscape Painting, 27 August 2009

... 1780s that fill the first room are notes made on the spot. There are no concessions to high style: Pierre-Henri de Valenciennes’s Cow-shed and Houses on the Palatine Hill is composed as stolidly as a picture postcard; Thomas Jones’s A Wall in Naples is as uncompromisingly frontal as a surveyor’s photograph for an insurance claim: all you see is a wall, a ...

In Saillans

Fleur Macdonald, 21 March 2019

... Saillans show how the gilets jaunes’ demands for direct democracy might be put into practice? As Pierre Bafoil wrote in Le Journal du Dimanche on 1 January, ‘The gilets jaunes dream about it. Saillans did it.’ Since their election, Saillans’s 15 councillors have tried to encourage transparency. Instead of delegating responsibility hierarchically, they ...

Short Cuts

Inigo Thomas: Cromwell’s Seal, 4 January 2018

... to end the monarchy. The Simon brothers belonged to a family of five children; their parents, Pierre Simon and Ann Germain, were Huguenots, whose own families had escaped to Guernsey to avoid either the Inquisition in the Spanish Netherlands or persecution in France. The family attended what was known colloquially as the ‘French Church’ on ...

At the Royal Academy

Daniel Soar: Hockney, 9 February 2012

... during his experiments in iPad art, he was beaming new pictures of flowers daily to the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris, where they reappeared on the screens of iPads in a show called Fleurs Fraîches. That was a proper ...

At Tate Britain

James Cahill: Frank Bowling, 15 August 2019

... almost comically, in Cover Girl (1966). A photograph from the Observer magazine of a model in Pierre Cardin dress and Vidal Sassoon hairdo is transformed into a dead-eyed totem beneath a silkscreen of Bowling’s Variety Store. Origin and endpoint – Bowling’s childhood home and his new city – are juxtaposed but also flattened; their mutual distance ...

At Camden Arts Centre

Jo Applin: On Nicola L., 26 December 2024

... female bodies, a series of built-in drawers where breasts, belly and vagina should be. The critic Pierre Restany referred to Nicola L.’s sculptures as ‘object lessons’. The body, we’re meant to understand, is a receptacle into which things can be stuffed, and from which things can be taken away. These sculptures resemble giant bobbin dolls, as if ...

At Tate Modern

Peter Campbell: The fairground at Bankside, 22 June 2006

... special exhibitions is closed at the moment while Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908-22 and Pierre Huyghe: Celebration Park are being installed) you get good views down into the Turbine Hall and out to St Paul’s Cathedral and the City. The success of Tate Modern as a viewing platform, like that of the Pompidou Centre, has never been questioned. But in ...

At the National Gallery of Scotland

Peter Campbell: Joan Eardley, 13 December 2007

... comparison of limited significance) resemble those of Tachiste contemporaries. Hans Hartung and Pierre Soulages were both painters whose work she could have seen exhibited in Scotland. More to the point are the abstracted landscapes of Nicolas de Staël and Soutine’s crumpled, wavy transformations of Céret (he was another painter with a single landscape ...

Union Sucrée

Perry Anderson: The Normalising of France, 23 September 2004

Le Rappel à l’ordre: Enquête sur les nouveaux réactionnaires 
by Daniel Lindenberg.
Seuil, 94 pp., €10.50, November 2002, 2 02 055816 5
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Esquisse pour une auto-analyse 
by Pierre Bourdieu.
Raisons d'Agir, 142 pp., €12, February 2004, 2 912107 19 9
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La République mondiale des lettres 
by Pascale Casanova.
Seuil, 492 pp., €27.50, March 1999, 2 02 035853 0
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... of the past had yet to be thoroughly purged of its ambiguities: the Nation. This task fell to Pierre Nora. In his editorial on the tenth anniversary of Le Débat in 1990, Nora had hailed the ‘new cultural landscape’ of the country, and within another couple of years, he completed his own monumental contribution to it. Originating in a seminar at the ...

Man on a Bicycle

Gillian Darley: Le Corbusier, 9 April 2009

Le Corbusier: A Life 
by Nicholas Fox Weber.
Knopf, 823 pp., $45, November 2008, 978 0 375 41043 7
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... Prize winner, escaped.) It was years before Le Corbusier’s architectural partner, his nephew Pierre Jeanneret, would return to work at the office at 35 rue de Sèvres, so horrified was he by his uncle’s complicity with the Vichy regime. But with his customary precision, Le Corbusier pressed on. By 1945, when he was planning l’Unité d’Habitation in ...