Portrait Tales
Regular price
€17.99
'Portrait Tales offers a compelling series of behind-the-scenes stories about both well-known and little-known masterly portraits from world art history and, therefore, about the famous or unduly forgotten or neglected artists who painted them. Jean Fremon enables us to look both behind and, not least, into the 'magic mirrors', as he phrases it in his French title, with which artists paint their own self-portraits. To tell his tales, he uses a colourful palette of phenomena related to how portraits are made and to how people pose for them; he highlights not only the painterly but also the psychological, sociological and political backgrounds informing the artist and the model.' (John Taylor, from the preface)
Jean Fremon has been contributing to a trans-genre tendency in contemporary French letters since 1969. The president of the Galerie Lelong by day, and a writer by night, he has published over twenty books in France, including poetry (translated by Lydia Davis et al.), fiction and essays on art. His work has been translated into Spanish, German, Norwegian and Turkish. His poetry has received praise from John Ashbery, Paul Auster and Rosemarie Waldrop. Some of the artists with whom he has worked the most closely include Antoni Tapies, Donald Judd, Jannis Kounellis, Sean Scully, David Hockney and Louise Bourgeois. In 1985, he commissioned Louise Bourgeois's first European exhibition. Thirty years later, he organised her last, which she curated, at the Maison de Balzac in Paris.