Portrait Tales
John Taylor author Jean Fremon author John Taylor translator
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Les Fugitives
Published:25th May '23
£11.99
Available for immediate dispatch.
'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 is a wholly singular artist, a writer who lives in the radiant zone where poetry, philosophy and storytelling meet.' - Paul Auster; 'An antidote to our epileptic times, Jean Fremon's parlance makes the description of art into an art of description, rescued from today's focus on current affairs [...] I only need to read a few pages of Jean Fremon's work to feel comforted - and, even better, to be persuaded that the most revolutionary form of art is figurative.' - Damien Aubel, Transfuge; 'Jean Fremon loves telling stories: stories about painters, stories about paintings; and he does this with finesse and style. A learned, Proustian writer, [Fremon] handles ekphrasis - the art of describing a painting - with subtle precision, in stories leading to meditations on art.' - Le Journal des Arts; 'Jean Fremon is the ideal dinner guest: for his sparkling wit paired with a keen intelligence and sensitivity. Sprinkled with amusing or unexpected anecdotes and illuminating comparisons that span art history, each story is a picture in a rich portrait gallery. Matisse concluded tersely that "a portrait is a quarrel". The ones which Jean Fremon provides here prove him wrong, serving us up a feast with brio.' - La Croix
ISBN: 9781739778330
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
120 pages