Posts Tagged ‘Marc Chagall’

Stanford Magazine has spoken on Evolution of Desire: A Life of René Girard, and pronounced it good: “While the relationship between biographer and subject can be risky — producing hagiography at one extreme, disparagement at the other — Haven balances her frank admiration with critical commentary … this is an ambitious and thought-provoking life portrait.”

Let us return a few words of praise for writer Ginny McCormick’s own prose: One reader said it is “attentive and careful” – and beyond that, as another observed, “remarkably lovely.”

I won’t recap her summary of René Girard‘s theories in the article, “Truth and Testament” (you can read the whole piece here), but instead excerpt some passages that will recount less familiar episodes of the French thinker’s life:

Girard by all accounts cared little about his reputation and relished argument. He tells Haven, “Theories are expendable. They should be criticized. When people tell me my work is too systematic, I say, ‘I make it as systematic as possible for you to be able to prove it wrong.’” Inducted into the celestial Académie française as one of its immortels in 2005, Girard certainly commanded the attention of European intelligentsia, if not universal accord.

***

Picasso in ’53

Beyond Girard’s theories, Haven scrutinizes aspects of his life that arguably foretold his work. She finds mimetic elements in the ancient history of his hometown, Avignon, seat of papal rivalry 500 years ago. (Girard’s father was an archivist who became the curator of the city’s Palais des Papes.) Girard’s interest in scapegoating echoes his own family history. A female forbear was a victim in the Reign of Terror. Members of his extended family, whose social position caused envy among fellow citizens, were accused of collaboration under the Vichy regime in World War II.

Moreau in ’58

Anecdotes about Girard’s youth in Avignon and student days in Paris during and after the war afford a lighter view. As an adolescent, the contrarian theorist was a prankster who disliked school; at times home study was the solution. A little-known venture was his role in the founding of Avignon’s arts festival in 1947. He and a friend did much of the legwork, coordinating with Picasso, Marc Chagall, Paul Klee, Georges Braque, Max Ernst, Wassily Kandinsky and others. One gasps at the informality: two twentysomethings transporting by the small truckload a dozen Picassos and the other pieces from Paris studios to Avignon. Girard recalls “mishandling” one of Henri Matisse’s Blouses Roumaines and then quickly repairing the small hole inflicted on it. He fondly recounts hobnobbing with visiting festival actors, including a young Jeanne Moreau.

Read the whole thing here.

The late, great poet…

We wrote yesterday about Tadeusz Różewicz, who died at 92. Today, poet and translator (and friend) George Szirtes writes about him in The Guardian. He says the Polish poet “was one of the great European ‘witness’ poets whose own lives were directly affected by the seismic events of the 20th century.”

“‘My decimated generation is now departed and dying, duped and disillusioned,’ he said soon after the fall of the Berlin Wall. He saw the forgetting of history as a disaster, ‘the falling of tears on the stock exchange’ as he wrote in a poem of 1994.”

More:

“That generation, born just after the first world war, amid the great chaotic redrawing of maps, saw the rise of fascism, the terrors of the second world war (both Różewicz and his brother Janusz – also a poet – served in the Polish Underground, Janusz being killed by the Gestapo in 1944), then watched the Iron Curtain descend across Europe and survived, if they did, Stalinism without being jailed or killed to see the clock tick towards 1989 and what they sometimes considered the false reinterpretation of their own pasts.

… and his admirer.

“Różewicz’s own recounting of his life, Mother Departs – a work part memoir, part diary, part recorded conversation, part poetry – presents us with the picture of a childhood that begins with an intensely religious mother who was born Jewish but then became part of the Catholic community. By the time Tadeusz was born the family was living in a small town, but she had spent years in a small backward village and her vivid descriptions of village life, which he recalls in Mother Departs, made a strong impression on the poet in his understanding of human potential.

“Różewicz’s first poems were religious and he never quite lost sight of the idea of good and evil. He did after all see plenty of the latter. After studying the history of art at university in Kraków he began to publish both poetry and plays and made his reputation in both, developing a collage style in plays like The Card Index.”

He concludes: “Różewicz was a major figure in modernist poetry but his modernism has little to do with theory and formal experiment as such. There is, in his harsh clarity, something beyond, a touch of early Chagall perhaps, as though life were sacred after all.”

Read the whole thing here.