[New-Poetry] Text in French

[Anny Ballardini]

> From: Association culturelle France-Amérique [mailto:acfa1 at aliceadsl.fr] 
> Sent: donderdag 10 augustus 2006 16:24 

The French publisher « Acfa Editions » Is pleased to announce the publication of "Au Sud D'eden, Des Américains Dans Le Sud De La France, 1910-1940" By the art historian Jocelyne Rotily. 

 

ISBN:  2-9524259-0-6

244 pages

24 illustrations

(TEXT IN FRENCH)

 

"A book of high interest" (Edmonde Charles-Roux, President of the 

Académie Goncourt)

 

"Au Sud d'Eden" was supported by the Archives of American Art, the 

Centre National des Lettres, and the Conseil Général 13.

 

  A BRIEF DESCRIPTION :

 

 Rare are the famous American artists and writers expatriated in Paris 

(betwen 1910 and 1940) who haven't one day been drawn to the South of 

France : Provence and the Riviera, most specfically.

            The "lost generation" was there in the 1920s :  John Dos Passos, 

Ernest Hemingway and Scott Fitzgerald who made of Antibes their land of 

pleasures ;  each summer, they met in the " villa America", a famous 

house owned by the painter and dandy Gerald Murphy .The South has also 

attracted radical writers such as the African American author Claude 

McKay who, promoted by Jean Ballard's "Cahiers du Sud",  wrote in 

Marseilles one of his most significant novels : "Banjo". Such as John 

Reed who discovered in Marseilles a" romantic",  "splendid" and 

"virile" city.

            The whole region was painted by artists for whom nature has remained a 

creative machine : William Glackens called the "American Renoir"; 

Stanton Macdonald-Wright who settled in Cassis and painted by the Cap 

Canaille some of his first synchromist landscapes (eg : "Cassis 

Polychrome") ;  Marsden Hartley who lived in Aix-en-Provence, haunted 

by Cézanne's Sainte-Victoire ; Man Ray who sojourned  in Marseilles. He 

loved  its popular and noisy Canebière, and photographed its "Pont 

Transbordeur", symbol of modernity as renown in France as the Brooklyn 

Bridge.  For these creators, the South was a garden of Eden.  They 

found freedom, a vibrant light, daring contrasts of colors, a pristine 

nature, and a Mediterranean way of life.

            When the war broke out, first in 1914 and later in 1940, the South 

turned into a land of refuge. In 1917 Morgan Russell, Blaise Cendrars's 

friend, Ieft Paris under the German bombs for Le Cannet. He  forsook 

for a time his synchromist investigation  to address the Masters of the 

Italian Renaissance ;  in Nice, Alexander Archipenko sculpted figures 

of bathers in a modernistic and unprecedented language.

            In 1940,  the South - now a " free zone" - was a land of transit 

where hope met despair. HeroIc figures came to the front stage, who 

endangered their lifes to save artists and intellectuals pursued by the 

Nazis. These heroes were :  Varian Fry, Miriam Davenport, Mary Jayne 

Gold and the American vice-consul in Marseilles Hiram Bingham.  Their 

sphere of activity was Marseilles.

            And all ends up or starts again with the novelist Jim Harrison who 

seems to reopen the road to the South.  Since the tragedy of September 

11, he has even more reasons to come to Arles or Marseilles. To him 

there may be no better way to fight against terrorism than to drink red 

wine and eat garlic.

 

            "Au Sud d'Eden" is mainly  based on unpublished material  belonging to 

the Archives of American Art,  the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in 

Washington D.C, the National Archives, the  MOMA, and to French 

archives such as  the BMVR,  and the Archives départementales in 

Marseilles.

            It brings to light another image of Provence and the Riviera and shows 

how the region, its culture, artists and landscapes had a major 

influence on the American arts and literature of this period.

 

THE AUTHOR:  Jocelyne Rotily is an art historian.  She  taught at the 

University of Provence, Harvard University, and at New York University 

and Columbia University (in Paris).  She is the author of Artistes 

américains à Paris 1914-1940, published by L'Harmattan, and of many 

articles published in  L'Infini ,  Critique , Gazette des Beaux-Arts , 

Le Bulletin célinien, and Les Mélanges de l'Ecole de Rome.  She 

recently contributed to the writing of the exhibition catalogue : A 

Transatlantic Avant-GardeAmerican Artists in Paris, 1918-1939. Her work 

has been supported by the  Smithsonian Institution, the Roberto Longhi 

Foundation, the Ecole Française de Rome, and the Singer-Polignac 

Foundation. Her main fields of interest are the French American 

cultural relations and African American arts.

 

 

TO BUY AU SUD D'EDEN , you may order it through  www.amazon.fr

 

For more information regarding Au Sud d'Eden, please contact :

ACFA Editions

23, avenue Guy de Maupassant

13008 Marseilles, France

E-mail : acfa1 at aliceadsl.fr

Fax : 33 (0)4 91 77 98 08

 

 
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Anny Ballardini
http://annyballardini.blogspot.com/
http://www.fieralingue.it/modules.php?name=poetshome
http://www.moriapoetry.com/ebooks.html
I Tell You: One must still have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star! 
Friedrich Nietzsche 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://wiz.cath.vt.edu/pipermail/new-poetry/attachments/20060829/e631d223/attachment-0001.html