Portrait Tales

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.

'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