Annie Cohen-Solal

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Annie Cohen-Solal (1948, Algiers), is a French historian and writer. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. After Sartre : A Life (1987) became an international success, she became French cultural counselor in the US, where she held her position from 1989 to 1992. At the crossroads of disciplinary fields (social history, art history, history of immigration), she focuses on the agents responsible for modern symbolic circulations.

Annie Cohen-Solal
Annie 1988.png
Annie Cohen-Solal (1988)
Born1948
Algiers
AwardsLégion d'Honneur

Bernier prize of Académie des Beaux-Arts

ArtCurial prize for the best contemporary art book
Scientific career
InstitutionsCultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the USA

Freie Universität Berlin
Hebrew University of Jerusalem
EHESS-Paris
Université de Caen
ENS-Paris

Life[]

Born in Algiers, Cohen-Solal settled and lived in seven different countries and speaks seven languages.

As an academic, she held positions at the Freie Universität Berlin, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Tisch School of Art (NYU), École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales, University of Caen (Basse-Normandie), École Normale supérieure in Paris.

Since her earliest projects as a scholar, she has been borrowing techniques from ethnography and anthropology, combining them with traditional historical archival research in intercultural contexts. After her PhD Paul Nizan communiste impossible, 1980, she was commissioned by André Schiffrin (Pantheon Books, New York) to write the first biography of Jean-Paul Sartre. Published in 1985, this book was translated into sixteen languages, which until today, some describe as "unsurpassable".[1]

As Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States in residence in New York (1989-1993), Cohen-Solal tackled numerous fields, managed to get Ariane Mnouchkine's Les Atrides to BAM, and created the first French interdisciplinary academic program across the US « centres d'excellence ».

In New York, Cohen-Solal's first encounter with Leo Castelli led her to shift her interest from intellectuals to agents of the art world. In the frame of a manyfold project which was to become a social history of the US artist, she published Painting American (2001) and Leo & His Circle : The Life of Leo Castelli (2010). She also published New York-Mid Century (2014), with Paul Goldberger and Robert Gottlieb; and Mark Rothko : Toward the Light in the Chapel (2014). By adopting the historical perspective of the longue durée and developing a multiscalar analysis of configurations, Cohen-Solal highlighted the various networks of agents who made possible the empowerment of the artist in the US as well as the shift of the art world to the US. In 2001, she produced a 25 programs-series for France-Culture: From Frederic Church to Jackson Pollock, the Heroic March of American Painters.

In 2014, she became general curator of Magiciens de la terre 2014 at the Centre Pompidou, and published Magiciens de la terre : retour sur une exposition légendaire, with Jean-Hubert Martin.

As part of her work on art, artists, intellectual and social circulations, she was commissioned by Leon Black (Jewish Lives series at Yale University Press) to write Mark Rothko : toward the Light in the Chapel, translated into six languages. Following the social and geographical trajectory of the painter, her book reveals how this Jewish child who immigrated to the United States at age ten, became a true agent of transformation of the country, managing to integrate the different cultural areas to which he belonged, notably in the Rothko Chapel (Houston, Texas) commissioned by the de Menil family and inaugurated in 1971. Following her global vision of artistic flows, the Maeght Foundation in Saint Paul de Vence entrusted her with the essay  for Christo and Jeanne-Claude : Barrels (2016). With historian Jeremy Adelman (en) (Princeton University), she became co-director of "Crossing Boundaries" a research group at CASBS (Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies), Stanford University (2015).

On the occasion of Sartre's centenary in 2005, her international lecture tour took her to Brazil, where she and Gilberto Gil considered the creation of a Sartre Chair at the University of Brasilia. She then co-directed the organization of the Sartre Night at the ENS, involving students and researchers as philosophers, historians and geographers, and led a research seminar "Geopolitics of Sartre" (2013). In 2009, at the French Consulate in New York, she was presented with the title of Chevalier dans l'ordre national de la Légion d'Honneur , the highest decoration in France, by Ambassador Pierre Vimont. Annie Cohen-Solal is a trustee of Paris College of Art (since 2015). She joined the jury of the Latvian Architecture Award in Riga (2015) and that of the Evens Art Prize in Antwerp (2016).

As a curator, she has been curating an exhibition « Picasso l'étranger » for the Musée national de l'Histoire de l'Immigration de la Porte Dorée, in partnership with the Musée national Picasso-Paris, which will be presented from October 12, 2021 to February 13, 2022. Her research on Picasso, at the crossroads of history of immigration and art history prompted her to write an essay: A Foreigner named Picasso, which will be published both in France (Fayard, Paris, March 2021) and in the US (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, NY, Fall 2022)

Bibliography[]

  • Paul Nizan, communiste impossible, Paris, Grasset, 1980.
  • Sartre: A Life, Translated by Anna Cancongi, Pantheon Books, 1988, ISBN 9780394756622; Translated Norman MacAfee, New Press, 2005, (translated in sixteen languages).
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, Gallimard, 1991, album "La Pléiade".
  • Sartre 1905-1980, Paris, Gallimard, 1999, coll. "Folio-Essais".
  • Painting American: The Rise of American Artists, Paris 1867-New York 1948, Translated Laurie Hurwitz-Attias, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre, Paris, PUF, 2005, coll. "Que sais-je ?", nº 3732. (translated into Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese).
  • Sartre, un penseur pour le XXIe siècle, Paris, Gallimard, 2005, coll. « Découvertes Gallimard / Littératures » (nº 468).
  • New York Mid-Century (with Paul Goldberger and Robert Gottlieb), New York, Vendome Press, 2014 (translated in English and German).
  • Leo and His Circle. Alfred A. Knopf, 2010 (translated in French, Italian, Dutch, Spanish, Turkish, Chinese).
  • Une Renaissance sartrienne, Paris, Gallimard, 2013, (translated in Spanish and Italian).
  • Magiciens de la terre : retour sur une exposition légendaire (avec Jean-Hubert Martin), Xavier Barral et Centre Pompidou.
  • Calder/Prouvé, New York, Gagosian Gallery, 2014 (in French, English and Italian).
  • Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel. Yale UP, collection Jewish Lives. 2015. pp. 4–. ISBN 978-0-300-18553-9.
  • « In Quest of The Mastaba », in : Christo et Jeanne-Claude : Barils/Barrels, Fondation Maeght, 2016.
  • La valeur de l'art contemporain, collection La vie des idées, (with Cristelle Teroni) PUF, 2016.
  • Calder, Forgeron de géantes libellules, Paris, Gallimard et Musée Soulages, 2017.

Various contributions[]

Press[]

Videos and Radio[]

Press Excerpts[]

References[]

  1. ^ "Le " Sartre " d'Annie Cohen-Solal ou une conscience critique de son temps - Marc Alpozzo (Ouvroir de réflexions potentielles)". marcalpozzo.blogspirit.com (in French). Retrieved 2020-10-23.

External links[]

External video
video icon Annie Cohen-Solal. Her latest book, "Mark Rothko: Toward the Light in the Chapel," Charlie Rose, 4/5/2015
video icon Annie Cohen-Solal: Jean-Paul Sartre, Cornell University, Oct. 24, 2008
Retrieved from ""