Timothy Hyman

Excellent biography and illustrations of this not awfully well-known french painter of the first half of the last century. His life had just enough of bathos, compulsions, tragedy (his paramour, Renee, killed herself after he decided he couldn't leave his wife, Marthe, for her) and talent to place him amongst the ranks of tragic artists. But then, all art is tragedy in the sense it tells us what we lack. If people had no lack of creativity, meaning and beauty in their lives, art museums worldwide would fail, falling like a row of dominoes; now, in our age, we are mere spectators, epigoni, if you like, who must line up at museums where the dried flowers of the meaning and beauty of our human tribe, expressed uniquely by Art, are sequestered.… (más)