Saints and lovers: myths of the avant-garde in Michel Georges-Michel's Les Montparnos

This article examines Michel Georges-Michel’s 1924 novel Les Montparnos as a study of the myths circulating around the Montparnasse avant-garde of the 1920s, and their function in relation to art. Key amongst these myths is the idea of art as a religion, according to which avant-garde artists are conceived as secular saints and martyrs. While this notion of artist as saint is strongly present in early-twentieth-century biographies of Van Gogh, Georges-Michel explicitly relates his fictionalized version of Modigliani’s life not to such recent models but rather to the Renaissance masters, and especially to Raphael, a link which is explained in terms of the post-war ‘retour à l’ordre’ in French artistic culture. The novel’s references to Raphael as archetypal painter-lover are also related to its construction of a myth of the artist as virile and sexually prolific, and to its identification of creative and sexual impulses

Marking Time, Moving Images:Drawing and Film

This article explores the range of ways in which artists have brought the practice of drawing into contact with film. This has to do with a range of related but different practices: the articulation of time and the relationship between movement and stillness; the use of film stills and photographs as source material for the production of drawings; the inscription of manual marks directly onto the surface of celluloid film; and the use of film and digital projection to present the process of making drawings. The article ranges widely from works made in the 1940s and 1950s by Henri Matisse and Henri Michaux, to experimental films made in the '60s by Stan Brakhage and Birgit and Wilhelm Hein, to contemporary artworks by Vivienne Koorland, Oscar Muñoz, and Susan Morris