2023-04-22 20:00:08
“The Whiteness of the Whale”, by Jean Frémon, POL, 352 p., €26.90, digital €19.
Neither critic nor art historian, Jean Frémon has nevertheless devoted most of his writings over the past fifteen years to painting. To artists like Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010), Francis Bacon (1909-1992) or David Hockney (born in 1937), whom he was able to exhibit in the gallery where he is, with the poet Jacques Dupin (1927-2012 ) and gallery owner and publisher Daniel Lelong, the co-founder. Or to visual artists, real or imaginary, who are at the heart of the fictions brought together in Look Street (POL, 2012) and The Magic Mirror (P.O.L, 2020).
The texts he wanted to collect in The Whiteness of the Whale, when POL editions proposed to him to publish a new work on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the publishing house, are nevertheless essentially devoted to literature. They evoke authors like Michel Leiris (1901-1990), Jacques Dupin, Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), Marcel Cohen (born in 1937) or Bernard Noël (1930-2021). If artists such as Louise Bourgeois and David Hockney are present in the volume, it is from the angle of the links they have with Balzac and Proust respectively.
Because, before being an art dealer, Jean Frémon was a writer. He was only 22 when he published his first novel with Editions du Seuil in 1969, The Mirror, the larks. For a long time, his literary activities continued alongside his professional activity. The latter first unfolded in publishing, with Jean-Jacques Pauvert (1926-2014), then in the art world, which he joined when Jacques Dupin offered to come and work with him at the gallery. Maeght. Gradually, the two activities converge and feed each other.
An “intellectual and creative complicity”
When asked about the way in which he articulates these two lives, Jean Frémon confides that the fact of being a writer allows him to maintain a “intellectual and creative complicity” very different from the relationship that a painter can maintain with a simple art dealer. As for the fact of writing essentially about painting, he affirms that it “fits well”. Because he doesn’t have “no desire to tell his life story” and don’t know each other “no particular gift for the imagination”. He adds : “To observe, to tell what I observe, to put myself as a writer at the service of another work, of an intellectual adventure, that is what I prefer. »
Faithful to his approach as an informed and discreet observer, Jean Frémon nevertheless operates, with The Whiteness of the Whale, a slight step aside. The collection, which borrows its fine title from the central chapter of Moby Dickby Herman Melville (1851), without staging its author, indeed paints a hollow portrait of him. “These are all people that I have known for the most part and whom I admire, explains Jean Frémon, and who, in a way, have “made my life”, professionally and intellectually. »
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