Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer, historian, cultural diplomat and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades. Born in Algiers, in a Jewish family from multiple Mediterranean origins (Algeria, Spain, Portugal, Greece, Italy etc.), she faced numerous geographical displacements and devoted her entire career to issues of migration and creation. For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature and society with an intercultural twist. An award-winning writer from Sartre: 1905-1980 to Leo & His Circle: the Life of Leo Castelli (Prix ArtCurial 2010) and A Foreigner Called Picasso (Prix Femina 2021), her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large. Annie Cohen-Solal brings to life a surging global ebb and flow of cultural energies, driven by innumerable fascinating individuals– painters, collectors, critics– who initiated enormous cultural changes in history.
Life
Born in Algeria, Annie Cohen-Solal lived in numerous countries and speaks numerous languages.[1]
As a writer, after Annie's PhD Paul Nizan communiste impossible, 1980 (with Professor Annie Krigel), Cohen-Solal 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. 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).[3] In July 2023, Cohen-Solal was asked to give the keynote address for the Sartre UK Society at Oxford. Her lecture “Who’s Still Afraid of Sartre?” developed some of the issues from her Tribune published earlier in Le Monde.[4]
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".[5] In June 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.
In New York again, Cohen-Solal's first encounter with Leo Castelli led her to shift her interest from European 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. She joined the jury of the Latvian Architecture Award in Riga (2015) and that of the Evens Art Prize in Antwerp (2016). Annie Cohen-Solal is also a trustee of Paris College of Art (since 2015).
As part of her research 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.
As a curator, Cohen-Solal presented Magiciens de la terre2014 at the Centre Pompidou, and published Magiciens de la terre: retour sur une exposition légendaire, with Jean-Hubert Martin. 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 (Princeton University), she became co-director of "Crossing Boundaries", a research group at CASBS (Center for Advanced Behavioral Studies), Stanford University (2015).
Her latest book Picasso the Foreigner (Prix Femina Essai, Fayard, 2021 and Gallimard Folio, 2023) was published in English by Farrar, Straus & Giroux (USA and English-speaking world) and in Spanish by Paidós (Spain and Spanish-speaking world) in Spring 2023. Next editions in 2024: Poland (Znak Koncept), Brazil (Record), Italy (Marsilio), and Russia, China, Japan etc. In 2022, Cohen-Solal curated the 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 was presented from October 12, 2021 to February 13, 2022. It won the Historia prize for best historical exhibition 2022. A version of this exhibition A Foreigner Called Picasso is currently being presented in New York at Gagosian West 21st Street (November 10 to December 22, 2023; it is co-curated with Vérane Tasseau). Forthcoming Picasso exhibitions might include Mantova (Palazzo Te) and Milano (Palazzo Reale).
Sartre: A Life, Translated by Anna Cancongi, Pantheon Books, 1988, ISBN9780394756622; Translated Norman MacAfee, New Press, 2005, (translated in sixteen languages).
"Simone de Beauvoir and 'The Wonders of America': 1947-1951", p.79-95, in: Simone de Beauvoir. Centennial Conference, volume X, The Florence Gould Lectures at New York University, Center for Civilization and Culture, New York University, New York, Summer 2009
"Existentialism Is a Humanism", p.3-15, Préface to the English version of "Explication de L'Etranger" et "L'Existentialisme est un humanisme", New Haven, YUP, 2007
«Coal Miners and Dinosaurs», p.125-136, in: Media Studies Journal, special issue: «Global Views on U.S Media», New York, The Freedom Forum Media Studies Center, New York, Columbia University, Fall 1995.
«France and the Fear of the New Germany: A view from France», Partisan Review, October 1995.
«Culture and the French Nation», p.161-167, in: Culture and Democracy: Social and Ethical Issues in Public Support of the Arts and Humanities, Andrew Buchwalter, editor, Boulder, Colorado, Westview Press, 1992.
«Tracking Down a Willing and Reluctant Hero», p.86-96, in: L'Esprit Créateur, vol. XXIX, n°4, Susan R. Suleiman, editor, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1989!;
«Lettre d'Italie», in Lettres d'Europe, Albin Michel, Paris 1988.
"The Young Sartre", p.212-226, in: Partisan Review, vol. 54, n°2, William Phillips, éditeur, Boston, Boston University, été 1987
"Simone de Beauvoir", Vogue, New York, July 1985.
"Mode galopante d'un produit mixte", p.133-137, in: Revue des sciences humaines, numéro spécial: «Récits de vie», tome LXII, no 191–192, Lille, Université de Lille III, 1983.
"Un Yéménite dans une poste" (avec Christian Bachmann), p.80-97, in: Etudes de Linguistique Appliquée, n°37, André Abbou, rédacteur en chef, Paris, Didier Erudition, janvier-mars 1980.
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