The French scholar and author, who is writing a cultural biography of Leo Castelli and his circle, discusses the evolving sociology of the artist/gallery/collector system.
Annie Cohen-Solal is a writer and a Professor at the University of Caen (American Studies) and at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. She was born in Algeria, received a Ph.D. from the Sorbonne, and has taught at New York University, the Freie Universität in Berlin, the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Paris XIII. She has published a biography of Sartre, Sartre 1905-1980 (Gallimard, 1985), which was translated into eighteen languages; the current American version, Sartre, (The New Press, 2005) has been prefaced by philosopher and author Cornel West. In Brazil, after meeting with Minister of Culture Gilberto Gil, she was asked to create a Sartre Chair at the University of Brasilia.
From 1989 to 1993, Dr. Cohen-Solal served as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States. Following her experience as a cultural diplomat, she published Un jour ils auront des peintres, l’avènement des peintres américains: Paris 1867-New York 1948 (Gallimard, 2000), which received the Prix Bernier of the Académie Française, and Painting American, The Rise of American Artists: Paris 1867-New-York 1948 (Knopf, 2001).
In 2005-2006, as a Fellow of the Pollock-Krasner Foundation at SUNY-Stony Brook, she conducted research on the gallerists Leo Castelli and Ileana Sonnabend, organizing the symposium “From Abstract Expressionists to Magicians of the Earth, The New State of The Art World,” and is now in the process of developing an Observatory for the Global Visual Arts. In 2009, Annie Cohen-Solal will publish Leo & les siens in Paris (éditions Gallimard), in Milan (Johan & Levi), and in New York (Alfred A. Knopf). She is currently a Visiting Arts Professor at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts.
This lecture is supported by the New York Council for the Humanities and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
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