The Russian Academy Of Arts

22 April – 22 May 2011
Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts
17 University Embankment, St. Petersburg

The Research Museum of the Russian Academy of Arts, 17 University Embankment, St. Petersburg, invites you to attend the opening of a show of paintings by the French artist Phillip Roman (1927-1999) and a panel discussion “Parallel History of Modern Art in Europe” to be led by the Member of the Academie Francaise Jean Clair and teacher of the Institute of Literary Studies of the College de France Odyllia Bombarde, that will take place on April 22, 2011 at 2 pm.

The theory of avant-garde movements in the art from the beginning of World War I till the 1980s comprising futurism, cubism, suprematism, Bauhaus, new objectivism, social realism, etc. has a claim on adding some historical explanations to many forms of modern art. At the same time, this theory is ideological and teleological, that is why it does not include a whole number of persons who created without their adherence to any art trends, and often, we only today start appreciating the significance of their work.

Phillip Roman is one of these artists, who were lost in History and saved by the Time. Strange was his career – from a quiet place of a banker in Lebanon, when this country was under the French influence, to the solitude during his last years when he was absolutely forgotten. And in between – a number of important meetings that changed his life: with the French poet Pierre Jean Jouve, who occupied in the 1930s a special place – between Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski) and George Bataille, and whose influence was recognized by the young people in the 1960s, then with his wife Blanche Reverchon-Jouve, a pioneer of psychoanalysis in Switzerland. Later, was his meeting with Balthus which affected his career: Phillip Roman gave up the bank and became an artist.

Jouve, Freud and psychoanalysis, Balthus, passion for Balzac and Stendhal, and much more unexpected for a Frenchman, adherent of traditional culture was his reading of books by Henry James, Arthur Schnitzler, Fyodor Dostoevsky. High individual culture of Phillip Roman was oriented to Mitteleuropa, Germany and Russia, rather than to the pure Gallic tradition. Disputes about the soul and its contradictions were much more interesting to him than arguments and reasons of the Intellect.  

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