Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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female monologuists of the turn-of-the-century

music halls discovered and encouraged

Georges Brassens (also being the first to per-

form some of his songs). Patachou was later

to perform songs by (among others) Guy

Béart, Léo Ferré, Charles Aznavour and Serge

Gainsbourg. She retired as a singer in the early

1960s. Since then, she has been compère at

the restaurant-cabaret of the Eiffel Tower and

appeared in the film Faubourg Saint-Martin

(1987).

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Cornick, M. (1995) Intellectuals in History:

The ‘Nouvelle Revue française’ Under Jean

Paulhan, Amsterdam: Rodopi (a study of

the influence of history and politics over

the intellectuals of the review).

Peduzzi, Richard

b. 1943, Argentan

Stage designer

Peduzzi is known for his architectural style,

and his collaboration with Chéreau since 1969

on acclaimed productions including Peer Gynt

in 1981 and Hamlet in 1988. He has worked

with other directors in film and theatre, in-

cluding Bondy, on his 1988 version of Shake-

speare’s A Winter’s Tale.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Bradby, D. (1991) Modern French Drama

1940–1990 , 2nd edition, Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press (see the section

on collective creation).

Perec, Georges

b. 1936, Paris;

d. 1982, Ivry

Novelist, autobiographer and director

When he died at the age of 46, Perec, of Polish-

Jewish parentage, had produced a disconcert-

ingly varied body of work. Since then, partly

through posthumous publications, he has

come to be regarded as one of the most influ-

ential creators of his time. The first of two

landmarks in his literary career was the publi-

cation, in 1965, of Things: A Chronicle of the

Nineteen Sixties (Les Choses: une histoire des

années soixante), a sociologically inspired

novel about consumerism, written without

dialogue but including numerous hidden quo-

tations, including some from Flaubert’s Senti-

mental Education, an earlier ironic study of

deluded youth. The second was Life: A User’s

Manual (La Vie mode d’emploi), an extraor-

dinary creative feat where the entire contents

of a Parisian apartment block are conjured up

in words and stories, each chapter focusing

on the same instant in the lives of the inhabit-

ants of one apartment at a time. Like his men-

tor, Raymond Queneau, Perec saw that eclec-

tic erudition, combined with a highly specula-

tive stance and a strong sense of form, could

produce works which defied all established

categories. While fiction and storytelling were

always important to him, he identified three

other themes as being of equal significance:

first, the quest for ways of exploring and re-

cording everyday reality, which inspired

Espèces d’espaces (Kinds of Space) and Tenta-

tive d’épuisement d’un lieu parisien (Attempt

to Exhaust a Parisian Space); second, autobi-

ography and memory, which led to W or the

Childhood Memory (W ou le souvenir

d’enfance), a work haunted by his mother’s

destruction in the Nazi holocaust, and Je me

souviens (I Remember) a list of 480 ‘collec-

tive’ or generational memories; and third,

games and formal constraints, which inspired

Perec, avid maker of crosswords and co-au-

thor of a treatise on the Japanese game of Go,

to become a fervent member of OuLiPo, and

to write A Void (La Disparition), a full-length

novel written without the letter ‘e’. Always

creative and stimulating, Perec’s works, in-

cluding films such as Un Homme qui dort (A

Man Asleep) and Récits d’Ellis Island (Ellis

Island Stories—with Robert Bober), generally

weave his various interests into new patterns,

combining a playful lightness of touch with

themes whose seriousness and importance

have been increasingly recognized.

MICHAEL SHERINGHAM

Further reading

Bellos, D. (1993) Georges Perec: A Life in

Words, London: Harvill (essential back-

ground reading).

Périer, François

b. 1919, Paris

Actor, real name Gabriel Pillu

Périer has played a wide range of roles in Pa-

risian boulevard theatres, at the Théâtre Na-

tional Populaire and the Comédie-Française,

as well as on radio and television. Influenced

throughout his career by Sartre, he appeared

in the 1948 production of Dirty Hands (Les

Mains sale).

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Parker, G. (1990) ‘Michèle Perrein: The Pa-

renthesis as Metaphor of the Female Con-

dition’, in M.Atack and P.Powrie (eds) Con-

temporary French Fiction by Women, Man-

chester: Manchester University Press (a

wide-ranging essay on Perrein’s fiction).

Perse, Saint-John

b. 1887St-Léger-les-Feuilles,

Guadeloupe;

d. 1975, Presqu’île-de-Giens, France

Poet and diplomat, real name

Alexis Saint-Léger Léger

Born in the Antilles and trained in France for

the diplomatic service (holding a post in the

Ministry of Foreign Affairs, performing diplo-

matic service in China, and closely associated

with Aristide Briand), he wrote poetry only

rarely—Éloges in 1911, under his civil name,

and Anabasis (Anabasie) in 1924, using his

pseudonym for the first time. Anabasis was

translated by T.S.Eliot in 1938. Stripped of his

French citizenship by the Vichy regime in

1940, he emigrated to the United States and

worked in the Library of Congress. From

1940 on, he published a series of remarkable

long prose poems, powerfully rhythmical and

with strong epic and lyrical profiles, reminis-

cent of Pindar, the scriptures and Claudel. The

cycle begins with Exile (Exit) in 1942, a col-

lection containing his first ‘elemental’ poems,

‘Pluies’ and ‘Neiges’. There followed the enor-

mous epics Winds (Vents) in 1946 and

Seamarks (Amers) in 1957. In 1960 he was

awarded the Nobel prize for literature; Saint-

John Perse expressed his strong humanistic

faith in the coexistence of science and poetry

in his acceptance speech.

Later volumes are devoted to a celebration

of Dante (1965); a scientific/poetic work called

Birds (Oiseaux) in 1962, for which Georges

Braque made memorable illustrations; and a

work on old age, Chronicle (Chronique)

(1960). The final work, in 1977, is called

Songs of an Equinox (Chant d’un équinoxe).

All the poems are available in the Pléïade edi-

tion of 1972.

Perse returned to France in 1957 and died

there. He is remembered not only as a major

poet but as a distinguished diplomat and ad-

viser to statesmen.

WALTER A.STRAUSS

Further reading

Freeman, G. (1987) Pétanque, the French

Game of Boules, Leatherhead: Carreau

Press (an authoritative, illustrated exami-

nation of the game’s history, rules, tactics

and organization in the United Kingdom).

Philipe, Gérard

b. 1922, Cannes;

d. 1959, Paris

Actor

A stage and screen actor, Philipe was also

strongly committed politically to the causes

of the Left. His career began during the

Occupation (1940–4), but he was really one

of the first of the new generation of actors of

the 1950s. He was a sign of the times of the

new focus on youth and beauty evident

in Yves Allégret’s film Les Orgueilleux

of 1953. His performance style was a radical

departure from that of his flamboyant pred-

ecessors in its muted naturalness, and his

understated style and performativity from

the interior, mixed with his elegance and

beauty, gave him an aura that no one

resisted. When Théâtre National Populaire

(TNP) theatre director Jean Vilar first spot-

ted him in 1950, he declared he had met

the real El Cid. His untimely death from can-

cer provoked unprecedented national

mourning.

SUSAN HAYWARD

See also: cinema; cinéma de qualité; theatre

photography

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when

Baudelaire defined it as a mere secretarial aid

to the sciences and arts like printing or short-

hand, photography has occupied an ambigu-

ous and somewhat precarious place in French

artistic life and thought. In the first half of the

twentieth century, visual culture continued to

be dominated by painting: photographic

pictorialism, with its dusky half-tones evok-

ing the stifling atmosphere of the turn of the

century, was a shadow of impressionism, and

even much of the radical work of Surrealist

photographers like Hans Bellmer and Brassaï

(which travestied and reconstructed banal re-

ality) was predicated on the work of painters.

However, with the founding in 1937 of the

American magazine Life, the new concept of

the photojournalist was born. In France,

Eugène Atget and Lartigue had already been

linking reportage-photo to a more aesthetic

concept of photography, whereby photo-

graphs were seen as both documents and lyri-

cal objects in their own right, and the exist-

ence of two magazines, Regards and Paris-

Match, both keen on emulating Life, encour-

aged photographers to make their images

more incisive and more informative.

After the war, photography acquired new

prestige and a new dynamism, for the public

was thirsty for images that bore the marks of

authenticity; photographers now considered

their primary function to be to document the

world for those who could not witness it first

hand. In 1945, the Rapho agency grouped to-

gether many photographers such as Doisneau

and Ronis, whose work was informed by a

humanist approach to the witnessing of world

events. Then, in 1947, Cartier-Bresson and

Robert Capa set up the Magnum agency, an

international co-operative of photographers

who felt concerned with the human suffering

and misery caused by war, and with social and

racial injustice, and who expressed their con-

cern through their cameras and pictures. Con-

vinced that much postwar political history

would be decided in the developing countries,

photography

422

the Magnum photographers travelled the

world, sending back their candid shots to be

developed in Paris and then distributed

throughout the world. The influence of Mag-

num can be seen in the vast 1955–6 ‘Family of

Man’ exhibition of 503 photos by 273 pho-

tographers, put on in Paris and New York. In

the 1950s, Life and Paris-Match functioned as

a sort of conscience of the world, presenting

the last images of the war, of the subsequent

activities of reconstruction and then of the trau-

mas of decolonization. Throughout this period,

photography was seen as the capturing of a

‘decisive moment’ of reality—as Cartier-

Bresson famously defined it in the preface to

his 1952 book, Images à la sauvette (Stolen

Images).

Both ‘art photographers’ and ‘photojournalists’

were now broadening the range of their subject

matter and experimenting with the technical

possibilities of the medium, and public interest

in this art form was so great that in 1961 Michel

Tournier was entrusted with setting up and pre-

senting a series of monthly television pro-

grammes which showed great photographers at

work; Cbambre noire (The Darkroom) ran for

four years until 1965. A dominant feature of

the 1960s was the move towards ‘subjective

photography’, a move fostered and encouraged

by many intellectuals who began to question

the humanistic premises of Magnum-type pho-

tography. For instance, in Mythologies, Barthes

denounced what he saw as attitudes of benevo-

lent distance and attacked photojournalistic

work for its sentimental humanism and, ulti-

mately, its complicity with injustice. In 1965,

Pierre Bourdieu argued that, despite the fact that

photography may appear to be spontaneous,

accessible to all and therefore highly personal,

it is one of the most structured and systematic

of all cultural activities.

Photography was now increasingly at the

centre of avant-garde art and intellectual de-

bate, as well as having achieved true popular

acceptance not only as a documentary medium

but also as an art form. In a significant sym-

bolic gesture, after the events of May 1968,

the Bibliothèque Nationale separated its pho-

tographic gallery from the main buildings, re-

designing it to open directly on to the street.

The public visibility of photography was fur-

ther increased in 1969 by the founding by

Lucien Clergue and others of the Rencontres

Internationales de Photographic in Arles, prob-

ably the world’s premier competition, and then

by the inauguration in 1976 of the Mois de la

Photo, held every second year in Paris. In 1973,

the prestigious magazine Chroniques de l’art

vivant devoted a whole issue to photography,

and by 1988 interest in photography of all

types was so great that the magazine Le

Photographe was founded. Finally, the almost

inevitable institutionalization took place in

1982 with the creation of the École Nationale

de la Photographie (ENP) in Arles and the

equally inevitable social consecration by prizes

was effected in 1984 when the Société des Gens

d’Image founded the Prix Niepce for photo-

graphs and the Prix Nadar for books.

In 1980, Barthes published Camera Lucida

(La Chambre claire), a highly personal essay

in which he insisted on the magical quality of

photography which permits a new relation-

ship with the past, the present and the future.

Barthes’s poetic meditation on loss, and his

notion that time is both reinforced and un-

done in what he calls the photographic ecstasy,

have influenced both the theory and practice

of photography, and much of the most excit-

ing contemporary photography is now con-

cerned with inferiority—rejecting reportage

but also wishing to intensify the presence of

the material world, it presents itself as ‘fiction-

photography’ in which the image is an explic-

itly staged mise-en-scene.

MICHAEL WORTON

Further reading

Barthes, R. (1980) La Chambre claire: note

sur la photographie, Paris: Éditions de

l’Étoile, Gallimard, Le Seuil. Translated

R.Howard (1982) Camera Lucida, Lon-

don: Jonathan Cape.

Bourdieu, P., Boltanski, L. and Castel, R.

(1965) Un art moyen; essais sur les usages

sociaux de la photographie, Paris: Les

photography

423

Éditions de Minuit. Translated S.Whiteside

(1990) Photography: A Middle-Brow Art,

Cambridge: Polity Press.

Deedes-Vincke, P. (1992) Paris: The City and

Its Photographers, Boston, Toronto and

London: Bulfinch Press (a thoughtful and

eminently readable study of the history of

French photography and the part played in

it by Paris; includes 100 well-chosen illus-

trations ).

Gouvion Saint Cyr, A. de, Lemagny, J.-C. and

Sayag, A. (1988) Art and Nature: Twenti-

eth-Century French Photography, London:

Trefoil Publications/Barbican Art Gallery (lav-

ishly illustrated, with short but insightful

essays; published to accompany the 1988 ‘Im-

ages de France’ exhibition held in London).

Piaf, Édith

b. 1915, Paris;

d. 1963, Paris

Lyricist and singer, real name

Édith Giovanna Gassion

One of France’s most internationally ac-

claimed popular singers of the postwar period,

Édith Piaf will best be remembered for her

mournful songs which articulate female pain,

hardship and suffering, often caused by love.

Her life is the very stuff of popular myths and

legends: allegedly born under a gas lamp in

the rue de la Villette in Paris and cradled by a

passing gendarme, Piaf—the daughter of street

performers—was temporarily blinded at the

age of 8, but was ‘miraculously’ cured, having

prayed to St Theresa. Later brought up

amongst pimps and prostitutes, living mainly

in the Pigalle quarter of Paris, Piaf was dis-

covered singing in the street in 1935 by Louis

Leplée, the owner of a chic cabaret, Gerny’s.

He took her on immediately and presented her

under the name la môme Piaf (The Piaf Kid;

piaf is slang for ‘sparrow’).

Her career seemed to be taking off dramati-

cally when, in April 1936, the first of a series

of tragedies that were to punctuate Piaf’s life

was to strike: her mentor, Louis Leplée, was

murdered in his apartment. Piaf herself came

under suspicion, was held for police question-

ing for two days and then released. Offered

protection by the lyric writer Raymond Asso,

who guided her career until the outbreak of

World War II, Piaf now tasted huge success in

France before touring America for the first time

in 1947 (with the Compagnons de la chanson).

It was there that she met the great French boxer

Marcel Cerdan, who was to become the world

middleweight champion the following year. He

was also to become the great love of her life,

but tragedy struck again on 27 October 1949,

when Cerdan was killed in a plane crash.

The rest of Piaf’s life was filled with tour

after tour, the pain caused by rheumatoid ar-

thritis which was visibly to deform her, drug-

induced illness, her divorce from the singer

Jacques Pills in 1956 (they had married four

years earlier), her relationship with the young

Georges Moustaki (among others) and, finally,

her marriage in 1962 to the much younger Théo

Sarapo (who died at the age of 34 in a car crash

in 1970). Piaf herself died on 9 October 1963—

though the official date is 11 October on her

death certificate, as her body was spirited by

ambulance from the south of France to Paris,

where she had always wanted to die. One final

irony associated with Piaf is that she had been

a friend of the playwright Jean Cocteau, who

wrote a one-act play for her. When he learned

of her death, he was preparing to write a trib-

ute to her, but he too died the same day. Best

remembered in the English-speaking world for

Milord, If You Love Me, Really Love Me

(Hymne à l’amour) and the standard No, No

Regrets (Non, je ne regrette rien), Édith Piaf sang

and recorded a huge number of songs, charac-

terized by her doleful voice, with its rolled ‘r’

sounds and the vibrato which was also accen-

tuated with the passing of the years. A charis-

matic stage performer (characteristically dressed

in black) who eventually mastered the art of

gesture, Piaf remains a much-admired and

much-discussed figure today.

IAN PICKUP

Piaf, Édith

424

Further reading

Duclos, P. and Martin, G. (1993) Piaf, Paris:

Éditions du Seuil (a well-researched biog-

raphy).

Piaget, Jean

b. 1896, Neuchâtel, Switzerland;

d. 1980, Geneva

Psychologist

A developmental psychologist, specializing

in the maturation of children’s intelligence,

but trained as a biologist, Piaget first became

interested in psychology through observing

the intellectual development of his own chil-

dren, who provide the evidence for his earli-

est studies, such as The Language and

Thought of the Child (Le Langage et la

pensée chez l’enfant) (1923). His analysis of

the emergent process of reasoning in children

through a mechanism of ‘reflexive abstrac-

tion’ based on their interaction with the ma-

terial world led him to a generalized theory

of knowledge which he called Genetic Epis-

temology (Épistémologie génétique) (1970).

His thinking has been widely influential in

educational theory and has inspired contro-

versial new methods of teaching basic logical

and mathematical skills to primary school

children.

PETER HAWKINS

Pialat, Maurice

b. 1925, Puy-de-Dôme

Director

His career started in 1960 with intense psy-

chological dramas in a realist idiom, such as

L’Enfance nue (1969) and La Gueule ouverte

(1974, with Baye and Philippe Léotard). In

the 1980s, his films used stars and reached a

wider public: Loulou (in 1980), with

Depardieu); A nos amours (1983), with

Bonnaire, seen as a key film of the 1980s;

Police (1985), with Depardieu and Marceau;

and Sous le soleil de Satan (1987), with

Bonnaire and Depardieu.

PHIL POWRIE

Further reading

Magny, J. (1992) Maurice Pialat, Paris:

Cahiers du Cinéma (thematic analysis).

Toffetti, S. (ed.) (1992) Maurice Pialat: l’enfant

sauvage, Turin: Lindau (a collection of

homages, articles, interviews).

Picasso, Pablo

b. 1881, Malaga, Spain;

d. 1973, Mougins, France

Artist

The twentieth century’s most celebrated art-

ist, Picasso’s prolific production includes sculp-

ture, printmaking, ceramics, stage design, book

illustrations and writing, as well as paintings

and drawings. Although Spanish by birth, Pi-

casso lived and worked most of his adult life

in France and was closely associated with the

Parisian avant-garde before World War I. In

1907, he created the founding work of Cubism,

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. In the 1920s, he

Piaget, Jean

425

was associated with the Surrealist movement.

He never returned to Spain after the Spanish

Civil War in 1936, and spent World War II

continuing to work in occupied Paris. From

1948 onwards, he lived mainly in the south of

France in Vallauris and near Mougins.

Picasso’s father, a painter and teacher of

drawing himself, encouraged his son’s preco-

cious talent. In 1895, his father took up a post

in Barcelona, an important city at the turn of

the century for European intellectual life which

had cultural and artistic links with France. Pi-

casso first visited Paris in 1900, and in 1904

he settled in Montmartre, then the centre of

Bohemian artistic life. His early work is cat-

egorized in two periods, the Blue Period

(1901–4) which includes the famous Self-Por-

trait of 1901, and the Rose Period (1904–6),

identified by its acrobats and harlequins.

It is impossible to exaggerate the impact and

achievements of Cubism, which provoked the

most radical change in art since the Renais-

sance. The influences on Les Demoiselles

d’Avignon (1907) both of Paul Cézanne and

of primitive African art, in which most of the

Parisian avant-garde were interested, have been

much commented on. Georges Braque was

introduced to Picasso by Guillaume Apollinaire

at this time, and the two of them worked

closely together during this period. It should

be noted, however, that Picasso was never part

of a ‘group’ or ‘school’, and did not, for ex-

ample, exhibit at the first large Cubist exhibi-

tion at the 1911 Salon des Indépendants. From

1909 onwards, Picasso began to sell canvases

despite hostility from the public and the art

establishment. The artistic avant-garde was

largely dispersed by the outbreak of World War

I, with many French artists leaving for the

Front, and foreigners, including Picasso, were

regarded with suspicion. Cubism came under

attack as anti-French in a wave of popular and

cultural xenophobia, due in part to the Ger-

man nationality of one of the century’s most

influential art dealers, Daniel-Henry

Kahnweiler. Towards the end of the war, Pi-

casso entered into a new realist and neoclassi-

cal style of working in tune with the postwar

revival of classicism in Paris. He was already

becoming rich, enjoying a comfortable lifestyle,

and he spent much of his time on the French

Riviera. His classicism was imbued with the

Mediterranean culture which continued to ex-

ert a fascination over him.

In 1923, Picasso met André Breton, leader

of the Surrealist movement, who greatly ad-

mired his work and was the first to reproduce

Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, in his magazine

La Révolution surréaliste in 1925. In the same

year, Picasso created another canvas which

shocked the critics, The Three Dancers, and

agreed to participate for the first time in a

group exhibition, the first Surrealist exhibi-

tion at the Galerie Pierre. Throughout his ca-

reer, Picasso painted portraits, often of his two

wives and several mistresses, and the late

1920s and early 1930s saw a number of real-

ist portraits. A renewed interest in sculpture is

evident in the etchings of the Vollard Suite, on

which Picasso worked from 1930 to 1937 and

in which his personal mythology—with its

mixture of pagan and Christian elements, bulls

and minotaurs, nymphs, fauns and satyrs, and

the theme of the artist and his model—became

firmly established. The culmination of his

work before World War II is Guernica (1937),

a response to the bombing by Franco’s Ger-

man allies of the ancient Basque capital of

Guernica on market day. With its palette of

black, white and grey, and its iconography of

twisted human and animal figures, Guernica

is considered by many to be one of the centu-

ry’s most important anti-war paintings. Before

the outbreak of World War II, the painting

travelled to Norway, London and New York

(where it hung in the Museum of Modern Art

from 1940), returning to Madrid only in 1981

to mark the artist’s hundreth birthday.

Picasso remained mainly in Paris during

World War II, refusing many offers of refuge.

His presence was considered by many a sym-

bol of the Resistance, and thousands of peo-

ple went to visit him at the Liberation. A pho-

tograph taken at a private reading of Picasso’s

play, Desire Caught by the Tail (Le Désir

attrapé par la queue)—organized by Michel

Leiris in 1944, produced by Albert Camus,

with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir,

Picasso, Pablo

426

Jacques Lacan and Pierre Reverdy, among oth-

ers —bestows upon the event a symbolic value.

In the same year, L’Humanité announced on

its front page that Picasso had joined the French

Communist Party, although this is usually seen

as an act of solidarity with fellow artists rather

than motivated by deep political conviction.

The Charnel House (1945), linked in its style

to Guernica, was painted after the revelations

of the Nazi concentration camps. In 1949, Pi-

casso was asked by the Communist Party to

design a poster for the World Peace Congress

in Paris. His Dove appeared all over the walls

of European cities. In 1950, he was awarded

the Lenin Peace Prize. In 1951, he produced a

large, overtly political painting (Massacre in

Korea) and, in 1952, the huge murals Peace

and War in an abandoned chapel at Vallauris,

then named the Temple of Peace. In 1953, he

produced his infamous portrait of Stalin which

scandalized the party. As the Cold War hard-

ened, he withdrew his support for the cultural

activities of the French Communists.

In 1948, Picasso had moved to Vallauris in

the south of France, a village full of ceramicists

and potters, where he became passionately in-

volved in ceramics, combining sculpture, paint-

ing and drawing. His frequent presence on the

beach soon became well-known and he attracted

a huge crowd of admirers. In the post-1945

period, he produced a range of work which was

both retrospective and innovative. He contin-

ued with his own well-established themes while

beginning a dialogue with the great masters of

the past, including Delacroix, Velazquez and

Manet in the 1950s. In 1955 the film-maker

Henri-Georges Clouzot made the film The Pi-

casso Mystery (Le Mystère Picasso), which re-

corded his process of creation. The 1960s saw

a controversial change in style, in which the fa-

miliar Picassian mythology is apparent, together

with the figures of the old man, the musketeer,

the king and the painter, but in which the tech-

nique appears clumsy. His output remained pro-

lific, with over 1,000 paintings, drawings and

graphics produced in the last five years of his

life, including 165 large- and medium-sized can-

vases for an exhibition of his recent work shown

at the Palais des Papes in Avignon in 1970.

DEBRA KELLY

Further reading

Bernadec, M.-L. and du Bouchet, P. (1993)

Picasso: Master of the New, trans. C.

Lovelace, London: Thames and Hudson

(an engaging introduction to his work with

good illustrations and explanations of tech-

nique and an evocative document section,

despite a sometimes curious style).

Daix, P. (1993) Picasso: Life and Art, trans.

O. Emmet, London: Thames and Hudson

(a thorough one-volume discussion of his

life, career and work by a writer, critic and

Picasso scholar who knew him for twenty-

five years).

Gallwitz, K. (1985) Picasso: The Heroic Years,

New York: Abbeville Press (a revised and

updated version of the 1971 Picasso at 90

which concentrates on the post-1945 pe-

riod).

Richardson, J. (1991) A Life of Picasso, vol.

1, 1881–1906, vol. 2 (1996), 1907–1917:

The Painter of Modern Life, London:

Jonathan Cape (the first two volumes of a

four-volume monumental work).

Piccoli, Michel

b. 1925, Paris

Actor

A stage and screen actor and a great risk-taker

in the roles he accepts and the film-makers and

theatres he works for (avant-garde theatre, art

cinema, unknown directors). Not all choices

have been successes, but Piccoli has obtained

the status of a great performer and gained

national acclaim. He willingly uses his fame

to help projects get off the ground, to foster

new talent and to undertake risky productions

(such as Faraldo’s Themroc in 1972). His per-

formance style exudes moral and physical

Piccoli, Michel

427

strength, which he contains or releases de-

pending on the role. As an actor he has a great

range (from classical to comedy) and in any

given role he can embody and sustain many

contradictory characteristics: subtlety, vulgar-

ity, insolence, robustness and vulnerability, as

in Godard’s Le Mépris (1963).

SUSAN HAYWARD

Planchon, Roger

b. 1931, St Chamond

Director, actor and playwright

One of the major figures in the director’s thea-

tre of the postwar period, Planchon is best

remembered as one of France’s greatest thea-

tre directors since the war, noted for his abil-

ity to combine, like his hero Brecht, concrete

realism with heavily sign-laden anti-naturalis-

tic qualities. He was one of the most success-

ful proponents of a new blend of social-his-

torical theatre to emerge in France during the

years of decentralization in the 1950s and

1960s, drawing on the traditions of Brecht and

Büchner as well as the Elizabethan theatre to

form an epic style designed to appeal to all

classes and backgrounds.

Planchon, however, was not an essentially

political director, maintaining that campaign-

ing would never change the fact that theatre

audiences were predominantly middle-class.

However, it is still true that his efforts to take

theatre to the people of Villeurbanne (near

Lyon) with his theatre company (Théâtre de

la Cité) were remarkably successful. The son

of a café-owner, the young Planchon earned

his keep with a part-time bank job, while ex-

ploring the works of Artaud (another great

influence on his work), Bataille and Genet,

and indulging a love of cinema and modern

poetry. His theatre career began in 1950, when

he staged a winning burlesque production in

a local theatre competition. With the money,

the group set themselves up as the Théâtre de

la Comédie, and in 1952 moved into new

premises in an old printworks, with a small

theatre seating around 100 people, staging

classics from Shakespeare to Calderón, and a

variety of plays from the New Theatre.

Adamov, in particular, proved a good choice

for Planchon to direct, given their shared in-

terest in Artaud. Adamov was so impressed

with their work that he went on to write for

Planchon’s company.

In 1954, the Berliner Ensemble visited

Paris. This marked the beginning of

Planchon’s fascination with Brechtian theatre.

After meetings with Brecht, together with

analysis of his production techniques and

views on the role of the director as interpreter

of a huge network of stage signs, Planchon

staged several Brecht plays, including The

Good Woman of Szechuan in 1958 and Fear

and Misery in the Third Reich in 1956. At the

same time, he had also become interested in

the young playwright Vinaver, whose Today

or the Koreans (Aujourd’hui ou les Caréens)

he staged at the same time. Planchon’s pro-

duction prompted Adamov to bestow upon

him Paolo Paoli, the first truly Brechtian-style

play to be written in France; it became the

first play the company took to Paris, and per-

suaded the Communist mayor of Villeurbanne

to allow them a permanent base for the com-

pany. In October 1957, the company staged

its first production there (Shakespeare’s Henry

IV, following popular local request); then, a

year later, Alexandre Dumas’s The Three

Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires), and

Planchon’s first Molière production, George

Dandin, noted for the Brechtian style of the

production, with characters firmly in their his-

torical and social background. Planchon was

now considered leader of the Brechtian con-

tingent in France, as much for his interpreta-

tions of the classics as for his Brecht produc-

tions. Between 1958 and 1961, his company

made several trips to Paris, as well as continu-

ing to play to packed houses within the

Villeurbanne community. By 1963, it had been

awarded the status of a Centre Dramatique

National. Planchon began writing his own

material, while Robert Gilbert, one of the

original members of the company, helped him

Planchon, Roger