Alex Hughes. Encyclopedia of Contemporary French Culture

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Sagan, Françoise

b. 1935, Cajarc, Lot

Writer and playwright

A popular novelist, Sagan has also written

plays, short stories and volumes of autobiog-

raphy. Of her numerous fictions, which fre-

quently focus on women’s experience of the

pleasures and pain of love, two early novels—

Bonjour tristesse (1954) and A Certain Smile

(Un certain sourire) from 1956—are the best

known. The first, written when Sagan was in

her teens, won the Prix des Critiques, and es-

tablished Sagan’s international reputation.

Sagan’s work is usually considered as ‘light’;

however, her novels offer, arguably, significant

insights into feminine psychology.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: literary prizes; women’s/lesbian writ-

ing

Saint Laurent, Yves

b. 1936, Oran, Algeria

Fashion designer

Saint Laurent studied fashion design in Paris.

In 1953, he was hired by Christian Dior and

developed the ‘trapeze’ silhouette. In 1962,

after being drafted by the French army for the

French-Algerian conflict, he opened his fash-

ion house. After introducing successively the

cowboy and the sailor look, Saint Laurent

turned to contemporary art and in 1965

launched his Mondrian dress. In 1966, he

opened his first ready-to-wear boutique, Saint

Laurent Rive Gauche. He mass-produced his

clothes to make them accessible, and devel-

oped accessories, a men’s line and perfumes.

JOËLLE VITIELLO

Further reading

Ubersfeld, A. (1969) A.Salacrou, Paris:

Seghers (thorough critique of his work).

Sallenave, Danièle

b. 1940, Angers

Writer, academic and literary theorist

Sallenave’s early publications, including

Paysage de ruines avec personnages (Ruined

Landscape with Figures) and Le Voyage

d’Amsterdam (Amsterdam Journey), bear wit-

ness to her theoretical interest in narrative and

semiotic innovation. However, her best-

known novel, Les Portes de Gubbio (Gubbio’s

Gateways), published in 1980 and awarded

the Prix Renaudot, represents a return to a

more traditional, less experimental form of

novelistic practice. Sallenave has also worked

in the medium of the theatre.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: literary prizes; women’s/lesbian writ-

ing

Salvador, Henri

b. 1917, Cayenne, French Guiana

Singer-songwriter and musician

Having gone to Paris at the age of 7, Henri

Salvador joined Ray Ventura’s big band, Les

Collégiens (The College Boys), touring with

them in 1941 in South America, where he

stayed until 1945, having become a star in his

own right. Back in France, Salvador estab-

lished himself as a singer (particularly in the

1960s), comic actor and parodist, though his

first love was and remains jazz. This French

version of Sammy Davis Junior was the highly

respected guest of honour at the eleventh

‘Victoires de la Musique’ (French Pop Music

Awards) in 1996.

IAN PICKUP

Further reading

Besser, G.R. (1979) Nathalie Sarraute, Boston:

Twayne (an overview of Sarraute’s career,

its major themes and stages, in the context

of the experimental modern novel; contains

bibliography).

L’Esprit créateur (1996) Nathalie Sarraute ou

le texte du for intérieur, special issue 36, 2.

Minogue, V. (1981) Nathalie Sarraute and the

War of the Words: A Study of Five Novels,

Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press (an

analysis of Sarraute’s work with language).

Sarrazin, Albertine

b. 1937, Algiers;

d. 1967, Montpellier

Writer

The author of a series of autobiographical fic-

tions chronicling her disrupted and disruptive

life—she was a foundling child whose difficul-

ties with her adoptive family led to a stint at

reform school, followed by a series of sojourns

in prison, punctuated by several escapes—

Sarrazin’s work captured the attention of

French critics and readers when it began to

appear in the mid-1960s. Best known for nov-

els telling of prison life and its aftermath—

Astragal (L’Astragale) in 1965, The Runaway

(La Cavale) in 1969 and La Traversière (The

Crossing) in 1966—Sarrazin was also a pro-

lific producer of diaries, poems and letters.

Many of these were published posthumously

in the 1970s, after their author died prema-

turely.

ALEX HUGHES

See also: autobiography; women’s/lesbian

writing.

Sarrazin, Maurice

b. 1925, Toulouse

Actor, director and troupe leader

A pioneer of postwar theatre decentralization,

and a founder of the Grenier de Toulouse in

1945, which took numerous classical produc-

tions on tour and gave Gatti a stage for his

work.

ANNIE SPARKS

Further reading

Cohen-Solal, A. (1986) Sartre: A Life, New

York: Pantheon (a biography).

Goldthorpe, R. (1984) Sartre: Literature and

Theory, Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press (a good general study).

Hollier, D. (1986) The Politics of Prose: Essay

on Sartre, trans. J.Mehlman, Minneapolis:

University of Minnesota Press (highly pro-

vocative synthesis of Sartre’s corpus).

Howells, C. (1988) Sartre: The Necessity of

Freedom, Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-

sity Press (a philosophical study).

LaCapra, D. (1978) A Preface to Sartre,

Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press (a gen-

eral introduction).

Scriven, M. (1984) Sartre’s Existential Biog-

raphies, London: Macmillan (illuminating

study of the biographical works in particu-

lar).

Ungar,S. (1987) ‘Rebellion or Revolution?’, in

D. Hollier (ed.) A New History of French

Literature, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Uni-

versity Press (studies prehistory of Les

Temps modernes through Sartre’s evolution

towards collective action between 1940

and 1953).

Sautet, Claude

b. 1924, Montrouge

Director

Sautet is something of a ‘sleeper’: although he

has been an important film-maker in France

for all but forty years, his work has only just

begun to become known in English-speaking

countries. His dissection of bourgeois social

relations relied heavily on his work with

Montand, Piccoli and (above all) Romy Sch-

neider, who starred in five of his films. His

most recent work has featured Emmanuelle

Béart, who stars with Daniel Auteuil in Un

coeur en hiver (1992) and with Michel

Serrault in Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995).

KEITH READER

Further reading

Europe (1977) La Science-Fiction, special is-

sue, August/September.

Gattégno, J. (1971) La Science-Fiction, Paris:

PUF ‘Que sais-je’ (essential reading).

Klein, G. (1966) En un autre pays: anthologie

de la science-fiction française, Paris:

Seghers (dated, but the classic in the field).

Science-fiction (1984–5), Paris: Denoël (pub-

lished between January 1984 and Septem-

ber 1985, so relatively recent, but hard to

find).

sculpture

The abstraction/figuration debate associated

with postwar painting did not generate the

same degree of antagonism within the field of

sculpture. Sculptural abstraction seemed to

have gone as far as it could with

Constructivism, and the ideals of progress as-

sociated with it were unable to survive the

horrors of war. Those who continued in this

tradition tended to move into architecture. The

most important figurative sculptors working

in France in the immediate postwar years were

Giacometti and, to a lesser extent, Germaine

Richier, but they expressed themselves in such

a personal way that no ‘school’ of sculpture

could develop from their work. While they may

have had imitators, they had no successors.

Giacometti’s postwar sculpture is rooted in

the prewar period. The opportunity for self-

examination that the war years offered him,

along with many other sculptors, resulted in a

transformation that allowed him to confront

a changed world. In the aftermath of a war

involving genocide, death camps and the

Holocaust, man’s humanity was called into

question and only figuration that disturbed

and questioned was henceforth credible. There

are resonances of the death camps and the eco-

nomic deprivation of the postwar years in

Giacometti’s attenuated figures, but also re-

flected are the feelings of alienation and the

inability to communicate present in Sartre’s

analysis of the human condition. Sartre’s criti-

cal endorsement of Giacometti in the cata-

logue of his 1948 New York exhibition at the

Pierre Matisse gallery helped him to become

one of the most celebrated of postwar sculp-

tors, not only in France but internationally.

These postwar sculptures were also about per-

ception. Giacometti was seeking a sculptural

means of representing the figure as it is per-

ceived in reality, in space, as leaving or having

left a much larger visual field. The

phenomenological undertones here link him

to the philosopher Merleau-Ponty, with whom

Sartre was also associated.

Germaine Richier’s postwar figurative

sculpture

486

sculpture has often been compared to

Giacometti’s. Like him, she was able to recon-

sider her approach to sculpture during the

war. She was aware of his work and, like him,

she had undergone the influence of prewar

Surrealist discourse. In her Mante religieuse of

1946, the hybrid woman/insect figure, com-

parable to Giacometti’s Femme égorgée, em-

bodies an existential nightmare evoking the

thirst for destruction which the war years had

witnessed.

During this period, Picasso’s innovative pre-

war sculpture found a public for the first time,

not least thanks to Brassai’s book of photo-

graphs, Les Sculptures de Picasso (Picasso’s

Sculptures), published in the late 1940s. His

application of collage techniques to three-dimen-

sional work had led him to break down the pre-

vailing hierarchy of materials. This was to in-

fluence much subsequent post-1945 sculpture.

Although the ground for this had already been

broken by Duchamp and his ‘ready mades’, Pi-

casso’s use of the objet trouvé was different.

Duchamp’s true successors were the Surrealists,

who exploited the associations triggered off by

the juxtapositions of disparate objects. Picasso,

on the other hand, was more interested in the

forms created by discarded objects, evident in

his practice of casting in bronze his final assem-

blage of found objects after covering them in

plaster. This division, between sculpture that

demands a formal reading and that which works

by association, still persists.

Jean Arp’s postwar sculptures also worked

as plastic statements rather than through as-

sociation, despite his previous involvement

with Surrealism. His biomorphic shapes can

be read as distillations of natural forms, body

parts, and so on. Here seemed to be an exam-

ple of sculpture that was arguably ‘abstract’

but not descended from Constructivism.

However, Arp’s very originality isolated him

and although, like Giacometti, he had imita-

tors, his postwar work produced no real suc-

cessors, although its echoes can be found in

the sculpture of Anish Kapoor working in

England and some of the more recent work of

Claes Oldenburg in the United States.

The first generation of entirely new names

in sculpture in postwar France were to be-

come, for the most part, members of that

(fairly disparate) group of artists dubbed by

the critic Pierre Restany Nouveaux Réalistes.

César established his reputation in 1960 with

his series of Compressions, works consisting

of scraps of multicoloured metal from old cars.

This was followed in 1967 with his Expan-

sions, for which he exploited the properties of

the new material polyurethane. The actual

creation of these sculptures was turned into a

series of Happenings.

Nouveau Réalisme was, loosely speaking,

the French equivalent of British or American

Pop Art of the 1960s, although the individual-

ism of its main players ensured that it was a

short-lived movement. Apart from César, those

working in three dimensions included Arman,

who is best known for his accumulations of

everyday objects of the same type—echoes here

of Warhol—as well as for his assemblages of

objects cut into strips. He has cast some pieces

in bronze, a practice which recalls Jasper

Johns’s beer cans as well as Picasso.

Niki de Saint-Phalle was also at work in

the 1960s, creating her Nanas, figures made

of polystyrene painted in primary colours. The

use of this new material, associated with mass

production and a product of the industrial/

consumer age, together with the sexual and

feminist overtones in her work, identifies her

with the issues of that decade and popular cul-

ture in particular. But Saint-Phalle seems also

to have been inspired by another artist whose

roots go back to the prewar period, Jean

Dubuffet. His painted objects of expanded

polystyrene made in the 1960s were to develop

into often monumental sculptures of steel and

fibreglass.

The work of Daniel Spoerri and much of

the creative output of Yves Klein, also one-

time Nouveaux Réalistes, can be loosely clas-

sified as sculpture whose idiom is that of Pop

Art. Spoerri’s tableaux pièges, debris ran-

domly displayed in glass-sided boxes, and

Yves Klein’s sponges and ‘aerostatic sculp-

tures’, crossed the boundaries that tradition-

ally separated high art from popular art.

sculpture

487

Jean Tinguely, also a so-called Nouveau

Réaliste, is usually regarded as a kineticist

whose sculptures are descendants of Dada

rather than Constructivism. His motorized as-

semblages, often inviting public participation,

sometimes ‘self-destructing’, seem to be mock-

ing technology rather than honouring it. He is

one of the few kinetic sculptors to have sur-

vived that period.

Minimalism, which dominated sculpture

internationally in the 1970s, like its Concep-

tualist offshoot, was largely an American/Brit-

ish phenomenon, as is the ambiguously titled

Land Art. Christo invented empaquetage

(packaging) soon after arriving in France in

1958, and has been identified with the Land

Art movement, but his interventions in the

landscape, unlike those of other Land Artists,

take place not in a wilderness far from public

view but precisely where they can disturb.

Through his temporary transformations he

appears to be questioning and making us look

again at what we take for granted environ-

mentally (for example, the Pont-Neuf for Pa-

risians). A similar motive seems to be behind

the work of the French sculptor Jean-Pierre

Raynaud, whose most famous work is the

construction of his own house—a domestic

space conforming to none of the traditional

criteria, forcing one to move around, live and

breathe differently. Through his cheap, white,

commonplace china tiles, he orders his space,

showing the poetic side of untransformed ob-

jects.

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, sculp-

ture worldwide began to demonstrate a multi-

plicity of styles. Within the context of French

sculpture, this postmodern stylistic pluralism

and love of pastiche is evident in the archaeo-

logical collages of Anne and Patrick Poirier.

Bernard Pagès also appears to be quoting from

the past when he deals with the theme of the

column, although this may also be seen as an

attempt to rediscover the instinct of the first

builders. Postmodern eclecticism, in France as

elsewhere, subverts any attempt to map cur-

rent sculptural trends.

CAROL WILCOX

Further reading

Cabanne, P. (1993) Arman, Paris: ELA (a good

account not only of Arman’s sculpture but

that of other Nouveaux Réalistes).

Restany, P. (1975) César, Paris: Éditions André

Sauret (Restany’s introduction to César’s

sculpture consists of a typically partisan

overview of postwar French sculpture, with

special reference to the Nouveaux Réalistes

he promoted).

Sebbar, Leïla

b. 1941, Aflou, Algeria

Writer

Brought up in Algeria where her French

mother and Algerian father taught French, and

educated at university in France, Leïla Sebbar

differs from beur writers in ethnic origin, class,

education and age, but her influential novels,

short stories, journalism and letters also ex-

plore questions of exile and identity in post-

colonial France. Her work particularly

foregrounds the perspectives of marginalized

Algerian, beur and mixed-‘race’ female char-

acters, culminating in the emblematic heroine

of 1982’s Shérazade Missing: Aged 17, Dark

Hair, Green Eyes (Shérazade, 17 ans, brune,

frisée, les yeux verts), the nomadic beurette

whose unconventional identity quest informs

a series of novels.

CARRIE TARR

See also: beur writing; beurs; francophone

writing (fiction, poetry): North Africa

Seberg, Jean

b. 1938, Marshalltown, USA;

d. 1979, Paris

Actor

Seberg, Jean