Leiris, Michel

Bacon (1909-92) was raised in large country houses in rural Ireland by a family whose conventional expectations he rebelled against early on. As a young man he was introduced to the seamy side of life in London and Paris; but only after seeing a Picasso retrospective in 1928 did he become an artist. He sprang into prominence in 1944 with a triptych which shocked the art world with its sheer ferocity, and he soon emerged, with his friend Lucian Freud, as a leader of an informal "School of London," which favored figurative painting in an age dominated by abstraction. As retrospectives of Bacon's work in Paris, London, and New York made his reputation soar, his nighttime exploits grew wilder and wilder; charming and confident, with a strong sadomasochistic streak, he was drawn to "rough trade" in London clubs and pushed all situations to the edge. At the same time, he was a deeply cultivated and thoughtful artist who was obsessively guarded about the sources of his inspiration. Michael Peppiatt has unlocked many of the enigmas of Bacon's life and work. Bacon talked openly to Peppiatt about his early life, his sexuality, his fantasies, and his ambitions, aware that all was being recorded for publication. At the suggestion that some of his remarks would sound indiscreet, Bacon replied: "The more indiscreet, the more interesting it will be." Together with many new facts, unpublished documents, and penetrating analyses of key paintings, these conversations have been integrated into what is the most complete and riveting account of one of the greatest artists of our time.

A comedy-drama set on the eve of World War II which contrasts the affairs of the French aristocracy with those of the working class during a weekend house party.

The Automatic Muse collects together four remarkable novels from the early days of Surrealism - the 1920's, when the group was experimenting with "automatic writing" and other methods of "forcing inspiration.". Despite, or because of, the methods used in their composition these works are remarkable for the differences between them. They are variously mysterious, comic, astonishing, wildly extravagant. Yet they all share a feeling for the marvellous, and a literary style totally unrestrained by the conventions of "literature." Their potent vitality is an ample demonstration of the Surrealist programme and its belief in "the total liberation of man."

Scratches is the first volume in Michel Leiris's monumental four-volume autobiography, Rules of the Game. In this volume, the celebrated French writer examines his inventory of memories, explores the language of his childhood, weaves anecdotes from his private life with his old and recent ideas. In the end, he so mercilessly scrutinizes what was familiar that its familiarity drops away and it blossoms into something exotic. As Leiris recollects his childhood, his father's recording machine becomes a miraculous object and the letters of the alphabet - from A (or the double ladder of a house painter) to I (a soldier standing at attention) to X (the cross one makes on something whose secret one will never penetrate) - come magically to life. Also here are evocations of Paris under the occupation, his journey to Africa, and meditations on his fear of death, which he tried to exorcise through his autobiographical writings.

One of the towering classics of twentieth century French literature, Phantom Africa is a singular and ultimately unclassifiable work: a book composed of one man’s compulsive and constantly mutating daily travel journal—by turns melodramatic, self-deprecating, ecstatic, and morose—as well as an exhaustively detailed account of the first French state-sponsored anthropological expedition to visit sub-Saharan Africa. In 1930, Michel Leiris was an aspiring poet drifting away from the orbit of the Surrealist movement in Paris when the anthropologist Marcel Griaule invited him to serve as the “secretary-archivist” for the Mission Dakar-Djibouti, a major collecting and ethnographic journey that traversed the African continent between May 1931 and February 1933.^ Leiris, while maintaining the official records of the Mission, documenting the team’s acquisitions, and participating in the research, also kept a diary where he noted not only a given day’s activities and events but also his impressions, his states of mind, his anxieties, his dreams, and even his erotic fantasies. Upon returning to France, rather than compiling a more conventional report or ethnographic study, Leiris decided simply to publish his diary, almost entirely untouched aside from minor corrections and a smattering of footnotes. The result is an extraordinary book: a day-by-day record of one European writer’s experiences in an Africa inexorably shaded by his own exotic delusions and expectations, on the one hand, and an unparalleled depiction of the paradoxes and hypocrisies of conducting anthropological field research at the height of the colonial era on the other. Never before available in English translation, Phantom Africa is an invaluable document.^ If the book is “a stone marking a bend on a path that is entirely personal,” as Leiris himself described it years later, it is also a book whose broad canvas bears witness to the full range of social and political forces reshaping the African continent in the period between the World Wars.--

"This book is a study of opera by the great French poet, art critic, and anthropologist Michel Leiris. In Operratics Leiris turns his mind to one of his major loves, opera. Approaching the subject as a lover of music without any formal musical training, he discerns fascinating patterns in cultural movements in opera and reveals his personal tastes in this great genre."--BOOK JACKET.

"Our knowledge of the arts of Africa, and of the circumstances in which they have been practised, is still very incomplete. Created over a period of several millennia in a vast range of techniques and materials, and extending to every field of human activity, African artefacts are newaly all essentially functional, but at the same time they can stand as pure works of art in their own right. The great dance masks of the secret societies, the carved ancestor figures, the beautiful bronze heads from Benin and the terracottas from Ife, the steatite bird-man from Zimbabwe - all these have a precise magico-religious function which in no way impairs their aesthetic value. In this book the authors have provided a detailed historical and aesthetic study fo the rich and varied panorama of African art. The first part of the book sets in context the historical relationship between the African and Western cultures, the aesthetic outlook of the African peoples and the place of Africa in the history of art generally. The second and third parts form a detailed account of the arts of Africa, considered first according to category, and then region by region."--Amazon.