Marcel Brion

Biography

Lawyer wire, Marcel Brion was born with Marseilles in 1895. With the College Thiers, in its class of sixth, it has as school-fellows Marcel Pagnol and Albert Cohen. After having completed its secondary studies with the college Champittet, in Swiss, it follows studies of right to faculty of Aix-en-Provence. Lawyer at the bar of Marseilles between 1920 and 1924, it very early gives up its career of lawyer to turn to the literature.

He is resulting from a family of origin of Provence and Irish, the name of Brion being a Francization of O' Brion , and this cultural heritage doubles will undoubtedly weigh in its attraction for the foreign cultures and its taste of the voyage, where he lets be expressed his desire of escape by traversing the world. Its romantic universe but also its activity of literary and artistic criticism will nourish this curiosity towards the “other”. Regular collaborator for the Review of the two worlds and the New arts persons , Marcel Brion directs during twenty years the heading foreign Littérature of the daily newspaper Le Monde . He contributes to make known with the French public of the authors such as Rainer Maria Rilke, James Joyce or Dino Buzzati. In this respect, Marcel Schneider will have this comment: “Marcel Brion, it was the Europe before the letter. He knew seven of the principal languages spoken in Occident, and he knew them as a discoverer of talents. He knew to choose and he was not mistaken” ( Le Figaro , July 1st 1994).

In 1964, it is elected with the French Academy with the armchair of Jean-Louis Vaudoyer.

With its death, in 1984, with Paris, it leaves nearly one hundred works.

His/her son, Patrick Brion, critical and historian of the cinema, are the “voice” of the Cinéma of midnight of France 3.

Distinctions

Officer of the Legion of Honor
Military Cross 1914-1918
Large officer of the National order of the merit
Officer of Arts and Letters

Work

Tests

Through his activity of historian of art, Marcel Brion was interested above all in the various aspects of European civilization: music, with in particular its Mozart , painting, sculpture, icons. This multiplicity of the topics and the cultures is worth to him to be today translated into Germany, in Spain, with the Portugal, in Italy and Russia, country whose heritage inspired to him by the articles and the books that he regarded itself as as many “voyages” in an almost initiatory direction, of these voyages of which he writes, in its test on Novalis: “The duration of the voyage is unaware of all the limits which time puts at the activity of the man. ”

It was illustrated with a series of works on the art of the Italian Renaissance: Giotto (1928), Botticelli (1932), Michel-Angel (1939) or Léonard de Vinci (1954).

As a historian, it approaches in his biographies of the characters as various as Frederic II of the Holy roman Empire ( Frederic II of Hohenstaufen , 1948), Laurent Splendid the (1937), Machiavel (1948), Las Put (1928) or Rudyard Kipling (1929). However, the other large slope of its work of critic and historian relates to the Germany and the Romantisme, with four volumes of romantic sound Germany , where it analyzes in particular the work of Heinrich von Kleist, Brentano, Hoffmann, Eichendorff, Hölderlin, Schiller and Achim von Arnim; its works on Goethe or Robert Schumann and the romantic heart ; in the same way, its synthesis on the Fantastic ( fantastic Art , 1961). Lastly, starting from the Years 1950, Marcel Brion devote several texts to contemporary painting: Abstract art (1956), Directs (1963).

A posthumous collection, published into 1994 with the editions Jose Corti, Labyrinths of time: Meetings and choice of an European , gathers articles of Marcel Brion on Huysmans, James Joyce, Hofmannsthal, Thomas Mann, Robert Walser, Hermann Hesse and other authors.

Works of fiction

“The substance of the dream is the conscience of a lack”, writing Marcel Brion in the novel Algues (1976). In a dubious environment of “passage”, of “crossing”, where mix the wandering and the doubt, nostalgia and envoûtement, the work of fiction, inaugurated since 1929 by the Spanish Whim , culminates with novels like Château of shades (1943), the Enchanter (1965), the Festival of the tower of the Hearts (1974) or the collection of news the Stopovers of the high night (1944). In the middle of a universe where the borders tend to dissolve between reality and the imaginary one, the author lets emerge, as in spite of him, of the characters mysterious, tragic, such the “Marshal of the Fear”, who give to the reader the feeling to penetrate in clearly-obscure at the same time fantasmatic and curiously familiar. These topics of the dream, the magic, the chance, of the unknown, are found in each novel or of the news of Marcel Brion.

Good number of these texts available, are today reprinted in their editors of origin or are published in edition of pocket.

Bibliographical choice

; Arts and literature

Giotto , Rieder, 1928
Turner , Rieder, 1929
Botticelli , Crès, 1932
Klee , Somogy, 1955
Kandinsky , Somogy, 1960
romantic Germany , 4 vol., Albin Michel, 1962,1963,1977,1978
the Golden age of Dutch painting , Elzevier, 1964
the Eye, the spirit and the hand of the painter , Plon, 1966
romantic Painting , Albin Michel, 1967
the Great adventure of religious painting , Perrin, 1968
Rembrandt , Albin Michel, 1969
Titien , Somogy, 1971
Goethe , Albin Michel, 1982
Robert Schumann and the romantic heart , Albin Michel, 1986
Paul Cézanne , Bordered, 1988
fantastic Art , Albin Michel 1989
Michel-Angel , Albin Michel, 1995
Léonard de Vinci , Albin Michel, 1995
Mozart , Perrin, 2006

; Biographies

Bartolomé de Las Put, Père of the Indians , Plon, 1928
the Life of Attila , Gallimard, 1928
Rudyard Kipling , Éditions of the New Assessment, 1929
Théodoric, king of Ostrogoths , Payot, 1935; 1979
Laurent Splendid the , Albin Michel, 1937
White of Castille , Bookstore of France, 1939
Machiavel , Albin Michel, 1948
Frederic II of Hohenstaufen , Tallandier, 1948
Tamerlan , Albin Michel, 1999
Charles the Bold one, large-duke of Occident , Tallandier, 2006

; Novels and new

the Mirrors and the pits , Albin Michel, 1968
the Town of sand , Delivers Pocket, 1976
On other side of the forest , Livre Pocket, 1982
the Vain Mountains , Albin Michel, 1985
the Stopovers of the high night , news, Albin Michel, 1986
the Madness Céladon , Livre Pocket, 1989
the Rose of wax , Livre Pocket, 1994

; Studies on Marcel Brion

Nathalie Raoux, “Marcel Brion and Walter Benjamin, the Frontier runner and the Passer by”, in humanistic Marcel Brion and “frontier runner” , Acts of the international symposium Marcel Brion organized by the National library of France, Albin Michel, 1996
Books Marcel Brion , Klincksieck

Internal bonds

Others historians of art having written on the Italy:

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