IN CONVERSATION WITH ANNIE COHEN-SOLAL

On March 26th, I had the opportunity to interview Professor Annie Cohen-Solal, who is a global academic, writer, historian, cultural diplomat, and public intellectual in a trajectory that spans more than four decades.  For ever, she has been tracking down interactions between art, literature, and society with an intercultural twist. She’s an award-winning writer for her biographies of Jean-Paul Sartre, Mark Rothko, Leo Castelli, Pablo Picasso, and many more; her books, exhibitions, and lectures have been widely covered both by academic reviews and by the press at large.

In our lovely conversation, we navigated through the voids of society and the entanglements of the art world – exploring Cohen-Solal’s life and works, particularly focusing on her biographies JEAN-PAUL SARTRE: A LIFE (1985) and MARK ROTHKO: TOWARD THE LIGHT IN THE CHAPEL (2014) - to understand that very own feeling of being perceived as a foreigner and that very common sense of not belonging anywhere, thus belonging somehow everywhere.

Annie Cohen-Solal. Courtesy of Sijmen Hendriks

JEMMY: I read and heard plenty of incredible and fascinating things about you, your life and works, but can you tell B&A who really is Annie Cohen-Solal? How have your studies and work shaped you as a person? 

ANNIE: This is one of the things I tried to explain to the students in my seminar at Bocconi, which ended on Thursday night. The seminar was titled WHO IS AFRAID OF FOREIGN ARTISTS? It explored six different artists that I noticed and worked on; not all of them I have written books on, but some of them I will write, and for those artists, I asked a little help from some of my colleagues. I told the students that in your research, in your writing, and in your academic and professional attitude, there is not only the intellectual and rational, the part that you read and that plays a role, but there is also the emotional part, the one inherent to your body, which helps you evolve and helps you get into a kind of metamorphosis. 

I told them that sometimes - and I used the example of Mark Rothko - it is a traumatic  experience that is at the core of a career. And because I was mentioning the experience of being a foreigner, I have noticed, after 35 years working in the field of the Arts, that I have only worked on people who were foreigners. For me, a foreigner coming from a different country, a different culture, a different language, is perceived by others as different, alien. I have never known why, but actually, it's only very recently that I realized this is my story as well: I came to France from Algeria at the age of 13; I was very fascinated by French culture. Later (I was around 17 then), I realized that I was rejected by the History professor simply because I came from Algeria and I was Jew. She had asked us to bring to the class a family tree and made fun of what I had brought because I “did not belong” (so to say), i.e.; because the history of my family as she said publicly in class “was lost in the sands of the desert”.  Actually, she was traditional and supported right-wing ideas. Nevertheless, that was painful, even if I didn’t notice it at first. But that pain came back to me while I was doing research on Picasso as a foreigner in France - which became a book (prix Femina Essai) and an exhibition (prix Historia). I realized that what Picasso endured in France as a foreigner, a leftist, and an artist for all his life, and the way in which he managed to turn his experience into a victory was at the core of my research.

So, last week, I told the students that they had to be aware that the position of being a foreigner might as well become an asset if they managed to handle it strategically. Many of the students were foreigners in Milano or had gone on Erasmus to other countries, and so they had felt something that was not exactly peaceful or welcoming, but basically a situation of rejection brought on by a situation of domination. But also, I told them that my research is being presented in Italy now, at an interesting political moment. The book Picasso. Una vita da straniero, (Marsilio) will be published at the end of April 2024, two exhibitions will take place in September 2024: in Mantova, at Palazzo Te: Picasso a Palazzo Te. Poesia & Salvezza (September 5, 2024 - January 6, 2025); in Milano, at Palazzo Reale: Picasso lo Straniero (September 20, 2024 - February 2, 2025). Finally, in Fall 2024, I’ll be devoting my seminar at Bocconi to that same topic. This also comes at a moment when the Venice Biennale Arte that will open on April 20th with a theme that I know very well. It will be called: FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE, just exactly what I do. I hope I somehow answered your question!

Jean-Paul Sartre in the Sorbonne, Paris, May 1968. Courtesy of Marc Riboud

JEMMY: Yes, of course. Thank you. What you've just told me is incredible, and you've already mentioned some artists I'd like to learn more about later in our conversation. But, before diving into those topics, I'd like to ask you another question from your biography that has piqued my interest: I read that you served as the Cultural Counselor to the French Embassy in the United States in residence in New York from 1989 to 1993. Can you articulate what it means to be a cultural diplomat?

ANNIE: It happened after my Sartre book. I was commissioned to write this book by an American publisher when I was very young, after I did my PhD, and after being invited to a TV program. During this TV show, I happened to come across as very aggressive: I dislike people who lie in public, and I don't mind attacking them. And there was a problem with a Nazi who claimed he had never been a Nazi, but having worked on his book, I noticed how much of a Nazi he had been, so I attacked him. All of this had been well documented; in fact, the American publisher heard about me after this talk show, and he asked me to write the biography of Sartre. At the time, I had already published my PhD and my book on Paul Nizan, a friend of Sartre, who had been a communist but had resigned from the communist party. So, I knew that Sartre was a giant (whom I had actually met once), but that I had never written about him, and so that I might not be the best person. So, I told André Schiffrin, the American publisher, ‘Why don't you ask other people?’ But he replied, ‘No, I want you to do it.’ He told me to write a project, so I wrote a 10-page project.  He considered many French publishers to help him commission the book from me, but no French publisher was interested either in Sartre or in me because I was too young and not well known, and they wanted it commissioned from a very well-known older person, and a man. But André Schiffrin didn't care about my age or my gender. He wanted to bet on somebody who had already done something that he found good. It is a very American way, and very different from the French one. So, then he asked me how much I wanted to earn, and I had to work on it full time, so I thought and asked for a very low expected wage, like $1,000 a month or something, a very low rate. But in Euro, thanks to the dollar going from 5 to 10, it doubled my income, and I worked—as you know, when somebody is young and has to prove oneself—very hard. I asked for four years to finish my work, but in the end, I finished it in three and a half years. When my manuscript was ready, the agent of this American publisher decided to offer it to French publishers, and it went to an auction sale. Twenty publishers were interested after reading the text, and they started bidding: three of them gave 1 million French francs, which was a very large sum of money at the time for a manuscript, and these three were the best publishers in France, and I sold it to the best of them. It became a best-seller, and now it’s translated into 15 languages.

At the time, I went touring around the world for four years to present my book. And because I can speak a few languages, I behaved in the interviews the same way I did in France. The most visible TV shows took place in the Netherlands and Germany: in the Netherlands, the journalist who invited me was Adriaan Van Dis (a star in his country) but as I did now know about him, I was very candid in my answers.  After he asked me a dull-witted question, I responded abruptly, by questioning him in turn. It was kind of insolent, I believe. So, he was surprised and blushed in front of a big audience, and the audience clapped for some time. The next day, I was on the cover of all the magazines, my book became number 1 for one year on the best-selling books, and the Queen invited me. It was crazy. Nothing to do with Sartre; it had to do with my personality I believe (that of a woman who does not conform); then the same thing happened in Baden Baden, Germany: a very well-known and brilliant journalist asked me questions in German, but at the end he asked me a silly question; so I attacked him, and he also blushed. And the next day, I got a call from the Bundes chancellor Helmut Kohl, who said he saw the show, was mesmerized by it, and wanted to meet me in Bonn or Paris. A few days later, I got a call from the Elysée Palace, which informed me that President Mitterand was having dinner with Kohl and invited me to join them. Once there, Kohl said to Mitterrand: ‘You should use Annie better’, so the President asked me what I was doing at the time and suggested that I become French cultural counselor in the United States, because of the new research that I had started on the cultural position between the US and Europe. Within a month, I was sent to New York City. I left my tiny, small apartment full of books in a popular neighborhood of Paris, and I flew to NYC, where I lived in a private mansion on 5th Avenue, and my next-door neighbor at my private home was Miles Davis. I worked there for 4 years to try and discuss the link between French and American culture, then I started to interview the people who were sitting next to me at these fancy events and dinner parties. When I left this position, I had all the material to write a book, and I behaved as an anthropologist in the United States. It was a very good position to watch what was going on, so I produced a book on the art world and how it works in the US. It was my first book on the Art world, which was published in 2000, called PAINTING AMERICAN:  in Italian, Americani per sempre (Johan & Levi). In France, it got a prize, and from that date on, I went on writing about this topic. The book was about an American painter coming to Paris at the end of the XIX century, feeling a foreigner. So, from the very beginning, I worked on the art world as being built by people who travelled the world, and how travelers are the ones that change culture by becoming bridges. That is more or less the answer to your question.

JEMMY: What a story. Both Paris and New York are cities where lots of migrants live, work, and find their creativity. For example, your friend Leo Castelli came from Trieste to New York City, where you two met. Do you also think the cities where you have lived have shaped your studies and research?

ANNIE: Yes, but also no. In the sense that I believe the most important city that influenced me is Algiers, the city where I was born. It is a harbor city, a city of many exchanges. Being a little girl, growing up there, and hearing the sound of the sea and the sirens of the boats, it was something that really shaped my interest in the back and forth and the even flow of people and ideas. 

Annie Cohen-Solal with Leo Castelli, New York, 1990. Courtesy of Marc Riboud

JEMMY: Beautiful. Going back to the Art world and New York City, you said that with PAINTING AMERICAN your interests shifted to the art system, and especially to Mark Rothko, who is also well known to be a migrant artist. In 2015, you wrote a book, MARK ROTHKO TOWARD THE LIGHT IN THE CHAPEL. 

On a personal note, I love Rothko and consider him one of my favorite artists. But to be honest, at first, I didn’t really understand his art. My first encounter with Rothko art was at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice. That painting really spoke to me in a way I still cannot describe. After that, I began reading about this artist, and I became fascinated by his personal life and poetic vision. Art as a metaphysical consolation. But, still, when my friends ask me why I like Rothko so much, I find it hard to explain, so I’m asking you: Why do you think we like Rothko so much?

ANNIE: Firstly, it is interesting that you started liking his work after seeing one of his paintings. I think he is a painter who values the interaction with his paintings as essential. It is not an art that you should look at on a piece of paper or on a screen.  It's a radiation of the color of the painting that comes to you, and you have to interact with it, so he produced an art that you have to see in person. Also, because the borders between the colors are not fixed, you are projected into the painting, and the painting refuses to let you leave. It is something destabilizing.

I also have developed an extensive interpretation: Rothko was not born an artist. He is, in that sense, the opposite of Picasso (who was the son of an artist and knew, already at age 14 that he was a genius). Rothko was not a good draftsman, but he emigrated to the US, where he experienced all kinds of rejections. He was a brilliant kid who was rejected by Yale, where he later entered, and he never felt at home in the US, a country in which he could not identify with the institutions. For these reasons, he was very vocal, progressive, and very committed politically. He wrote about his feelings in a harsh way against the MET, the Whitney Museum, and MOMA. He was also a great pedagogue; for 30 years, he taught art to young kids, and he liked not to teach but to help young people express themselves.  He was helping talent emerge. This was a very avant-garde education.  He carried a complex aesthetic evolution in his art: he started as a figurative artist, then surrealist, then mythologic, and then, in the end, he found what people call his “signature style” with his rectangular colors floating on each other. I call it a “cosmopolitanism of forms”, as he hybridized forms from various figurative traditions, and the most recent inspiration being the Pompeii frescoes.  I think that any foreigner, any traveler, anybody who comes from a different background can identify more easily with such art than other people “who feel entitled to belong”. I told my seminar students about the sociologist Georges Simmel who studied this topic: ‘The foreigner learns the art of adaptation more searchingly, if more painfully, than people who feel entitled to belong.’ In my case, this is also true, because I feel that I don't belong. Therefore, I am free to navigate in the voids of society. And this is also what Rothko did: by those aesthetics, he remained opened and addressed all of us who “don't belong”.

Preparation of the Picasso exhibition at the Grand Palais, Paris, 1966. Courtesy of Marc Riboud

JEMMY: An ode to those who don’t belong. Fascinating. Now, I know how to respond to my friends! But, what about the Rothko Chapel?

ANNIE: He was asked by Dominique de Menil, a French-American art patron, civil-rights activist, and philanthropist, to create a chapel on her property in Houston, Texas. The chapel has no light, except from the top, and has eight walls. You enter in the dark, and there are panels that you don't see when you come in because your retina has to adapt to the dark, so you are forced to sit, and when your retina has adapted, you see something extraordinary. It is an empowering experience. Rothko, because he was a great pedagogue and a democrat, did not want to put any label on the walls, so that it would be available to all people, whether these were people with three PhDs in art history or people who couldn’t read. That place was created 50 years ago and became one of the most visited places in the world. It is at the crossroads of politics, ethics, and aesthetics. Rothko was raised in a Jewish family, but he was not religious. He was spiritual, and he believed in this concept that exists in the Old Testament, which is tikkun olam, which means “repairing the world”.

JEMMY: So, the Chapel aspires to repair the world, right?

ANNIE: Exactly. He built it and thought of it after seeing a chapel in Torcello, which is an island north of Venice, which I have been to two weeks ago for the first time. It is a basilica from the Byzantine era where there is a Virgin and Child all in gold and a refiguration of the Resurrection, as well. He felt a tension between tragedy and hope between these two figures and wanted to bring it into the chapel in Houston.

So, today, I think that this Chapel is indicating, at a time of terrible political tensions in the world, that Rothko would be on the side of Daniel Barenboim, for example. As a Jewish artist, he worked with the great historian (and pianist) Edward Said, who was Palestinian-American and together they founded the Divan Orchestra, in which Palestinian musicians play music alongside Israeli musicians, bringing out an inclusive message from the civil society that politicians do not address. So that’s where Rothko's message lies, and mine as well.

JEMMY: Beautiful. Art as a form of social action. This is also my message.

ANNIE: Yes, Rothko himself said that ‘Art is not only a form of action, but a form of social action’ and that’s what the Chapel is, a form of social action.

JEMMY: I hope one day I’ll get the chance to visit Rothko Chapel as well.

ANNIE: You should! It is fantastic. But now, Jemmy, tell me about you.

JEMMY: My parents are from Bangkok, Thailand, and they then migrated to Italy, where I was born, in Pordenone. I have never had the opportunity to live in Thailand, but I have been going there almost every two years since I was 16 months old to visit my grandparents. I really - like you said - don't feel I belong anywhere, not here in Italy nor there in Thailand; I also have a really strong connection with New York City because my auntie lives and works there, and I've been many times. One summer, I went there all alone by myself: I was utterly consumed by my own thoughts, and I wanted to find the pieces of me I had lost. I believe that New York City is the ideal place to be both no-one and everyone at the same time, a perfect city to find oneself and experience metamorphoses. There, I met a lot of people whose stories and lives intrigued me. I love NYC for these reasons. But I also love Bangkok because it is perfect chaos; there are a lot of things going on at any time. And when I’m there (in Thailand), I feel there is a sense of innate happiness in me, and I want to explore more of this feeling as I discover more about Asian culture and tradition.

ANNIE: Do you speak the language?

JEMMY: Yes! I can speak Thai.

ANNIE: Oh, that’s good.

JEMMY: I'm trying to find my own identity, but at the same time I'm happy that I don't really feel constrained to only that one word that's written on my passport.

ANNIE: You should be happy. I mean, I don't care too. Nowadays, it doesn't mean anything anymore: there was the era of the Nation-State, but now it's more about Spheres of Belonging.  Now, I do understand why my talk echoed your experience deeply. So, what do you want to do later on?

JEMMY:  Now, I'm studying Law, and I'm still a bit confused about my future plans. Next sure thing is that I'm going to New Zealand for my exchange semester abroad. I hope I'll find pieces of myself also there. I have too many ideas, maybe, but I'd love to work on something that could combine Law, Arts, and Culture. My intent is to give significance and dignity to everything I do. My own Sartrean idea of life and existence. This is why, after our first encounter of last month, I wrote to you: this conversation is my attempt to infuse this meeting with even greater meaning. I really believe this will help me figure out who Jemmy truly is. Thank you for everything.

ANNIE: I'm very happy to help. Thank you. 

Bus stop, 1984. Courtesy of Marc Riboud