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SELECTED TEXTS BY DE FRANCIA
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Commitment in Art Criticism
Peter de Francia, 1957‘Art does not exist for the sake of either interpretation or art history, let alone criticism...’
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Mandarins and Luddites
Peter de Francia, 1973‘It is possible that the elaboration of a visual language tough enough to be used as the basis of a style may be the essential problem confronting artists of the next decades...’
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Fernand Léger
Peter de Francia, 1983‘Great art can be produced in a society where the concepts of present and future are psychologically fused to maximum intensity...’
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Effigies and Images
Peter de Francia, 1989‘Up until [Philip Guston's] death in 1980, “the real” was to take on a specific ambivalence: that of violent contrasts, a subversion of rationality through a language of seemingly dead-pan rationalism, located in a no-man’s-land in which compassion confronts satire and tragedy is often indistinguishable from grotesque humour….’
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Fables and Other Drawings, 1990–2001
Peter de Francia, 2002‘Mark making can never be neutral. Should it become so it is already dead...’
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SELECTED TEXTS ON DE FRANCIA
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Peter de Francia
John Berger, 1958‘It is not his emotions which are supreme for him, but the new world he sees emerging, and which, by painting, he helps to bring about...’
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Peter de Francia
Renato Guttuso, 1962‘In European painting today Peter de Francia occupies a very special position which can be linked with the lone stand of other artists in different parts of the world whose work runs counter to the mainstream…’
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De Francia in India, At Last
Geeta Kapur, 1990‘A figure deeply anomalous and equally contemporary in that his imagination belongs to humankind in its millenial dimension...’
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Peter de Francia: Drawings
Dore Ashton, 2008‘Peter de Francia observes the world and draws his conclusions. Literally...’
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Socialist-Expressionist: Peter de Francia (1921-2012)
Merlin James, Artcritical, 2012‘Peter had the demeanour of a dishevelled, rather droll, down-to-earth ouvrier, in a blue cotton ‘French worker’s’ jacket…’
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The Sensual and the Political
J. X. Zhang, New Left Review, 2022‘One striking feature of the paintings of Peter de Francia (1921–2012) is that they often evoke an urge to converse….’
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Bibliography of published works by de Francia
1954 Le Corbusier, The Modulor, translation from the French, Peter de Francia and Anna Bostock, Faber, London; reprinted 2000, 2004, Birkhauser, Boston and Basel
1956 Impressionism (Movements in Modern Art), Methuen, London, reprinted 1957, 1959,1960, 1961; 1957, Crown, New York
1969 Léger: The Great Parade, Cassell, London
1983 Fernand Léger, Yale University Press, London
1989 Uden Titel, Brondum, Copenhagen / Untitled, Frith Street Gallery, London
2002 Fables, Maruts Press, London
