Colette Brunschwig

Une monographie sur la peintre française et son oeuvre, accompagnée de quatre essais critiques et philosophiques, de documents d'archives des expositions, d'extraits de ses correspondances ainsi que de textes de l'artiste.

Painting the ultimate space . Born in Le Havre in 1927, Colette Brunschwig exhibited her work for the first time in 1952 at the Colette Allendy gallery in Paris. Her acrylic paintings, ink drawings, gouaches, colour washes and water-colours form a body of work tirelessly inflected by grey, which is defined as a painterly intermediary for colours, an upwelling of form caught up in the challenges of the undefined abstract motif and the inexorable dissolution of the image and of representation.. Colette Brunschwig is a painter of the twentieth century, and she interrogates both Western artistic modernity and the historic traumas of the Shoah and of Hiroshima in a unique way. The artist, who has a strong sense of philosophical kinship with Emmanuel Levinas and was close to the philologist Jean Bollack, combined her painterly investigations linked to 1950s abstract art with the study of Talmudic exegetical traditions and, in the late 1960s, lessons learned from the Chinese Literati painters of the tweifth and thirteenth centuries.. Tracing her twofold artistic lineage back to Claude Monet and Kazimir Malevich, Colette Brunschwig has constantly explored a dynamic space across which the inner breath of expansion and compression blows a space she patiently makes available in order to continue painting when all has been annihilated and to inscribe within her work the reflexive, sensitive strata of newly living forms.. This first monograph is intended to be an open tool for knowledge. It thus includes a large number of reproductions of Colette Brunschwig's paintings, extracts from her personal archives, photographs of exhibitions and critical essays, all forming possible Windows into the artist's painterly techniques and intellectual approaches. It also includes her correspondence with famous members of the artistic and literary scene in post-war France and writings in which she reflects upon her relationship with modem art and the technological transformations of her time..