Existential Englishman

The Existential Englishman is both a memoir and an intimate portrait of Paris ­– a city that can enchant, exhilarate and exasperate in equal measure. As Peppiatt remarks: ‘You reflect and become the city just as the city reflects and becomes you’. This, then, is one man’s not uncritical love letter to Paris. Intensely personal, candid and entertaining, The Existential Englishman chronicles Peppiatt’s relationship with Paris in a series of vignettes structured around the half-dozen addresses he called home as a plucky young art critic. Having survived the tumultuous riots of 1968, Peppiatt traces his precarious progress from junior editor to magazine publisher, recalling encounters with a host of figures at the heart of Parisian artistic life – from Sartre, Beckett and Cartier-Bresson to Serge Gainsbourg and Catherine Deneuve. Peppiatt also takes us into the secret places that fascinate him most in this ancient capital, where memories are etched into every magnificent palace and humble cobblestone. On the historic streets of Paris, where all life is on show and every human drama played out, Michael Peppiatt is the wittiest and wickedest of observers, capturing the essence of the city and its glittering cultural achievements.

If you’re interested in art, or writing, or Paris, it will ring bells in your head. I loved it, On the page, [Peppiatt] remains probably one of the most eminent art writers of our time; off it, to judge by the swirl of parties, interviews, and chance encounters that fill this memoir, he is a gifted and indefatigable conversationalist, Brings [Paris] to life so vividly you can almost smell it, Peppiatt’s account of his bohemian life in Paris is full of colour, character and charm ... Peppiatt has an aesthete’s love of life, and there are vivid descriptions of food, drink and romance here that both enrapture and inspire ... Offers elegant proof that Michael Peppiatt’s powers of observation remain undimmed and acute, Being an acute observer and friend of artists, [Peppiatt] shares with them a heightened sensitivity, which leads him to write evocatively about particular memories … Evocative and beautiful prose

Michael Peppiatt has been writing about art and artists since 1964, when he began reviewing exhibitions for the Observer while still a student. He left London for a job as arts editor at Réalités then Le Monde in Paris, where he lived at the heart of the art and literary world for the following thirty years, becoming cultural correspondent for the New York Times and, in 1985, owner and publisher of Art International. Peppiatt is the author of a dozen books, including Francis Bacon: Anatomy of an Enigma, In Giacometti’s Studio and the acclaimed memoir Francis Bacon in Your Blood. He has also curated numerous exhibitions, notably Giacometti in Postwar Paris, Caravaggio/Bacon, Joan Miró: A Painter Among Poets and, recently, Bacon/Giacometti.