Michel Ragon — critic, curator, ambassador of art, champion of abstract painting, archivist of anarchists, workers, and the proletariat, defender of a new style of architecture, novelist, teacher, Seine-side bookseller, manual laborer, and husband — was born 100 years ago today. What Baudelaire and Champfleury did for Courbet (whose twin investment in advancing art, as the leader of the Realism school, and social struggles, as an official of the Paris Commune, made him the perfect subject for a Ragon biography), Michel Ragon did for a whole genre, the Abstract Art school that flourished in post-war Paris, chronicled as well as post-war anti-Semitism in France, in Ragon’s roman-a-clef Trompe-l’Oeil.  Jean-Michel Atlan was his chou-chou and friend; the COBRA group owed him their first Paris exhibition; Ragon’s tribute to Wols assured his place in the pantheon of  20th-century painters. And his incognito infiltration of the Barnes Collection made sure that neither American authors nor the French artists they hoarded were left out. The largely forgotten vectors of European anarcho-syndicalism — Victor Serge, Paul Delesalle, Nestor Makhno, Alexandra Kollontai, Louis Lecoin, Rirette Maitrejean — were rescued from the dustbin of history into which its victors, a forgetful media, and a reductive academy had swept them by Ragon’s monumental historical novel “La Mémoire des Vaincus.” To read more from Michael Ragon, in the French original and in our English translation, click the links. To read the Dance Insider’s authorized serialization of “Trompe-l’Oeil” in exclusive English translation, click here. To continue his fight for workers’ rights, artistic and journalistic liberty and free speech and against fascism, anti-Semitism, and racism and xenophobia, please consider voting for the Nouveau Front Populaire in Sunday’s French legislative elections. – Paul Ben-Itzak.

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Contact Paul Ben-Itzak at artsvoyager@gmail.com. Paul Ben-Itzak was educated at San Francisco's Mission High School, the San Francisco Center for Theater Training, and Princeton University, where he studied with Robert Fagles, Joyce Carol Oates, Ellen Chances, and Lucinda Franks. Also at Princeton, he was founding managing editor of the Nassau Weekly and began contributing to the New York Times, Reuters, the Associated Press, Atlantic City Press, and many others, later writing for the Arts & Liesure section of the Times. As a San Francisco-based correspondent for Reuters, he was one of the first reporters to cover the AIDS crisis, also covering the arts, the tech sector, and the financial markets. In 1998, he co-founded the leading international arts journal The Dance Insider & Arts Voyager (http://www.danceinsider.com ) and, later, Art Investment News (http://www.artinvestmentnews.com). Paul has also worked as a DJ, children's theater teacher and playwright, and made his debut as an actor on the New York stage in 2011, playing Weston in Sam Shepard's "Curse of the Starving Class." To date, Paul has translated the sketches of Boris Vian, reviews of theater performances , French tourism sites, and research proposals and articles from CNRS and other researchers. His editing work includes dissertation level papers.

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