Propos de peintre, deuxième série: Dates / Précédé d'une Réponse à la Préface de M. Marcel Proust au De David à Degas

The collection assembles personal essays and critical sketches that mix portraiture of fellow artists with reflections on art criticism, memory, and shifting reputations. It opens with a response to a contemporary preface and reincorporates earlier studies of individual painters, offering anecdotal observations alongside formal judgments. The essays probe the instability of artistic value, the habits of critics and collectors, and the friction between artistic creation and amateur appreciation. Alternating admiration for established masters with skepticism toward fashionable novelties, the pieces form a subjective chronicle of artistic life and the author's own practice across changing tastes.