The fact of the matter

IT is appropriate that West Cork and its annual literary festival should provide a platform for arts writer, cultural historian and biographer Nicholas Fox Weber to talk about his subjects — after all, he’s been coming to this section of craggy coastline for 40 years, and it has played a seminal and supporting role in more than a few of his 14 books.

His titles and researches span the lives of some of the 20th century’s most famous and enigmatic artists and creatives, including those who’ve been creative with their own back-stories. The Polish-French painter Balthus is the most enigmatic and surely the most self-mythologising he’s had to deal with; he got the lucky introduction to talk to Balthus via Rosscarbery art gallery owner Angela Flowers, who had family links to one of Balthus’s early 1930s models, Alice.

But, for all the exotics and elites, from the mythomane Balthus and the Bauhaus movement’s major figures, to architecture’s towering modernist Le Corbusier — incredibly, it fell to Fox Weber to write Le Corbusier’s first major biography — there’s also the elephant in the room, or at least room for the elephant: He has also written ‘The Art of Babar’, on the gentle-giant traveller of watercolour fame and fable.