Marc Devade and the Support-Surface Legacy Revisited

A new book edited by Camille Saint-Jacques and Éric Suchère, published by Éditions Lienart, reexamines the pivotal period of the 1960s-70s through the figure of painter Marc Devade and the Support-Surface movement. The collection assembles texts, interviews, and critical essays from historical protagonists including Catherine Millet, Marcelin Pleynet, and Louis Cane, alongside newly commissioned contributions. It explores the complex relationships between Devade and the Tel Quel review, the Marxist and Maoist political engagements of the group, and the intertwined dynamics of writing and painting. The book constructs a mosaic portrait of an era of exceptional intellectual and ideological richness, while questioning why this creative virulence and profusion of written and pictorial commitments now seem like distant, diluted memories. Anne Hindry's review notes that Devade's painting is little seen today, Cane's work has lost its way, and others have disappeared entirely—attributing this partly to the misdirection of chosen political ideology and largely to the evolving relationship between artistic activity and the social body. The volume's merit lies in probing the essence of the relationship between writing, which explicates thought through words, and painting, the great 'mute' that appeals to the body.