Marcelin Pleynet's Monograph Revisits Judith Reigl's Oeuvre

Éditions Adam Biro has published a monograph by Marcelin Pleynet on Hungarian-born painter Judith Reigl (1923). Pleynet argues that 20th-century art history, still dominated by avant-garde logic, suffers from temporal confusion, market-driven values, and distorted judgment. His method involves a lucid and passionate examination of singular works to extract their 'thought-painted' quality. Reigl's life was marked by war, fascism, Nazism, Stalinism, the Iron Curtain, nationalism, and exile, which fueled an oeuvre Pleynet describes as a 'violent experience of freedom.' She broke with André Breton despite his admiration, refused to become a mentor to younger generations, affiliated with no movement or ideology, and ignored the false abstraction/figuration conflict. Her diverse and extensive work reflects, in Pleynet's words, a 'sustained existential commitment.'