The jury unanimously decided to award the prize jointly to two publications: Ellsworth Kelly, Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings, Reliefs, and Sculpture, Volume One, 1940–53, by Yve-Alain Bois, published by Cahiers d’Art, and Aby Warburg ou la Tentation du Regard, by Marie-Anne Lescourret, published by Éditions Hazan.

The authors

Marie-Anne Lescourret is a philosopher, translator and journalist. She is the author of numerous biographies such as Rubens (Lattès, 1990) or Goethe ou la fatalité poétique (Flammarion, 1998) as well as numerous essays in aesthetic philosophy and musicology.

“Images speak to us of a century, of one civilization to another, but they are also spoken to each other, a secular language of forms that are perpetuated or accentuated [...] With [Warburg], the image takes on an incredible scope, as its vast posterity demonstrates it.”

Yve-Alain Bois is a historian, art critic and curator. Specialist in European and Russian avant-garde, he is notably the author of Matisse and Picasso (Flammarion, 1999) and Reconsidering Barnett Newman (Yale Press University, 2005). In 2017, he directed the exhibition Painting as Model at MAMCO in Geneva.

It is nevertheless my hope that some particularly voracious readers will endeavour to follow Kelly step by step, entry after entry, from his student years to his return to the united states, without missing a beat.

Jury

For the 2015 edition, the jury was composed of:

Jean-Jacques Aillagon
Former Ministre of Culture

Luca Massimo Barbero
Art historian, director of the Fondazione Giorgio Cini’s Institute of Art History, curator for the Peggy Guggenheim Collection

Laurence Bertrand Dorléac
Art historian, publisher, university lecturer, director of the Laboratoire Arts et société de Sciences-Po(Arts and Society Laboratory of Political Science)

Jean-Marie Borzeix
Journalist, former director of France Culture

Brigitte Leal
Deputy Director of the National Museum of Modern Art

Laurent Le Bon
President of the National Picasso Museum in Paris

Alain Minc
President of AM Conseil, essayist

Markus Müller
Academic, Director of the Picasso Museum in Münster

Alfred Pacquement
Former Director of the National Museum of Modern Art

Marie-Karine Schaub
Historian and academic (University Paris-Est Créteil-Val de Marne)