Agnès Poirier, Left Bank:

Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-1950 

(Henry Holt & Co., $30)

             Agnès Poirier, a Paris-born and London-educated journalist, takes on two weighty subjects in Left Bank: Art, Passion, and the Rebirth of Paris, 1940-1950: Parisian artistic, cultural and intellectual life during what was surely Paris’s darkest 20^th century period, the four years of German occupation, 1940-44; and the efforts to restore the City of Light to its former eminence in all things artistic, cultural and intellectual in the remaining years of the turbulent decade.  Her book consists primarily of short anecdotes or vignettes – what she terms a “collage of images” (p.4) — about some of the leading artistic and intellectual personalities in 1940s Paris.  With much emphasis upon the shifting romantic attachments among these personalities, the book has a gossipy flavor.

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