Sartre, Jean-Paul

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1905–1980). French philosopher, novelist, playwright, critic, and political activist, a highly influential figure in his country's intellectual life from the 1940s. Before the Second World War he held various teaching posts; during the war he served in the army, was captured by the Germans, and after being released, worked for the Resistance; after the war he was a full-time writer. His energetic involvement in many of the important issues of the time and his unceasing concern with moral problems won a worldwide audience for his ideas. He was a leading spokesman for existentialism, a system of ethical thought that stresses the importance of personal experience and individual responsibility in the face of a meaningless universe. His writings on the visual arts form a small part of his output and are mainly concerned with a few painters or sculptors who particularly interested him, notably Alexander Calder, Alberto Giacometti, and the painter Robert Lapoujade (1921–93), who in 1961 had an exhibition of abstract works inspired by the French-Algerian conflict (Galérie Pierre Domec, Paris) for which Sartre wrote a lengthy catalogue introduction. The artist most closely associated with Sartre is Giacometti; his isolated, emaciated figures are often seen as embodiments of the existentialist spirit, and Sartre wrote the introduction to the catalogue of the exhibition that established Giacometti's reputation in the USA (Pierre Matisse Gallery, New York, 1948). Some of Sartre's other writings on art were published in English in Art News, and his Essays in Aesthetics, selected and translated by Wade Baskin, was published in 1963; Baskin writes that ‘Sartre approaches art with an open mind but seeks always to fit his findings into his philosophical scheme'. Apart from Calder and Giacometti, the famous artists among Sartre's friends included André Masson, who designed the sets for his play Morts dans sépulture in 1946.