Vocation : Writers : Critic

André Bazin (French: [bazɛ̃]; 18 April 1918 – 11 November 1958) was a renowned and influential French film critic and film theorist. He started to write about film in 1943 and was a co-founder of the renowned film magazine Cahiers du cinéma in 1951, with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca.
He is notable for arguing that realism is the most important function of cinema. His call for objective reality, deep focus, and lack of montage are linked to his belief that the interpretation of a film or scene should be left to the spectator. This placed him in opposition to film theory of the 1920s and 1930s, which emphasized how the cinema could manipulate reality.

Isaac Rosenfeld (March 10, 1918 - July 14, 1956) was an American writer who became a prominent member of New York intellectual circles. Rosenfeld wrote one novel (Passage from Home, 1946), which, according to literary critic Marck Shechner, "helped fashion a uniquely American voice by marrying the incisiveness of Mark Twain to the Russian melancholy of Dostoevsky," and many articles for The Nation, Partisan Review, and The New Republic. Some of those articles were posthumously published in a volume titled An Age of Enormity, and his short stories were later published as Alpha and Omega.

Richard Warrington Baldwin Lewis (November 1, 1917 - June 13, 2002) was an American literary scholar and critic. He gained a wider reputation when he won a 1976 Pulitzer Prize for Biography or Autobiography, the first National Book Critics Circle Award for nonfiction, and a Bancroft Prize for his biography of Edith Wharton. The New York Times called the book "a beautifully wrought, rounded portrait of the whole woman, including the part of her that remained in shade during her life" and said that the "expansive, elegant biography ... can stand as literature, if nothing else."
He was the Neil Gray Professor of English and American Studies at Yale University, where he taught from 1959 until his retirement in 1988; from 1966 to 1972, he was master of Yale's Calhoun College. From 1954 to 1959 he taught at Rutgers–Newark. In 1988 Lewis received a Litt.D. from Bates College. A member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, Lewis received its Gold Medal for Biography in 2000.
Lewis is generally considered one of the founders of the academic field of American Studies. His interests ranged from criticism of American and European writers to biography and artistic criticism. He is associated with John William Ward.
Lewis' career as critic involved him in the lives of many influential American and European thinkers and writers.
Lewis received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago, where he studied under Norman Maclean, author of the novel A River Runs Through It and Other Stories. He and his wife and sometime co-author Nancy later became close friends with Southern writer Robert Penn Warren.
Lewis' first major work The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (1955) explored De Crèvecoeur's idea of the American as a "new man" - an innocent Adam in a bright new world dissociating himself from the historic past. Lewis portrayed this preoccupation as a pervasive, transforming ingredient of the American mind that shaped the consciousness of lesser thinkers as fully as it shaped the giants of the age. The book traces the Adamic theme in the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Henry James and others, and in his epilogue Lewis exposes its continuing spirit in the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Ralph Ellison, J. D. Salinger, and Saul Bellow.

Fernand Berckelaers (10 March 1901, in Borgerhout – 12 February 1999, in Paris), pseudonym Michel Seuphor (anagram of Orpheus), was a Belgian painter.Seuphor established a literary magazine, Het Overzicht, in Antwerp in 1921. He moved in Dutch, Belgian, and French avant-garde circles. He associated at various points with Theo van Doesburg and Piet Mondrian, and was influenced by their iconic Neo-plasticist works. Along with Joaquin Torres-Garcia and Pierre Daura, Seuphor founded the abstract artists' group Cercle et Carré which included Wassily Kandinsky and Le Corbusier.In 1934, Seuphor moved to Anduze in the South of France following his marriage.Seuphor wrote and edited three books; A Dictionary of Abstract Painting (Tudor Publishing Co., 1958), Abstract Painting: 50 Years of Accomplishment (Dell Laurel Edition, 1964), and "The Sculpture of this Century" (George Braziller, Inc. NY, 1960). These volumes, now out of print, remain among the most valuable documents of abstract painting & sculpture in the 20th century. The painting books have numerous color illustrations which document the various paths that abstract painting took, especially after World War II. The sculpture book has black & white photos that track both figurative as well as abstract sculpture from early 20th century through 1959. Also contains a short bio in the back of the book on each sculptor mentioned.
Seuphor also assisted with the Tudor companion volume of his Dictionary of Abstract Painting, the Dictionary of Modern Painting, which documents all the various schools of painting in the 20th century, including both abstract and realist painting.
He had also an own contemporary art collection with works of Marcelle Cahn, Adam Jankowski, Jean Piaubert, Jean Gorin, Jean Miotte, Aurélie Nemours and Victor Vasarely.

Pierre-Octave Calixte Ferroud (6 January 1900 – 17 August 1936) was a French composer of classical music.

Ambroise Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry (French: [pɔl valeʁi]; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945) was a French poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.

André Antoine (31 January 1858 – 23 October 1943) was a French actor, theatre manager, film director, author, and critic who is considered the father of modern mise en scène in France.