French art critics

Ricciotto Canudo (French: [kanydo]; 2 January 1877, Gioia del Colle – 10 November 1923, Paris) was an early Italian film theoretician who lived primarily in France. In 1913 he published a bimonthly avant-garde magazine entitled Montjoie!, promoting Cubism in particular. Involved in numerous movements yet confined to none, Canudo exuded seemingly boundless energy. He ventured into poetry, penned novels (pioneering a style emphasizing interpersonal psychology, which he dubbed sinestismo), and established open-air theatre in southern France. As an art critic, he unearthed talents like Chagall, curating a Chagall exhibition in 1914. In that same year, alongside Blaise Cendrars, he issued a call for foreigners residing in France to enlist in the French army. Among the 80,000 who responded was Canudo himself.He saw cinema as "plastic art in motion", and gave cinema the label "the Sixth Art", later changed to "the Seventh Art", still current in French, Italian, and Spanish conceptions of art, among others. Canudo subsequently added dance as a precursor to the sixth—a third rhythmic art with music and poetry—making cinema the seventh art.Canudo is often regarded as the inaugural aesthetician of cinema, thus making his "Manifesto" pertinent for an English-speaking readership. Several of Canudo's concepts found resonance with two prominent early French film experimenters—Jean Epstein and Abel Gance.

Pierre Georges Daix (24 May 1922 – 2 November 2014) was a French journalist, writer and art historian. He was a friend and biographer of Pablo Picasso.As a young man, Daix was an ardent Stalinist. He joined the French Communist Party at the age of 17 in 1939 when the Communist Party was banned for supporting the German-Soviet pact. In July 1940, he created a student club, the Centre laïque des auberges de la jeunesse (Claj), which served as a legal screen for the clandestine Union of Communist Students.When David Rousset (1912-1997) spoke out about Stalin's vast system of prison camps, Daix attacked him as a liar, denying that the GULAG system existed in the Soviet Union, in a 16 page article in Les Lettres Françaises, entitled "Pourquoi M. David Rousset a-t-il inventé les camps soviétiques?". Rousset brought libel charges against Daix and there was a public trial in France, which Rousset, who had told the truth about the camps, won in 1950. As a French communist, Daix continued his uncritical support for the Soviet Union for many years, though late in life he admitted he had been wrong.From 1980 to 1985, he was a journalist for Le Quotidien de Paris.

Hugues Panassié (27 February 1912 in Paris – 8 December 1974 in Montauban) was a French critic, record producer, and impresario of traditional jazz.

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Edmond Aman-Jean (13 January 1858, Chevry-Cossigny – 25 January 1936, Paris) was a French symbolist painter, who co-founded the Salon des Tuileries in 1923.

Michel Ragon (24 June 1924 – 14 February 2020) was a French art and literature critic and writer. His primary focus was on anarchic and libertarian literature.

Gaëtan Picon (19 September 1915 – 6 August 1976) was a French author: essayist, art and literature critic, and art and literature historian. He was director of the Mercure de France and Director-General of Arts and Letters under André Malraux. He wrote an entry for the Encyclopaedia Universalis on Swiss publisher Albert Skira.

René Huyghe (3 May 1906 – 5 February 1997) was a French writer on the history, psychology and philosophy of art. He was also a curator at the Louvre's department of paintings (from 1930), a professor at the Collège de France and from 1960 a member of the Académie Française. He was the father of the writer François-Bernard Huyghe.

Edmond Louis Antoine Huot de Goncourt (pronounced [ɛdmɔ̃ də ɡɔ̃kuʁ]; 26 May 1822 – 16 July 1896) was a French writer, literary critic, art critic, book publisher and the founder of the Académie Goncourt.

Gustave Kahn (21 December 1859, in Metz – 5 September 1936, in Paris) was a French Symbolist poet and art critic. He was also active, via publishing and essay-writing, in defining Symbolism and distinguishing it from the Decadent Movement.