Séverin Faust (December 29, 1872,

Paris Paris () is the Capital city, capital and List of communes in France with over 20,000 inhabitants, largest city of France. With an estimated population of 2,048,472 residents in January 2025 in an area of more than , Paris is the List of ci ...

– April 23, 1945), better known by his pseudonym Camille Mauclair (), was a French poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, and

art critic An art critic is a person who is specialized in analyzing, interpreting, and evaluating art. Their written critiques or reviews contribute to art criticism and they are published in newspapers, magazines, books, exhibition brochures, and catalogue ...

Background

Mauclair was a great admirer of

Stéphane Mallarmé Stéphane Mallarmé ( , ; ; 18 March 1842 – 9 September 1898), pen name of Étienne Mallarmé, was a French poet and critic. He was a major French Symbolist poet, and his work anticipated and inspired several revolutionary artistic schools o ...

, to whom he dedicated several works, and of

Maurice Maeterlinck Maurice Polydore Marie Bernard Maeterlinck (29 August 1862 – 6 May 1949), also known as Count/Comte Maeterlinck from 1932, was a Belgian playwright, poet, and essayist who was Flemish but wrote in French. He was awarded the 1911 Nobel Prize in ...

. He was initially a

poet A poet is a person who studies and creates poetry. Poets may describe themselves as such or be described as such by others. A poet may simply be the creator (thought, thinker, songwriter, writer, or author) who creates (composes) poems (oral t ...

and

novelist A novelist is an author or writer of novels, though often novelists also write in other genres of both fiction and non-fiction. Some novelists are professional novelists, thus make a living wage, living writing novels and other fiction, while other ...

. His poetry attracted some attention and was set to music by Ernest Bloch, Gustave Charpentier, and Ernest Chausson and Nadia Boulanger. His best-known novel is '' Le Soleil des morts'' (1898), a ''

roman à clef A ''roman à clef'' ( ; ; ) is a novel about real-life events that is overlaid with a façade of fiction. The fictitious names in the novel represent real people and the "key" is the relationship between the non-fiction and the fiction. This m ...

'' containing fictionalized portraits of leading avant-garde writers, artists, and musicians of the 1890s, which has been recognized as an important historical document of the '' fin de siècle''. He also wrote several non-fiction books about music including ''Schumann'' (1906), ''The Religion of Music'' (1909), ''The History of European Music from 1850–1914'' (1914) and ''The Heroes of the Orchestra'' (1921) which contributed greatly to French awareness of musical trends in turn-of-the-century Paris. As art critic at the ''

Mercure de France The () was originally a French gazette and literary magazine first published in the 17th century, but after several incarnations has evolved as a publisher, and is now part of the Éditions Gallimard publishing group. The gazette was publis ...

'', he attacked artists such as Paul Gauguin and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, though he expressed his admiration when their work became accepted. Later in life he wrote mainly nonfiction, including travel writing such as ''Normandy'' (1939), biographies of writers, artists, and musicians, and art criticism. In his art criticism, he supported

impressionism Impressionism was a 19th-century art movement characterized by visible brush strokes, open Composition (visual arts), composition, emphasis on accurate depiction of light in its changing qualities (often accentuating the effects of the passage ...

and symbolism, but disdained Fauvism, writing of the style that "a pot of paint has been flung in the face of the public". He also provided the libretto for Antoine Mariotte's 3-act 'conte lyrique' ''Nele Dooryn'', premiered at the Opéra-Comique in 1940. At the end of his life, he collaborated with the

Vichy France Vichy France (; 10 July 1940 – 9 August 1944), officially the French State ('), was a French rump state headed by Marshal Philippe Pétain during World War II, established as a result of the French capitulation after the Battle of France, ...

-regime, and worked for the ''Grand Magazine illustré de la Race : Revivre''. He was also a cofounder of the Théâtre de l'Œuvre with Lugné-Poe.

References

External links

* * {{DEFAULTSORT:Mauclair, Camille 1872 births 1945 deaths Writers from Paris French poets 19th-century French novelists 20th-century French novelists French travel writers French art critics French male poets French male novelists 19th-century French male writers 20th-century French male writers French male non-fiction writers French collaborators with Nazi Germany