| Claude Jeancolas | |
| Birth Date: | 1949 |
| Death Date: | 10 February 2016 |
| Occupation: | Journalist, writer, art historian |
| Nationality: | French |
Claude Jeancolas (1949 – 10 February 2016) was a French writer, art historian, and journalist. He is best known for his work on Arthur Rimbaud.[1] [2]
His childhood and adolescence was spent in Nancy, in the east of France. At the age of 16, he left for Paris with his Baccalaureate diploma. There, he continued his studies in a preparatory class for the "grandes écoles". He entered the École Supérieure de Commerce of Paris (ESCP). He had a degree from the Business School of the University of Texas where he wrote his thesis on management of the American press. He was also a visiting scholar in various American universities including UCLA, Stanford University, the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State University, the School of Journalism in Columbia Missouri, and Columbia University in New York. He died on 17 February 2016.[3]
He began his career as the head of the financial analysis department of the weekly magazine Entreprise; he then created two management journals: Enseignement et gestion and the Revue Française de Gestion. After that, he took over as head of the avant-garde monthly Mode international. He later edited the magazines Collections, Décoration, and Mariages. He moved to Votre Beauté, a magazine that François Mitterrand edited at the beginning of his career. He later joined the Hachette Group, which is now the Lagardère Group, as the international editor of Elle [4] (four editions created worldwide) and Elle Décoration (14 editions created worldwide). He also created Cousteau Junior and Max. Until 2012, he was the director of Marie Claire maison and Marie Claire travel magazines in Milan.
His interest in art developed in 1969 after meeting with the sculptor Edmond Moirignot, with whom he became a friend and later his guardian and executor of will. He later published a monograph on the sculptor Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux in 1987. Following the publication, he studied the history of sculpture and French drawing. Later, he published two books on the Nabis and the Fauves.
After quoting Arthur Rimbaud to his professor Izambard in an editorial for Max, he received an overwhelming amount of mail, which prompted him to explore the subject further. He continued studying Rimbaud's work, regularly publishing on the subject. In his view, Rimbaud was too intelligent (at the top of his class)[5] to be incoherent. He suggested that Rimbaud's poems always carried meaning, were coherent, and served a purpose. He also wrote about Une Saison en enfer. He also attempted to redeem the poet's highly criticized mother, Vitalie Rimbaud, in a biography that attempted to demonstrate the intense love that attached her to her child and her importance to Rimbaud.
Main publications:
Many of those were translated in German, Korean, Japanese and English.