French Tryst

FRANÇOIS-MARIE BANIER LANDS IN MIAMI BEACH

He began as a child—writing, painting, photographing. Drawn to everyone and everything, he went to museums and galleries with Salvador Dali when he was 16, published his first novel at 20, and now, at 57, French artist Francois-Marie Banier is having his first art exhibition in the United States. This month, Miami Beach's Bass Museum of Art will show Banier's quintessential^ European street images of passersby, his lyrical painted photographs, and his intimate celebrity portraits—Samuel Beckett in the months before his death, Vladimir Horowitz, Johnny Depp. "He's highly gifted in many fields—a polymath—and he's enchanting as a personality," says Bass Museum executive director Diane Camber. "It's sophisticated at the same time that it's childlike." From his home in Paris, coincidentally the same house where Berenice Abbott snapped her famous portrait of James Joyce, Banier says, "My main work is about people, the soul of people, ordinary people you can see all the time People are like birds in the sky, but they are in the street, and sometimes they are like an apparition—I don't want to forget them." The work is infused with notions of memory and history—a romantic and delicious melancholy. "He is a grand storyteller of an era of Paris society that is on the edge of slipping away," says Amy Cappellazzo, of Christie's New York. According to Banier, "Art is understanding the time, and it's a projection of what we have learned. You cannot stop time like a train. The most important point is, everybody in life is an objet d'art; everybody—even the worst woman, the worst man—can have an attitude sublime."

A. M. HOMES