Harry Jancovici

For more than fifty years, Harry Jancovici worked with artists in Paris and New York to make editions, artists’ books and art books, from Alexander Calder and Willem de Kooning to Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Chuck Close and Robert Longo.

He taught philosophy at the University of Brussels in the late 1960s before opening his first gallery in Paris, at 16 rue de Lille, devoted to young painting. As director of the collection La Vue Le Texte at Éditions de la Différence, he initiated and published Francis Bacon: Logique de la sensation by Gilles Deleuze (1981), the meeting of a painter and a philosopher that became a classic.

In 1994, with Sandro Rumney and Éditions de la Tempête, he brought together twenty-three artists for a portfolio to benefit Médecins du Monde, among them Roy Lichtenstein, Robert Rauschenberg, Louise Bourgeois, Antoni Tàpies and Balthus. It was presented at the Orangerie du Sénat in the presence of President François Mitterrand. In 2013, with Philippe Cardinal, he repeated the gesture for Handicap International with twenty-three more, from John Baldessari and Jeff Wall to Giuseppe Penone and Michelangelo Pistoletto, followed by a second edition in 2017.

In his later years he brought together the painter Peter Doig and the poet Derek Walcott in Morning, Paramin, and conceived the monograph of Julio Le Parc, with an edition of artworks made with the artist for it. Of everything he worked on, his favorites were the Deleuze book on Francis Bacon and Robert Longo’s Freud’s Studio.