Michel Ragon

French writer and professor of literature and historian, an autodidact. Ragon lost his father at eight. When moving to Nantes at fourteen with his mother, he spent a lot of time in the libraries of the houses and apartments where his mother worked as a housekeeper. He discovered the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Victor Hugo, Jules Verne, André Gide and frequently visited the art museum in Nantes. At the end of WWII, he moved to Paris where he met artists and connected with the Cobra movement in 1949. COBRA (or CoBrA) was a European avant-garde movement active from 1948 to 1951.

From 1954 he started to write poems and articles. In 1964, Michel Ragon became an art critic and historian of art and modern architecture. He also worked for the ministry of foreign affairs (he travelled to Japan, North and South America, Israel, Algeria, Cuba and the URSS) and taught at the Ecole des Arts décoratifs.

His most famous works are Les Mouchoirs rouges de Cholet (1984), La louve de Mervent (1985) and Le Marin des Sables (1987).

Michel Ragon died on 14 February 2020 at the age of 95.