Gaston Diehl

Gaston Diehl (August 10, 1912 – December 12, 1999) was a French professor of art history and an art critic.

Diehl graduated from the in 1934 and the Ecole du Louvre in 1936. In October 1935, Diel and his classmates in a student group called Regain a weekly review of the same name dedicated to discuss once or twice a month of contemporary creativity with different artists in the basement of the Capoulade Quartier . Beginning 1938, he participated in the weekly magazine Marianne and keep for a year a chronicle of art called "The rostrum of Youth." In 1939 he founded the magazine Charpentes.

In October 1943, during the Nazi Occupation, Diehl founded the May Salon in Paris in a café on the Palais Royal, in opposition to the ideology of Nazism and its condemnation of degenerate art. Its other founder-members were Henri-Georges Adam, Emmanuel Auricoste, Lucien Coutaud, Robert Couturier, Jacques Despierre, Marcel Gili, Leon Gischia, Francis Gruber, René Iché, Jean Le Moal, Alfred Manessier, André Marchand, Edouard Pignon, Gustave Singier, Claude Venard and Roger Vieillard. Several of them (Coutaud, Gischia, Iché, Le Moal, Manessier, Marchand, Pignon, Singier) had in 1941 participated in the exhibition of Twenty young painters of French tradition. The first May Salon took place at the Galerie Pierre Maurs from May 29 to June 29, 1945.

Diehl created in October 1944 the Movement of Friends of Art for the dissemination of the modern art through lectures, screenings, films, educational exhibitions particularly in the provinces. He was close to Rouault, and the young painters of French tradition which he prefaced exhibitions from 1943 at the Galerie de France, he also helped with the exhibitions of Bonnard, Matisse, Picasso, Villon, Braque, Bernard Buffet and Hans Hartung, and thus, according including the testimony of Pierre Restany " was very conscious writer who had a foot in the first half of his century and another in the second." In 1948, he played a role in the creation of the International Film Festival of Art and contributed to the films: Van Gogh (1948), which won an Academy Award for Live Action Short Film in 1950 and Gauguin (1950) with Alain Resnais and Christmas galantes (Watteau) (1950) with Jean Aurel.

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