This is the tribute of a child to a parent, especially commendable when the very concept of fatherhood is threatened; rarer still, the co-authors are themselves artists in their separate fields. Peter Mann is responsible for the pleasing design and photographs, and Sargy Mann has answered his son’s questions to provide an autobiographical text which largely concerns visual perception, ‘not at all straightforward even when you can see’, as Peter Mann says.
Jean Renoir’s Renoir, My Father is the prototype. Sargy Mann selected and discussed 27 paintings or series of paintings covering his career and Peter Mann has photographed them as they hang today in private houses. This novel idea is also indebted to Renoir, who told his son:
You don’t look at a painting. You live with it … It becomes part of your life.
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