Isabelle Laban-Dal Canto oversees a network of museums in rural departments of France, housing a variety of collections: prehistoric and Roman archaeology, painting, contemporary art, fossils, ethnological objects. As a specialist in modern art, she is also an independent researcher interested in the margins of art, including geographical, where artists choose to live in remote areas. In this context she met art dealer Lucien Henry. A native of the village in which he set up his business, he sold, frequented and loved a great many artists between the 1950s and his death in 1988. He was able to gather around him some well-known figures (Bernard Buffet, Henri Cartier-Bresson) but above all artists with original backgrounds, often self-taught, always committed to a singular creative path. Isabelle Laban-Dal Canto’s research into this atypical figure brings her to the heart of her subject: creation far from the norm.

Andrea Kollnitz is Associate Professor in art history at the Institution for Culture and Aesthetics, and former senior lecturer at the Centre for Fashion studies at Stockholm University. Her current research is focused on the self-fashioning of the avant-garde artist; nationalist visual and textual fashion and art discourse, fashion photography and caricature. She is co-editor, with Marco Pecorari, of Fashion, Performance and Performativity (Bloomsbury, forthcoming), and, with Louise Wallenberg, of Fashion and Modernism (Bloomsbury, 2018).

Ana-Stanca Tabarasi-Hoffmann is a researcher in history of ideas, a literary critic and a translator. Her interests are the history of landscape, the relationship between science, literature and arts, Romanticism and S. Kierkegaard, whose works she is also editing.