In 2018, the François Morellet Prize was awarded to Eric de Chassey for his book Après la Fin, Suspensions et reprises de la peinture dans les années 1960 – 1970, published by Éditions Klincksieck.
The book analyses the questions about Art developed in the 1960s and up to the end of the 1970s, the period of the supposed end of modernism, when the status of the artist was itself called into question. In the course of the chapters, this book exposes the different answers brought by the artists: change of medium, stopping all artistic practice for a few years, or even definitively. Even if most of those who had given up painting have returned, an understanding of the suspension of painting for almost twenty years sheds essential light on the history of contemporary art.
