An artist lives in his art; that is, his art is characterised by the impulses, sympathies and recoils which determine his nature as a human being. Yet equally, for the artist who loses faith, art can become a perverse refuge: an enclosed, private world within which he spins fantasies of his own defeat…. Unlike 'ivory tower' artists, who exclude pain, 'private world' artists … indulge in it masochistically; but, to almost an equal extent, have ceased to explore, to seek out new positive values by which to live.

Chabrol's work has shown a constant tension between these opposing ways of living in his art. Since the rather laboured, and subsequently disowned, Catholic affirmation of Le Beau Serge, his great problem as an artist has been the difficulty of affirming belief in anything. Rejecting the bourgeois world for its materialism, pretensions and repressiveness, but finding the various alternatives to this...