Michael Francis Gibson

Who is Michael Francis Gibson?

Michael Francis Gibson, art critic, art historian, writer and independent scholar, published regularly in the International Herald-Tribune, 1969–2004 and occasionally in other publications in English, and French.

Michael Francis Gibson, was born 18 July 1929, inside the American Embassy in Brussels, Belgium, the son of American Ambassador Hugh S. Gibson and his Belgian wife Ynès Reyntiens. After schooling in eight different establishments, six different countries and three different languages, he settled in Paris in 1958 where he has lived ever since. Married, four children.

He translated the Oxford Greek scholar E.R. Dodds' "The Greeks and the irrational" into French in view of its publication by Aubier-Montaigne in Paris in 1963. The anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss termed it “one of the key books of the present century.”

That same year Gibson founded the Collège Musical de Trie in the small village of Trie-la-Ville at the Château de Trie [www.musica-trie.com], to the north-ouest of Paris. In this private institution the musicologist Antoine Geoffroy-Dechaume taught the interpretation of early music according to principles laid down in period documents.