Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession

Event begins at 1pm PT / 2pm MT / 3pm CT / 4pm ET

Join us for a conversation with L. John Harris, author of Portrait in Red: A Paris Obsession (Heyday Books). The book covers L. John Harris’s captivating, ten-year quest to uncover the story behind an anonymous 1935 portrait found discarded on a Paris sidewalk. Blending investigative art sleuthing, novelistic memoir, and rich color photography, Harris takes readers from his discovery of “The Girl in Red” on a journey that merges historical intrigue, aesthetic theory, and personal revelation—connecting the painting to his own life as an art student, food writer, and memoirist. Along the way, he weaves in themes of Parisian culture, world history, and family heritage, showing how art can unexpectedly change the course of a life.

L. John Harris, born in Los Angeles, studied art and literature at UC Berkeley in the 1960s. Seduced by Berkeley’s food revolution in the 1970s, Harris worked at several iconic shops and restaurants and wrote The Book of Garlic (1974). He launched his cookbook company, Aris Books, in 1980 and his “Foodoodles” cartoon byline in Bay Area magazines led to a series of illustrated memoirs: Foodoodles (2010), Café French (2019) and My Little Plague Journal (2022). Mr. Harris co-produced with PBS in 2001 the film Los Romeros: The Royal Family of the Guitar and he serves as the curator of the Harris Guitar Collection at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. Harris’s next books are a fifty-year celebration of the Garlic Revolution, followed by a history of Berkeley’s “gourmet ghetto” food scene of the 1970s and 80s. Mr. Harris lives in the Berkeley Hills in a 100-year-old Italian-style villa designed by Walter Maybeck. Musical and literary events are presented at the villa several times a year.

Portrait in Red can be purchased on Bookshop.org.