Botticelli, Van Gogh, Baugin… 8 books to savor this winter

1. Burning passion at the heart of the avant-gardes

One is a sculptor, the other a painter… and she? A furiously free woman, also a painter but also a model for the greatest. Patrick Grainville, who had already devoted his last novels to painting, this time attaches himself to the “trio of the ardent” formed by Alberto Giacometti, Francis Bacon and, therefore, the Englishwoman Isabel Rawsthorne who was the friend, the muse, the lover of these two giants of art (Bacon will say that she was the only woman he had loved) and whose work has been relatively forgotten. Sharpened like the tip of a knife (of a painter, of course), Grainville’s text restores the artistic effervescence of the avant-gardes of the XXe century, from the 1930s to the 1990s, where we come across Picasso, Balthus or even the Japanese philosopher Isaku Yanaihara in the background… A great intoxicating literary fresco. IB

By Patrick Grainville

Ed. Threshold • 352p. • €21.50

2. The other Botticelli

What is he dreaming of, this beautiful languid Mars, unaware of the presence of his beauty, stretched out by his side, and of the little satyrs, determined to disturb his rest? It is this masterpiece, painted by Botticelli between 1475 and 1485 and whose interpretation still raises questions, which is at the heart of Stéphane Toussaint’s work. A fine connoisseur of the Italian Renaissance, director of research at the CNRS, he takes the reader on a tasty iconographic investigation… which, for sure, will confuse more than one! His thesis? In the absence of Cupid, the love between Mars and Venus would not have been consummated and the canvas would rather evoke homosexuality in the Tuscany of the quattrocento — and with it, that of its author! With erudition and humour, Stéphane Toussaint deconstructs the myth of an overly smooth Sandro Botticelli, sacred by 19th century art historians.e and XXe century. Jubilatory! IB

Botticelli’s dream

By Stephane Toussaint

Ed. Hazan • 160 p. • 25 €

3. The Passion of Van Gogh

Departure: Amsterdam. Terminus: Auvers-sur-Oise. After Rothko, De Staël, Monet or Goya, it is in the tormented psyche of Van Gogh that Stéphane Lambert embarks us with modesty through this story in the form of an (inner) journey inspired by his series for BeauxArts.com, “Sur la Van Gogh’s trail”, published last spring. “How is it, when we are going through a crisis unprecedented in the history of humanity, that it is you that I want to speak to, you most misfit of men? In a desperate spiritual quest traversed by the light of art, the writer follows the thread of works and letters left by the painter along his painful journey. The result is an intimate portrait of a terrible humanity. To read in one go, before the major exhibition that the Musée d’Orsay is preparing in the fall on the last months of the painter in Auvers-sur-Oise. FG

Vincent Van Gogh. The Eternal under the ephemeral

By Stephane Lambert

Ed. Arlea • 120% • 17 €

In bookstores February 2

4. A Chewable Essay

We first observe it a bit like a voyeur, through a pierced peephole in the cover, before savoring it thanks to the words of the writer and poet Daniel Kay. The latter devotes to this wafer dessert, painted by Lubin Baugin around 1631 and recently presented as part of the “Les Choses” exhibition at the Louvre Museum, a delicious little poetic essay. “Between the infinitely large and the infinitely small, just enough room for a wafer”: his sensitive and luminous language probes, with small touches, the silent mystery of the painting, opening here and there doors to the beyond ( “Is it only a question, for these presences thrown before our eyes with such power of affirmation, of revealing their being there or of accompanying the world to the end of our interrogations, in the solitude of the ultimate questions? “). A feast for the eyes and the soul, served on a silver platter. IB

Baugin, Wafer Dessert

By Daniel Kay

Ed. invented • 56% • €15

5. Mona Chollet, living surrounded by images

It’s his little treasure. The well-known essayist of Witches. There Undefeated power of women (2018) has been enriching a collection of images for years, found online or purchased as postcards when leaving museums. Her most faithful readers know it: Mona Chollet has long illustrated her reflections with a thousand and one eclectic references. It was time to devote a book to it, a little marvel published last fall. She talks about her relationship to images – and that of others (Walter Benjamin and Paul Klee, or this anonymous man who went so far as to steal a Rembrandt to keep it with him) –, her way of going through museums in at full speed to quickly locate the works that she likes and unearth them in reproductions (“a work only interests me insofar as it can belong to me”, but at a lower cost), from her collection of feminist portraits… Lavishly illustrated, the book gives the impression of entering a secret and warm lair. Undoubtedly his most intimate book. MCL

Images and fresh water

By Mona Cholet

Ed. flammarion • 192 p. • €19.90

6. Rififi at the Louvre Museum

First novel well felt, Varnish Lightening is a highly recommendable immersion in a well-known place: the Louvre Museum. In particular, we meet Aurélien, curator of the department of paintings, and Daphné, the brand new director of the Louvre – and former communicator. Sporty, determined, owner of a richly fed Instagram account, she summons a team of external advisers to speed up the museum’s attendance figures, under the worried gaze of Aurélien. Proposal n°1 of the quidams of the Culture Art Media Heritage agency? The restoration of… Mona Lisa. “Undoubtedly you fear that touching the symbol of Western art will have planetary repercussions? Yet that is exactly what you should be doing. » Ouch! The novel thus takes us behind the scenes of a great museum and into the delicate secrets of the restoration of old works, as much as into a terribly current malaise: the meeting of knowledge, humility and long time, embodied by Aurélien , in the face of the growth and advertising imperatives of a young, hyper-connected generation. Or how our relationship with the museum is changing… Thrilling! MCL

The lightening of varnishes

By Paul Saint-Bris

Ed. Philip Rey • 352p. • 22 €

7. Portrait of a hairy girl

For his third novel, the publisher Mario Pasa has taken on a singular task: to write the autobiography of a young girl whose only image has been kept, immortalized by an anonymous German painter in a well-known portrait: Madeleine Gonzales also said Portrait of Maddalena Gonsalvus (circa 1580) work from the collection of the Kunsthistorisches in Vienna (Austria). Affected like her family by universal hypertrichosis, she says: “it must be admitted that during my lifetime no terms were coined to explain our appearance, nor practically anything written about us, and since my death there have been many errors in the story of our lives, where many chapters are missing. Mario Pasa tells his story, that of a singular model, “child wolf, lion, cat or monkey, me the beast and the beauty”, that of a young girl also and of her entire family, of a century, again, that of Catherine de Medici. And, finally, that of otherness, called here monstrosity. MCL

By Mario Pasa

Ed. South Acts • 224p. • 22 €

8. Aesthetic shock and initiatory thriller

Artistic love at first sight at the Museum of Fine Arts in Lyon! Enzo and Manon have nothing in common. Nothing, if not the disconcerting experience they will both have in front of a work from the Lyon museum. An aesthetic shock that will upset their existence. One is grabbed by The wave of Courbet, the other is haunted by Passers-by by Daumier. No doubt, this is the famous “Stendhal syndrome”. And if it was the manifestation of a deep malaise that suffocates them? The two teenagers are convinced of it, they must carry out the investigation. Even if it means digging up family secrets and bringing up traumas lurking in their memory… The first volume of the series “Les Murmures” takes us on a thriller in the form of an initiatory novel. Improbable at times, this youth novel is however carried by an original plot in the land of the fine arts. JC

The Black Passers-by (The Murmurs, tome 1)

By Guillaume Le Cornec

Ed. Threshold • 288 p. • €14

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