Summer reading

Christo et Jeanne Claude the early years

An interview by Matthias Koddenberg

“A light read about the artists who wrapped monuments with such grace.”

This little book takes a look back at the couple’s formative years, which were creative both personally and artistically. We discover Christo, a Bulgarian refugee who painted portraits for a living, signing them “Javacheff”. When delivering one of the wife of the head of the École Polytechnique, Jacques de Guillebon, he met their daughter, Jeanne-Claude. They went on to become a leading couple in contemporary art, wrapping the world’s greatest monuments, including the Reichstag and the Pont Neuf.

But before all that came oil paintings and drawings… of wrapped objects. And numerous encounters with other artists in 1960s Paris. As a couple, he was more the artist, she the organiser: which worked wonderfully.

The text is illustrated with a great many photos of the two of them, as well as prints of the earliest Christo creations. A light read about the artists who wrapped monuments with such grace

Ecrit la nuit – Le livre interdit

Ettore Sottssass

In the early 2000s, Ettore Sottsass wrote Écrit la nuit as a personal testament. In Le livre interdit (the extract translated here into French for the first time) he writes candidly about a pivotal period in his life: his romantic and sexual infatuation with a much younger woman who painfully estranged him from his first wife Fernanda Pivano, translator of the Beat Generation. It all ended with his meeting a third woman, Barbara Radice, an art critic, with whom, and thanks to whom, he went on to found the Memphis movement with other Italian designers.

As in the previous book, what is interesting is how new relationships triggered creative shifts. And, for Sottsass, also the birth of a movement, Memphis, which provided a counterpoint to all that was serious in design, giving him a childlike outlook once again, full of colour and playful forms. This book begins with amorous confusion and ends with the joy of shared artistic creation.

Robert Ryman – Les cahiers de la collection Lambert

Stéphane Ibars

Robert Ryman died on 8 February 2019. As a tribute to him, the Lambert Collection decided to devote this second volume in its Cahiers series to him. By doing so, they have provided an opportunity to discover one of the best collections of works by this major 20th-century and early 21st-century painter, who remains one of the foremost representatives of minimalist painting.

Publishing this book, which aims to reproduce the thousand and one shades of white that characterise Ryman’s work, was a seemingly impossible task in such a small format. Yet it does make it possible to see that for him it was all about making the painting appear.

“It was never my intention to make white paintings. And it still isn’t. I don’t even consider that I paint white pictures. The white is just a means of exposing other elements of the painting. The white allows other things to become visible.” Robert Ryman

Information

Reopening of the Artcurial Bookstore on 31st August

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On Saturdays from 10:30 to 7pm

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Géraldine Martin

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Carine Decroi