Painting, music, photos… Nine exceptional books for Christmas – L’Express

BY STÉPHANE LAMBERT. GALLIMARD, 224 P., €42.

In a letter from January 1955, two months before his suicide at the age of 40, Nicolas de Staël summed up the credo of his pictorial career: “Always function differently from one thing to another, without a priori aesthetics… This what matters is that it’s fair.” Starting from this synthesis, Stéphane Lambert retraces the journey of a solitary painter, by turns tortured and luminous, whose fragmented canvases with bright solid colors struggle to fit into a box in the history of art. To this detailed account are added around a hundred paintings reproduced and commented on period by period. To be devoured in addition to the retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, until January 21.

BY JULIETTE BENHAMOU. FLAMMARION, 208 P., €35.

Things happened at the Hôtel Drouot, the venerable painting trading house, the epicenter of artistic life from the 19th century to the Second World War. The hypermodernity of Degas revealed at auction after his death, the love at first sight of the detestable Goncourt brothers for Japanese trinkets, “The Bear’s Skin” by financier André Level, which marked the beginnings of speculation in modern art … Juliette Benhamou gives us ten thrilling stories, sometimes cynical, often funny, which shed light on the history of art from an unexpected angle. Rejoicing!

BY AGNÈS SANDRAS. PERRIN/BNF, 240 P., €25.

Poetry, theater, literature, drawing, politics… The author of Miserable embraced these disciplines with the same fervor, delivering through them a vast chronicle of his time. The historian Agnès Sandras retraces these multiple lives in a dense book, with the support of the National Library of France, which opened the doors to its colossal Hugo collection, some of the archives reproduced here are previously unpublished. Manuscripts, drafts, love letters, intimate notes, photographic portraits, sketches by the master thus constitute a spectacular iconography which restores the “ocean man” in all its richness.

BY JEAN-LOUP & PATRICE NOTTEGHEM AND PHILIPPE DUBOIS, www.levangileselonstyan.com416 P., 44 €.

From 1948, joined in the summer by their cousin Philippe Dubois, Jean-Loup and Patrice Notteghem grew up in the shadow of the new National Motor Flight Center of Saint-Yan, in Saône-et-Loire, that their father, Louis Notteghem, directed. This pioneer of light aviation made his school a major site for learning to fly with his method called Gospel of Saint-Yan by the press of the time and which was soon applied in all flying clubs. The three cousins ​​retrace this formidable saga in an XXL book, Grand Literary Prize of the Aéro-Club de France 2023, which is teeming with archives, testimonies, photographs and technical documents. A sum that will fascinate both enlightened amateurs and the curious.

UNDER THE DIRECTOR. BY JULIEN ROUSSEAU AND HELÈNE KESSOUS. KAPH, 176 P., €40.

This book, rich in illustrations, tells us the fascinating history of Indian cinema, from its origins at the end of the 19th century to today. Beyond the global success of Bollywood and its screen gods, the work, which accompanies the exhibition visible at Quai Branly until January 14, dissects the long tradition of image making in India and the film industry in the subcontinent, today the largest in the world. A colorful stroll!

BY LILIANE AND CHRISTELLE TÉA. FIRST PARRALEL, 192 P., €32.

Little Christelle Téa made her first doodles in her parents’ Asian restaurantTo happiness, where she spent long hours every day after class. Having become a young artist recognized for the delicate drawings that she creates freehand, without sketch or repentance, she today illustrates the cooking recipes of her mother Liliane, originally from Cambodia, a legacy of family and traditional know-how. . A little gem with flavors of phô and lôc lac which deliciously mixes art and cuisine.

BY AMBER GAUTHIER. HAZAN, 240 P., €60.

“Everything speaks in my work, even the fish,” said the author of Fables. Everything can be painted too, thought Ambroise Vollard when, in 1926, he entrusted Marc Chagall with the illustration of La Fontaine’s famous collection, receiving in the process virulent criticism from those who castigated the association between the Russian painter of Jewish origin and this masterpiece of the French language. A wasted effort, Chagall took up the challenge with brio, finesse and brilliance, as this large format edition shows us, where the allegorical texts of the brilliant moralist sit side by side with around sixty gouaches, accompanied for the first time by their engravings.

MŒBIUS PRODUCTION, 176 P., €47.

First Artbook from the Le Petit Panthéon Moebius collection, here is an in-depth work dedicated to Arzak, a key figure in the Moebiusian universe. Of his solitary warrior with a sharp gaze, the comic strip author Jean Giraud, alias Mœbius, said that it “was a sort of passage to the act, a dive into strange worlds, beyond the visible”. We find it here in all its facets, from the first publications in Screaming metal to the dreamlike representations that followed, evolving over the graphic mutations of its creator. Something to delight the fans.

BY MATHIEU PERSAN. HACHETTE, 320 P., €60.

From social phenomena to science, including politics, the art of living and music – his lifelong passion – Mathieu Persan offers his take on our times with nearly 400 illustrations drawn from the abundant production of the young forty-year-old. that the press, the publishing world and even the stars of the musical sphere (Benjamin Biolay, Norah Jones) have been fighting over it for ten years. Nothing better than this committed opus to (re)discover the retro and refined style of this little graphic design genius, who draws his inspiration from the great poster artists of the interwar period.