In the footsteps of Paul Gauguin.
Grasset| N° d'inventaire | 31230 |
| Format | 13.5 x 20.5 |
| Détails | 319 p., paperback, under dust jacket. |
| Publication | Paris, 2017 |
| Etat | Nine |
| ISBN | 9782246814603 |
After a childhood in Polynesia and the Indian Ocean, Jean-Luc Coatalem, 41, travel writer and journalist at Géo, continues to travel the world. He published Villa Zaouche (1994), Tout est factice (1995), Mission au Paraguay (1996), and Le Fils du fakir (1998) with Grasset. The Book: It was the sepia photograph of an Anglo-Polynesian woman, bought at auction by the author, that suddenly prompted him to set off in search of Paul Gauguin. Who was this pretty vahine? And above all, why did the artist paint the waxen face of his son, Aristide, known as Atiti, on the day of his death in Papeete? What intimate echo does this painting awaken in Jean-Luc Coatalem, who, like Gauguin, knew Brittany as well as the archipelagos of Polynesia. Then begins a meticulous, realistic but dazzling hunt, where we will understand that Gauguin, grandson of Flora Tristan, hallucinating "Inca", "Peruvian with a flat purse", flees reality to find himself, overturns all the clichés about exoticism, to the point of losing his mind, to the bottom of the Well of Enjoyment, where the author finds his morphine addict syringe intact. What a hunt! What an investigation, mystical and geographical! Brittany, Holland, Denmark, Panama, Martinique, Tahiti, and the distant South Seas, with for companions, painters, creditors, cult merchants, vahinés, the ocean, solitude. A business-minded Gauguin chasing the sale? A family-father Gauguin, abandoning his five children in Copenhagen? A Gauguin reconciled with himself, a peaceful painter, whose hand was guided by the Maori gods? Who is the real Gauguin? And what if his appetite for elsewhere, for "the great Diverse," hid another hunger? As Gauguin wrote: "One dreams and one paints peacefully."
After a childhood in Polynesia and the Indian Ocean, Jean-Luc Coatalem, 41, travel writer and journalist at Géo, continues to travel the world. He published Villa Zaouche (1994), Tout est factice (1995), Mission au Paraguay (1996), and Le Fils du fakir (1998) with Grasset. The Book: It was the sepia photograph of an Anglo-Polynesian woman, bought at auction by the author, that suddenly prompted him to set off in search of Paul Gauguin. Who was this pretty vahine? And above all, why did the artist paint the waxen face of his son, Aristide, known as Atiti, on the day of his death in Papeete? What intimate echo does this painting awaken in Jean-Luc Coatalem, who, like Gauguin, knew Brittany as well as the archipelagos of Polynesia. Then begins a meticulous, realistic but dazzling hunt, where we will understand that Gauguin, grandson of Flora Tristan, hallucinating "Inca", "Peruvian with a flat purse", flees reality to find himself, overturns all the clichés about exoticism, to the point of losing his mind, to the bottom of the Well of Enjoyment, where the author finds his morphine addict syringe intact. What a hunt! What an investigation, mystical and geographical! Brittany, Holland, Denmark, Panama, Martinique, Tahiti, and the distant South Seas, with for companions, painters, creditors, cult merchants, vahinés, the ocean, solitude. A business-minded Gauguin chasing the sale? A family-father Gauguin, abandoning his five children in Copenhagen? A Gauguin reconciled with himself, a peaceful painter, whose hand was guided by the Maori gods? Who is the real Gauguin? And what if his appetite for elsewhere, for "the great Diverse," hid another hunger? As Gauguin wrote: "One dreams and one paints peacefully."