15 books you will devour this summer

Decrypt a Portrait of Gustav Klimtenter Olivier Debré’s workshop, find the Yoko Ono’s voicetremble with a burglar in the Vatican City…

Beaux Arts offers you a selection of fifteen books to slip into your suitcase between your swimsuit and sunscreen. Make your choices!

A captivating photographic road trip

“Leaving the main roads, getting lost. Deafening myself with music. Driving towards the mountains, the sky. To smoke. The music, very loud. Thinking about her, nothing. Remember. » In this editorial UFO as beautiful as a dream, between visual thriller and autofiction novel, the visual artist Sylvie Meunier scrolls through black and white photographs associated with a short and gripping story. The artist constructed his work from photos she collects all-round, enigmatic landscapes, highways endless, leaden sky seen from the window of a car, motels lost in the middle of nowhere, silent and anonymous rooms, fragments of bodies and blurred faces that the lens was unable to really capture, disturbing details of everyday life taken in close-up – a cigarette burned in an ashtray, the last steps of a staircase lost in the darkness, a light bulb hanging from the ceiling, crumpled sheets… Writing and images vibrate together to tell the story of the strange Mister K. – evocative title bringing us back to the short story by Dino Buzzati, The Kthan to the painting of Victor Brauner, The Strange Case of Mr. K. It all begins on the steps of a house in Oregon on February 17, 1958, where Mister K. decides to hit the road for a endless wandering across the United Stateshaunted by this beloved woman who desires another, troubled by the reminiscences of his childhood and indelible regrets. A pure moment of escape as only art and literature are capable of. DB

Love fictions with Antonin Artaud

Paris, 1930. Antonin Artaud, Anaïs Nin. He, a tormented poet, a penniless actor, an opium addict close to madness; she, a sulphurous American writer exiled in France, a feminist advocating free and multiple love. These two beings reached by the sacred fire of creation are irremediably drawn to each other. If their fleeting and platonic romance was very real, the story that Jérôme Attal tells of it is, for its part, pure fiction. Either nine imaginary encounters between Antonin and Anaïs, an intriguing but precise number because, according to the author, we would only have nine chances of a love story being born. Drawing on Nin’s long-censored diaries or Artaud’s writings, the author delightfully considers their planned, unexpected or missed meetings, their moods, hopes and regrets. It’s all there, the Bohemian and effervescent Paris of the 1930s, the avant-garde artists they encountered, and above all the subversiveness of Anaïs Nin and the agonies and psychotic disorders of Artaud. A fiery story. SdB