Christmas 2023: our selection of beautiful books to put under the tree

Welcome to the domus of Pompeii. Take a table, pretend to be a character from Petronius' Satyricon. Without the slightest tourist to bother you, admire, from the floors to the walls, the freshness of these reds, yellows, greens and blues. And even more the myth of Ariadne, that of Venus, Diana and Actaeon, the young girl Europe kidnapped by Zeus transformed into a bull, the torture of Circe... In luminous peristyles, stroll around a pool or a fountain, among the elegant columns or venerable altars intended for the worship of ancestors. During confinement, Luigi Spina photographed, alone, the interior of the ruins of these ancient villas. Some 57 homes once occupied by the middle and upper classes.

Thanks to his Hasselblad H6D-100c camera which allows a unique capture of colors, he reveals as much as possible, despite the sometimes fragmentary nature of the remains (cabinets, seats, braziers), the daily life as well as the splendor of the Roman city before its devastation in just a few seconds by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD. AD Each of his shots, due to the changing natural light, took between four and eight hours. Result: time hardly seems to have passed on these paintings and sculptures, mosaics and marble inlays.

Also read: What we owe to Greco-Roman Antiquity

Lines and perspectives of architecture are rendered with archaeological care, a seriousness which takes into account historical data, social and political sciences. In short, nothing seems to have escaped this eye which produced some 1,450 photos on site. Of the drama of Pompeii, Goethe rightly said: “Many misfortunes have happened in the world, but few which have brought so much pleasure to posterity. » And, in fact, this work provides great reading pleasure. Preface by Gabriel Zuchtriegel, the director of the ancient city.

Here a panicked newt scurries in front of the beak of the great egret, there a puffin nests under the tender eye of its other half, here a pair of guillemots watch over its young with its still downy body, there an unfortunate spider descends from its thread under the round eye of the sparrow. Audubon's drawings published two hundred years ago still delight with their beauty and vividness. Regardless of the fact that this vision has sometimes been described as artificial, The Great Book of American Birds remains a monument to the history of ornithology, composed year after year by a man who loved roaming the woods, the marshes, the shores and mountains of America to better capture its wild and abundant beauty.

Born to a French father in 1875 in Santo Domingo, raised in Brittany where he developed a passion for birds, Jean-Jacques Audubon fled to the United States to escape Napoleonic conscription. There he found territory to his liking and above all populations of birds which had not yet been decimated as on the Old Continent. This did not prevent him from being a true trigger fanatic (he later repented). He drew from life specimens that he had killed or that were sent to him, concerned with the greatest veracity in their description.

His quippy remarks on the “good taste” of the barred owl or this trick which consists of immortalizing the flamingo twisting its neck to be able to fit it onto its sheet (he drew at real size) are perhaps making purists talk today and grumpy in every way, but he remains “the king of ornithologist painters” as the great Cuvier had baptized him.

We think we have seen and read everything about the great Catherine. Once upon a time Deneuve proves that this is not the case. More than a simple compilation of articles from Sofilm magazine, better than a beautiful book with images on glossy paper, the richly illustrated work undresses the icon of French cinema with a multitude of angles, some expected (haute couture, Jacques Demy) and others, originals. The mother of the family, the controversial feminist, the partner of Gérard Depardieu (chapter to read before its deletion in the next edition?), the flambéuse, the scandalous, but also the failed meetings with Godard, Sautet, Hitchcock and Eastwood...

Also read: Catherine Deneuve: “I wouldn’t like my life to be told in the cinema at all”

Deneuve in all facets, told by others (Pierre Salvadori, Régis Wargnier, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Gilles Jacob) and by herself. In a long interview, she confided: “ Marco Ferreri was yelling all the time. He was yelling and he was getting mean. It impressed me enormously. For example, someone I would have loved to work with, but about whom people said the worst things to me, is Maurice Pialat. We had a project together that never came to fruition. » Deneuve-Pialat, a beautiful film buff’s fantasy.

Going underground to admire mammoths, giant penguins or the mysterious geometric signs drawn and engraved more than ten thousand years ago by our ancestors has become a must. France has 200 of the 400 decorated caves in Europe including the three stars, Lascaux, Cosquer and Chauvet. To these artistic masterpieces, we must add Font-de-Gaume, Pech Merle, Arcy-sur-Cure, Isturitz, Niaux…

It is this collection of remarkable sites that the scientific journalist Pedro Lima, passionate about cave art, and author of numerous quality works, introduces us to. With its infographics and its beautiful color photos on a black background, this beautiful book for the whole family is extended with a QR Code to easily schedule visits.

Dozens of images and more than 250 pages, or 1.9 kg, to recount six decades of rock “made in France”, and prove that John Lennon was wrong when he compared it to English wine. Under the leadership of Didier Varrod, lively music director at Radio France, Patrice Bardot and Alexis Bernier, hosts of the Tsugi magazine, some of the finest writers of local music criticism have united to revisit an epic very French.

The story begins at Place de la Nation on June 22, 1963, with the gathering organized by the magazine Salut les Comies, and is still not finished at this time. From Eddy Mitchell to Gojira, from Bashung to Didier Wampas, the colorful figures rub shoulders with a review of emblematic rooms, key cities and movements that shook the country by Mireille Mathieu and Dalida.

“ What’s the point of seeing a pianist’s hands? » It was with this question posed to him by Sviatoslav Richter that Bruno Monsaingeon chose to open, not without irony, the beautiful book of interviews just published by Éditions de la Philharmonie de Paris. A question that we could return to him: why, after a life behind the camera, a cinematographic work of 100 opuses devoted to classical music (the latest dedicated to the prodigy conductor of the Orchester de Paris, Klaus Mäkelä, is currently being edited), put down on paper 50 years of memories in contact with the greatest musical geniuses of the past century? Quite simply for the priceless testimony and inspiration these confessions from a confessor bring!

Throughout his stories, carried by an astonishing musical erudition, we follow the journey of this former violinist, from the modest student hostel in Moscow where he discovered Glenn Gould to the heights of Castel Gandolfo where he filmed Yehudi Menuhin and Jean- Paul II. Above all, we leaf through these 300 pages as we would watch thousands of hours of rushes on Menuhin, Gould, Oïstrakh, Varaday but also Piotr Anderszewski, Valeriy Sokolov or David Fray. Simple interview book? Rather a beautiful guide to the imagination of the greatest performers of our time!

Filming music, Philharmonie Éditions, 336 pages, €28.

In 1960, Zao Wou-ki was chosen with other artists to represent France at the 30th Venice Biennale. This scholar who first looked at French painting from China, was born in Beijing in 1920, trained at the Hangzhou School of Fine Arts in 1935, arrived in France in 1948, in Marseille, then in Paris , moved to Montparnasse, in a workshop next to that of Giacometti. His friends were then called Jean-Paul Riopelle, Nicolas de Staël, Sam Francis, Pierre Soulages, Maria Helena Vieira da Silva, Hans Hartung.

At the 1960 Venice Biennale, he notably exhibited a painting he had just completed, 08.01.60, “a type of bold axial composition, with its brushstrokes swirling in all directions, which would become a component of the style of Zao Wou-ki in the decade that began,” analyzes Ankeney Weitz , an art professor specializing in East Asian studies at Colby College in Kansas. This pictorial dynamism was inspired by a trip to Japan and Hong Kong in 1958 “ where he clearly identified his debt to East Asian artistic traditions, to theorize a distinction between European abstraction and Oriental calligraphic gesture.” Or, to find your way.

This Catalog raisonné of paintings (volume II) is therefore key to understanding Zao Wou-ki, who died at the age of 93 in 2013 in Nyon, Switzerland. Orchestrated by his wife Françoise Marquet-Zao and Yann Hendgen, this sum lets the specialists speak (Erik Verhagen who was co-curator of “Zao Wou-ki, space is silence” at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris at the winter 2018-2019) and amateurs, like Dominique de Villepin. A journey to the heart of painting.

The New Wave, knock knock badaboum, the taste of waterfalls and Yorkshires, it's got it all. The excellent Laurent Delmas, from France Inter, has put his radio soap opera “ La Bébel époque” in black and white. What joy! Film dialogues punctuate the chapters. There are interviews. Jean-Paul Rappeneau sees the actor again on rue de l'Échaudé as the prince of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, with his unique demeanor, his relaxation, his voice that he called “my bugle”. Philippe Labro recalls an epic (and feigned) anger on set and quotes the famous line from L'Alpagueur: “Cheers, coco! »

Also read: Hitchcock, Brando, Lennon, Belmondo... The hidden graves of the stars

Leafing through this album is like rediscovering a certain art of living and playing. Long live Bob Saint-Clar and the second degree! It’s no wonder that Tarantino adores this Frenchman for whom he coined the term “ Belmondism.” It is the journey of a child spoiled by his gifts who went from the left bank to the Champs-Élysées. “Boxing, laughter and childhood”, is how Rappeneau sums up this career. The final word goes to the author: “The man of brilliance. » He had to be found. Hygienic and essential.

A satin cover closed with mother-of-pearl clasps and stamped with relief characters: the case, measuring 42 × 32 cm, is refined, at the height of the most beautiful pages of classical Chinese painting printed in majesty and bound by Chinese stitching. On the right page, the image which unfolds in panoramic view to 64 cm or 128 cm, a nice way to measure the size of these originally silk rolls. On the left page, the instructions. The ladies of old times pass by walking in the moonlight, dragons burst forth with puffs of ink and lotuses, water, birds caught in the curled leaves of the peach tree peck at the ripe fruits, court festivals unfold along the rivers, snow falls on a painter's house, Kublai Khan goes hunting...

Ancient China comes back to life in colors softened by the sepia background of the silk. The space of the page is a lesson in emptiness and fullness into which life breaks in, just the moment of painting, but in all its details. From the period of the Three Kingdoms (220-589) to the Quing period which ended in 1911, the styles and subjects vary, and we can distinguish them, but the enchantment continues.

Chinese paintings, Citadels and Mazenod, 272 pages, €179.