Pascal Quignard

Musician Ann Hidden suspects her partner, Thomas, isnt telling her everything. So one dark night, she secretly follows him to an unfamiliar house in the Paris suburbs, where he disappears inside with an unknown woman. But before she can even begin to process what looks like a betrayal, she gets another surprisean old schoolmate, Georges Roehlinger, appears, berating her for spying from the bushes. With Georgess help, Ann takes radical action: while Thomas is away, she resolves to secretly to sell their shared house and get rid of all the physical manifestations of their sixteen years together. Thomas returns to find her gone, the locks changed, and his few possessions packed up and sent to his office. Ann, meanwhile, has fled the country and started a new, hidden life. But our past is never that easy to escape, and Anns secrets eventually seek her out.

"Il y a dans lire une attente qui ne cherche pas à aboutir. Lire c'est errer. La lecture est l'errance."

Over barely a century, Georges de La Tour (1593-1652) has gone from being virtually unknown to being acknowledged as one of the most popular figures in the history of French painting. Both the exhibition and the catalogue offer an overview of the painter's style, the subtle development of his technique, and the different treatments afforded to the personages that interested him.In this catalogue, renowned specialists in baroque painting update our knowledge of the painter, with texts from Jean-Pierre Cuzin, Guillaume Kazerouni, Dimitri Salmon and Andrés Úbeda de los Cobos, Chief Curator of Italian and French Painting (up to 1700) at the Museo del Prado and co-curator of the exhibition.

"Quignard meditates on a remarkable collection of illustrations of sexual imagery. He moves from the annals of global art to ancient and modern, from Bosch and Dürer to Rembrandt and Tintoretto, from Caspar David Friedrich and Caravaggio to Bacon and Jean Rustin. The meditations are wonderfully woven together, presenting a reflection on the sexual image that psychoanalysis calls “the primal scene”—a concept introduced by Freud as the first sexual scene witnessed by a child; a scene that is unexplained, unforgettable, and ultimately haunting."--