![]() ![]() These Boltanski assembled into narrativeless stories that yet seemed somehow autobiographical, often appearing to reference the Holocaust without ever quite doing so directly. This evolved into a practice that was to stay with him for the rest of his life – work made from discarded and anonymous images, culled from newspapers, police records and family photograph albums found in flea markets. It was in the rue de Grenelle in the late 1950s that Christian Boltanski, self-taught, began to make art – first, plasticine sculptures and then large-scale figurative paintings, which he in turn gave up for photography. The children slept at the foot of their parents’ bed until they were in their teens. Instead they were kept at home by a fearful and possessive mother who forbade the visits of friends. As recalled in the 2015 memoir La Cache, by Boltanski’s nephew, Christophe: “The house was a palace but the family lived like tramps.” Christian and his brothers, Luc and Jean-Elie, seldom went to school, and not at all after the age of 12. Christian was born 10 days after the Germans finally surrendered the city to De Gaulle’s victorious forces.Ĭhristian Boltanski’s work Personnes at the Monumenta 2010 event at the Grand Palais in Paris. In fact, he emerged from his hiding place at night to sleep with his wife, resulting in her becoming pregnant: a potentially dangerous thing in the Nazi-occupied French capital. The couple had gone through a sham divorce in 1942, Etienne allegedly fleeing to the so-called zone libre in the south. His Ukrainian Jewish father, Etienne, a prominent doctor, had spent 18 months of the German occupation of Paris hiding in a space between two floors of the family house in the rue de Grenelle, protected by his leftwing Corsican Catholic wife, Myriam (nee Marie-Elise Ilari-Guérin), a novelist. ![]() From the moment of his birth in 1944, mortality had been Boltanski’s special subject. It was a rare miscalculation on Walsh’s part. But I’m going to try to survive.” When the artist died, aged 76, he was four years to the good. “He has assured me that I will die before the eight years is up, because he never loses,” a cheery Boltanski said at the time. ![]()
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