In the era of minimalism, realism, or autofiction in novels, Patrick Grainville’s latest work “Les yeux de Milos” stands out with its abundance, erudition, and its ability to deliver very precise descriptions of paintings or places.
It is the novel of a lover and passionate enthusiast of painting, so much so that its protagonist, who grows up in Antibes, is quickly fascinated by richly anecdotal periods and creation secrets of two painters he contrasts: Picasso, whom he calls the Minotaur, and Nicolas de Staël, the tortured one. Two destinies that are antithetical to each other, yet closely intertwined with his own life, filled with dangerous liaisons and terrible connections (Primitive Art of the Early Hominids and the influence of Primitive Art on Picasso) since the hero’s fate, Milos, named so because his mother experienced her first sensual and erotic thrills in Greece, is inextricably linked to these two artists whom he encounters in thought, thanks to what he learns from their biographies and his reveries. It’s an itinerary of descriptions and details that draw upon the places frequented by Picasso, such as Mougins where he experienced bliss with Françoise Gilot, and de Staël’s artist studio in Antibes, from where the painter would leap in 1955 at the age of 41 facing the blue of the Mediterranean.
From the emblematic periods of these two 20th-century painters, the otherwise force of nature Nicolas de Staël, melancholic, alone, afflicted by his love for his young mistress Jeanne Mathieu, and the Minotaur, as he calls him, Picasso who, in 1937, had just painted “Guernica” and spent a summer with his best friends Eluard and Nusch, Man Ray, and Ady or even Lee Miller. Milos has strikingly blue eyes, “a royal blue, unreal azure,” an allegory of excess and purity, whose shine women have subdued.
It is also a novel of journeys since, as a student of Paleontology, he goes to Namibia to find “the raw fresco of the White Lady,” one of the oldest rock paintings, following in the footsteps of his mentor, Father Breuil, a sharp interpreter of cave art, of the Lascaux cave which he called “the Sistine Chapel of Prehistory,” driven by humanity’s origin, a novel rich in interactions, including romantic exchanges among the protagonists, discoveries, and surprises around these subjects whose obsession is easily transmitted. Physical love is celebrated just as much as love for painting, in scenes narrated with elegance and mastery.
The importance of places also captures our attention, places imbued with slices of life, echoes of their presence, that of an invulnerable, dominant, and dazzling Picasso, from epic love stories from Juan les Pins to Cannes through Mougins and Ménerbes, where he leaves his despair with Dora Maar after their breakup. Entangled in his sensual relationships, his labyrinths of amorous torments serve as both a celebration of Eros and pictorial art. A de Staël seemingly imprisoned within the Grimaldi Castle, built on the ancient Acropolis of the Greek city of Antipolis, now the Picasso Museum, caught between the abstract and astonishing figuration in his studio, melancholic and in search of absolutes, unable to complete the immense canvas, “The Concert,” shortly before his suicide.
Milos’s loves, bordered by these two figures, unfold in the shadow of these geniuses, be it with Marine, the closest and most complicit in discoveries and astonishments, the mysterious Samantha writing an essay on Picasso, or Vivie with whom he shares other secrets. Samantha reveals the painter’s ogre-like, voracious, sorcerer side, a genius with numerous mistresses, who drove some to suicide.
Two artists diametrically opposed yet sources of brilliance, and outpourings lent by the author to the protagonist, perhaps endowing him with excess wisdom for a man so young. Nonetheless, it’s an invitation to revisit the works of these two painters with curiosity and passion, with Antibes as the anchoring point, which is no displeasure to us Mediterranean readers.
by Roland Huguades
