Four Art World Investigations to Read This Summer

Connaissance des Arts recommends four investigative books for summer reading. Daniela Franck's "Dans le miroir de ses yeux" is a documented fiction tracing the life of Madeleine, a Black woman from Igbo roots to Paris, whose portrait by Marie-Guillemine Benoist was highlighted in the 2019 "Le Modèle noir" exhibition at the Musée d'Orsay. Thierry Maugenest's "Dans l'ombre de Cezanne. La Résistance à Château Noir" intertwines Paul Cézanne's final years at the bastide near Sainte-Victoire with a WWII Resistance group of artists in Marseille, centered on a Cézanne sketchbook. Blaise Hofmann's "Le Peintre célèbre du village voisin" profiles Swiss figurative painter Pietro Sarto (born 1930), exploring his engraving studio techniques. Vincent Noce's "L'Or pillé des pharaons" investigates the Louvre Abu Dhabi acquisition scandal, exonerating French curators and implicating two Hamburg dealers and expert Christophe Kunicki, who sold looted Egyptian antiquities through Pierre Bergé & Associés.