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PUBLISHER
MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

BOOK FORMAT
Clth, 5.5 x 8 in. / 242 pgs / 3 color / 13 bw.

PUBLISHING STATUS
Pub Date
Out of print

DISTRIBUTION
D.A.P. Exclusive
Catalog: FALL 2009 p. 30   

PRODUCT DETAILS
ISBN 9780878467464 TRADE
List Price: $35.00 CAD $47.50 GBP £30.00

AVAILABILITY
Not available

TERRITORY
WORLD

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MFA PUBLICATIONS, MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTON

The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski

Text by Christian Boltanski, Catherine Grenier. Forword by Luc Sante.

Christian Boltanski's votive installations, archives and objects, revolving around the fragile polarities of memory and amnesia, identity and anonymity, have made him one of the world's most renowned contemporary artists. And yet, despite the centrality of biography and testimony to his work, Boltanski's own story is little known and has never been fully told. Published on the occasion of the artist's sixty-fifth birthday, The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski, written in the form of a book-length interview (which the artist likens to a "psychoanalysis" or "confession") with the art historian Catherine Grenier, is Boltanski's oral autobiography. In it, he recounts his unusual wartime childhood ("my mother hid my father under the floorboards. He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house. He'd come out from time to time--I'm living proof of that!"), his career, friendships and marriage, successes and regrets, his approaches to art and teaching, how he created various installations, his relations with dealers and the public, and other matters that illuminate as never before his complex, enigmatic works. Boltanski is refreshingly phlegmatic about the realities of the world (art and otherwise), and he relates his remarkable stories--some enormously amusing, others tragic--with a matter-of-factness and self-deprecating humor that highlight his capacity for humane responsiveness. As both the self-portrait of a major contemporary artist and a frank, fascinating memoir, this is a document of capital importance.
The Possible Life of Christian Boltanski

STATUS: Out of print | 00/00/00

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FROM THE BOOK
"...Much later, the war broke out. My parents got a divorce, deliberately — it was a genuine divorce. Because my father quickly understood that things would be getting worse and worse for the Jews. One evening they pretended to have a horrible fight; they slammed doors and my mother hid my father under the floorboards. He stayed there for a year and a half, between two floors in the house. He'd come out from time to time — I’m living proof of that! My brother Luc, who was five years older than me, didn't know his father was there. He thought he'd left them, which of course made him miserable. But in reality, his father was living right under his feet the whole time. My mother was able to keep this secret thanks to my oldest brother, Jean-Élie, who was twelve or thirteen and had taken this enormous thing on himself. It was a heavy burden for a child, to have to constantly keep an eye out for the police..."

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