Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet

On the occasion of Philippe Jaccottet's 100th birthday - texts about artists, written with an attention infused with deep friendship. Peter Handke admirably referred to the poet Philippe Jaccottet as a poetic "servant of the visible" in his laudation for the Petrarca Prize. It is therefore quite natural that Jaccottet always maintained a close relationship with visual artists, deeply shaped by his own perspective on the visible, ephemeral world and its landscapes. He is particularly engaged with "painters of silence" such as Giorgio Morandi and Alberto Giacometti, Italo de Grandi, and Gérard de Palézieux. In the last year of his life, Jaccottet compiled in this richly illustrated volume the essays and notes he dedicated to the painters of his life - not a book of a critic or theorist, but rather a deeply personal and quite anachronistic expression of a lifelong affinity, beginning with the exceptional artist Lélo Fiaux in Rome, who introduced the young Jaccottet to the world of art. It is no coincidence that Jaccottet borrowed his title from the famous painting by Gustave Courbet, which also very anachronistically depicts the simple encounter between painter and admirer of his paintings under the open sky of the south.