The reading room : Gabriële Buffet Picabia

What makes this book so compelling is the angle the Berest sisters chose.

Gabriële Buffet was not simply Picabia's wife she was the intellectual sparring partner of the leading modernists of her time, including Marcel Duchamp and Igor Stravinsky. Frenchly Yet history had all but erased her. Anne and Claire Berest wrote Gabriële to better understand their own great-grandmother, and in doing so, they rescued one of the most fascinating women of the 20th-century avant-garde from the footnotes.

Francis Picabia, Le Bouquet, Saint-Tropez, 1909 sold at Christie's May 2024, 302'000 USD

For anyone who loves art history, this is the rare book that puts the ideas, Dada, abstraction, the birth of the avant-garde, back into the bodies and conversations of the people who invented them.

Gabriële Buffet-Picabia with Francis Picabia, right, and one of Picabia’s cousins, Seville, Spain, 1909

The year is 1908, at the height of the Belle Époque. A brilliant young French woman named Gabriële, freshly graduated from one of Europe's most elite music schools, meets a volcanic Spanish painter named Francis. They marry and fall headlong into a Paris experimenting with new ways of living, thinking, and creating. Soon, a third figure enters the picture: Marcel, a young artist by the name of Duchamp...

Gabriele, by Anne et Claire Berest, Edition Le Livre de Poche