From 13 to 23 November 2024, Le Mouffetard, France’s National Marionette Theater in Paris, is exhibiting a panorama of pastels by Jean Malaurie to coincide with the show ‘Racontars arctiques, chroniques rocambolesques de la banquise’ (‘Arctic tales – fantastic chronicles from the ice pack’), adapted from the writings of Danish author Jørn Riel (1931-2023) by the Quebec collective La Ruée vers l'or.
Jan Borm will engage in a dialogue with the collective La Ruée vers l’or and the audience after the show on Saturday, November 16.
Jean Malaurie, who was born in Mainz in 1922 and died in Dieppe in February 2024, is the author of Les Derniers Rois de Thulé (1955), the most widely read book about Greenland in the world. This story, translated into some twenty languages, is dedicated to his extended stay with the Inghuit, also known as ‘Polar Eskimos’, in the Thule region of north-west Greenland in the early 1950s. In his classic account, Malaurie tells the story of his expedition by dog-sled with two Inughuit couples to Inglefield and Washington Lands in North-West Greenland in the winter 1950-51 to undertake cartographic work, which was published with his degree thesis in the 1960s. The comic strip Malaurie, l'appel de Thulé (‘Malaurie, the Call of Thule’) by Makyo and Frédéric Bihel was published with the cooperation of Jean Malaurie by Editions Delcourt in 2019.
Jean Malaurie is world-renowned for his work in Arctic geomorphology and his ethnographic circumpolar stories dedicated to the Inuit, his intellectual and spiritual mentors. Founder and director of the famous ‘Terre Humaine’ book series published by Plon in 1955, he never ceased to defend the Indigenous peoples of the Arctic and the rest of the world. Director of Studies at the École des Hautes Études (EHESS) and Director of Research at the CNRS, Jean Malaurie received many prestigious awards, including the Nersornaat gold medal from the Greenland government, the Order of the Dannebrog and the Royal Geographical Society’s gold medal. He has also made a series of films for French television, but the general public has not yet had the opportunity to discover his pastels, with the exception of a few drawings at the Galérie Orenda, Paris, in 2018 and 2022, and an exhibition at the Oceanographic Institute/Prince Albert 1st of Monaco Foundation in Monaco in 2023-24. Although this activity represents a lesser-known aspect of his work, it is important insofar as his pastels ‘are as many references to the author's meditations on Nature and shamanism’, Joëlle Rostkowski of Galérie Orenda observes, adding about these captivating untitled images: ‘His solitary contemplations become visual inspirations, transcended into representations of the energy of matter, explorations of the hidden realities of the living universe and the spiritual forces that animate it’. Following the publication in 2020 of an album of his pastels by El Viso entitled Crépuscules arctiques (‘Arctic Twilight’), here is the exhibition of the same title. It shows the inspired pastels of a singular man who attaches particular importance to emotion, and whose memories of his extraordinary journeys on the ice floes with his Inghuit comrades have never faded.
