Facing Rimbaud: that is precisely where this album places the reader, without preamble or precaution, through a collection of portraits of the poet, from the most famous – like Fantin-Latour’s Coin de table (Corner of the Table) and the photo by Carjat – to the less well-known, like the unflattering caricatures by Forain. One of these portraits, showing Rimbaud in the last year of his life, has never been published before, and this is the first time that several others have been printed in a book.
Through this series of images — photographs, paintings, caricatures, drawings — selected either because they were the work of a contemporary of Rimbaud’s who actually knew him, or because they were published in his lifetime, we gradually perceive a character who seems to be escaping – almost fleeing – his own legend.
These portraits, landmarks in the buffeted, difficult existence of the young man from the town of Charleville-Mezières who came to Paris to become famous, and of the man from the land of the Red Sea, are presented in an order that follows the poet’s itinerary: a sort of visual biography retracing his extraordinary human adventure.
A short entry presents each portrait, in both its own specifics and within the poet’s broader trajectory.