MICHEL BUTOR: FROM THE NEW NOVEL TO THE WORLD OF THE ARTIST'S BOOK, A GLOBAL WRITER
Born on September 14, 1926, in Mons-en-Baroeul and died on August 24, 2016, in Contamine-sur-Arve, Michel Butor is an unclassifiable intellectual figure. Novelist, poet, essayist, critic, translator, and professor, he achieved fame with his novel, "La Modification" (1957), an emblematic work of the New Novel, written entirely in the second-person plural. This Renaudot Prize recognizes a daring writer, but cannot alone summarize an artistic trajectory deliberately open to the world.

Butor quickly abandoned the traditional novel form to explore uncharted territories: essay-poems, dream narratives, sound writing, and above all, an uninterrupted dialogue with the visual arts. His immense body of work—more than two thousand titles—is constructed like a “mobile library,” where geography, art history, music, and philosophy intersect.

A nomadic professor, he taught in Egypt, Greece, the United States, Geneva, and at numerous universities around the world. These sojourns abroad—particularly in the United States, where he wrote Mobile (1962), a veritable kaleidoscopic portrait of the country—constituted the beating heart of his inspiration. Each country became material for writing, each landscape prompted reflection on language and perception.

IT IS IN THIS BACK-AND-BACK BETWEEN TEXT AND IMAGE THAT BUTOR INVENTED AN ESSENTIAL PART OF HIS LEGACY: THE ARTIST'S BOOK.

A prolific collaborator, he worked with hundreds of painters, engravers, and photographers—from Pierre Alechinsky to Joan Miró, from Jacques Monory to Antoni Tàpies. He theorized this practice in *Words in Painting* (1969), establishing it as a space for shared creation where the written and the visual mutually enrich each other.

Among these artistic encounters, his collaboration with the painter Bernard Alligand held a special place in his later years. Their close relationship, nurtured by correspondence and a shared fascination with Icelandic landscapes, gave rise to a series of unique artist's books, including *The Restoration of the Female Body* (2008), *Hexagons in Disarray* (2012), *Square of Meteors* and *Ruins of the Future* (2013), *In the Gardens of the Unicorn* and *Return from Iceland* (2015)... Their last major trip together, to Iceland in 2014 for an exhibition at the National Library of Reykjavik, symbolizes this fusion of geographical exploration and aesthetic pursuit.

Butor received numerous awards, including the Grand Prix de Littérature from the French Academy in 2013. But beyond the prizes, it is the scope and insatiable curiosity of his work that leave a lasting impression: a writing style that is always alert, receptive to the world's influences, intimate yet universal, constantly transformed by its dialogue with other arts and other places. He leaves behind a trace not of an isolated author, but of a tireless transmitter, for whom the book was at once a tool, an object and a territory without borders.