Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry

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Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (1942)

Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez or Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry (born April 10, 1901 in Armenia , El Salvador ; † May 28, 1979 in Grasse , France ) was a cosmopolitan painter , sculptress and author of Salvadoran origin, a personality in the artistic scene of the Golden twenties at Montparnasse and the muse of the French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (1900–1944), with whom she was married in third marriage. This made her the central figure of his most famous work, the philosophical and poetic fairy tale The Little Prince, symbolized by a rose .

childhood

The daughter of a reserve officer and coffee plantation owner from Armenia came from one of the wealthiest families in El Salvador, where she had a happy childhood and an excellent education in a Catholic school.

The golden twenties

While she was still studying art in San Francisco , which she continued at the University of Mexico City and the Academy of Fine Arts of San Francisco, she met her first husband, a young Mexican officer, whom she met at the age of 22 got divorced again.

In Mexico she had a love affair with José Vasconcelos, a married family man with two children, whom she followed to Paris . There the beautiful extravagant artist married the novelist , literary critic , newspaper correspondent and consul of Argentina Enrique Gómez Carrillo (1873–1927), whom she had met through the sophisticated fauvist portraitist Kees van Dongen . Carrillo was also a close friend of the Salvadoran cartoonist Tonio Salazar and the Nicaraguan writer Rubén Darío . Even Maurice Maeterlinck , Gabriele d'Annunzio and Paul Verlaine were among the cosmopolitan circle of friends who with other artists the omitted twenties of the Montparnasse coined where Consuelo according to the statement of the Colombian writer Germán Arciniegas as the "volcano of El Salvador" was designated " who sprayed his fire over the roofs of Paris ”.

After the death of Enrique Gomez Carrillo, Consuelo, financially independent and emancipated, followed in 1929, together with a group of French writers, an invitation from the Argentine President Hipólito Yrigoyen to Buenos Aires , where she turned to sculpture.

The muse

In 1930 , on the occasion of a cocktail in the salons of the Alliance Française in Buenos Aires , Benjamin Crémieux introduced the young widow, hungry for life, to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry , the aviation pilot and director of Aéroposta Argentina . He was so fascinated by Consuelo's charisma and her sparkling temperament that he kidnapped her with his plane and threatened her during the daring flight with crashing the plane and made her promise to marry her.

The marriage took place on April 22, 1931 in the town hall of Nice , the church wedding took place on April 23 in Agay. Consuelo encouraged her husband, who so far had only published two works and viewed his writing activity as more of a sideline, to continue and especially supported him in the creation of the autobiographical work Nachtflug .

She also devoted herself to her own career. Her painting style changed under the influence of surrealist painters such as Marcel Duchamp , Oscar Dominguez , Balthus , André Breton and André Derain , with whom she became friends.

Due to Saint-Exupéry's frequent absence and his numerous affairs, the marriage was extremely turbulent. Notwithstanding this, and despite several dramatic separations and reconciliations, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry always retained his deep love for Consuelo.

The occupation of France by German troops in 1940 meant a lengthy separation for the couple. Saint-Exupéry moved to New York, while Consuelo settled in Oppède in the Luberon with a group of architects - including the later famous architect Bernard Zehrfuss - and art students . The memories of this time appeared under the title Oppède for the first time in New York, where Consuelo had followed her husband at his request in 1942.

The Little Prince was created in New York in 1943 . In this work by her husband, Consuelo is omnipresent - both between the lines and in Saint-Exupéry's drawings: the volcanic princely planet is an allusion to her homeland El Salvador and her fiery temperament; she is the untamed fox, the mysterious snake and the delicate silhouette of the child who knows how to tell so beautifully. Above all, however, it is the so beautiful, unique rose that the little prince loves so much and tries to protect it with a glass hood, while the field of flowers that he discovers on his excursion to earth reflects Saint-Exupéry's infidelity and his doubts about himself Reflecting a broken marriage.

The following year, on July 31, 1944, just under a month before the German surrender in France, the machine controlled by Saint-Exupéry disappeared over the Mediterranean. In the meantime, wreckage has been found. Consuelo undeterred continued to write her weekly Sunday letters to her missing husband, who could no longer reach him. A year or two after his death, she wrote the memory book The Little Prince's Rose, published posthumously in 2000, translated into twenty-six languages, and published in thirty countries.

The post-war years

In 1945 she returned to France from exile in New York, where she lived in Paris and Grasse (Provence), continued her artistic career, cultivated the legacy of Saint-Exupéry and associated with Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso , among others .

Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez died at the age of 78 on May 28, 1979 in Grasse of an asthma attack. She rests, like her second husband, Enrique Gomez Carrillo, in the Père-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Saint-Exupéry's silver bracelet found in 1998

It was not granted to her to see the final clarification of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's fate, whose body could not be found. However, in 1998 fishermen lifted a silver bracelet out of the sea off the French coast between Cassis and Marseille . It is engraved with “ANTOINE DE SAINT-EXUPERY (CONSUELO)” and the name and address of Saint-Exupéry's two publishers in New York. Two years later, not far from the site, wreckage from the crashed machine was found on the seabed near the Île de Riou , recovered and formally identified on April 7, 2004 using a serial number.

Exhibitions

  • 2005: (October 1st to 17th): "Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, la rose unique du Petit Prince", Grasse
  • 2006: (June 17th to 25th): "Antoine et Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, un amour de légende", Paris, Parc Floral, Salon du Timbre et de l'Ecrit
  • 2006: (June 20 to November 30): Antoine et Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry: objets d'une vie, Caen, Mémorial de la Paix

Works (selection)

  • Oppède . Editions Gallimard, Paris 1945.
  • Sunday letters (“Lettres du dimanche”). Ullstein, Berlin 2003, ISBN 3-548-60380-7 (List paperback; 60380).
  • The little prince's rose. Memories of an immortal love ("Mémoirs de la rose"). Ullstein Taschenbuchverlag, Munich 2004, ISBN 3-548-26174-4 .

literature

  • Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: The Little Prince ("Le petit prince"). Rauch Verlag, Düsseldorf 2000, ISBN 3-7920-0027-X . [1]
  • Alain Vircondelet, José Martinez Fructuoso: The little prince was a woman. Antoine and Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry, a legendary love ("Antoine et Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry"). Kunstmann Verlag, Munich 2006, ISBN 978-3-88897-447-2 .
  • Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry: The rose of the little prince . Memories of an undying love. Diana Verlag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-453-21262-2
  • Paul Webster: Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry . The life of the rose of the "Little Prince". Ullstein Verlag, Berlin 2001, ISBN 3-89834-029-5

Movie

  • Anand Tucker took up Saint-Exupéry's stormy love for Consuelo Suncin Sandoval in the 1996 film "Saint-Ex". The main roles were played by Bruno Ganz and Miranda Richardson .

Web links

Commons : Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ quoted on the website Consuelo de Saint-Exupéry
personal data
SURNAME Saint-Exupéry, Consuelo de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Consuelo Suncin Sandoval de Gómez
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Salvadoran artist, author and muse
DATE OF BIRTH April 10, 1901
PLACE OF BIRTH Armenia , El Salvador
DATE OF DEATH May 28, 1979
Place of death Grasse , France