Hugues de Montalembert

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Hugues de Montalembert (* 1943 in France ) is a French painter , documentary filmmaker and writer who lost his sight in 1978 in a robbery in his New York apartment.

Life

Hugues de Montalembert was born the third of seven children into an aristocratic family of officers from Normandy. His father Pierre Marie Charles François de Montalembert (1914-2009) was a retired Colonel in the French Army, his mother Yolande FitzGerald (1916-2011) was from Ireland. Hugues de Montalembert grew up on the estate, which has been in the family for 300 years. His youngest brother is the actor Thibault de Montalembert.

He studied law in Paris, but left the university in 1968 without a degree, instead of pursuing a career in the military or banking according to family tradition, and went to New York. In January 1970 in Florence he married the writer Idanna Pucci di Barsenio. The couple lived in Bali for two years before separating in 1974 and divorcing in 1979. It was not until 1976 that Hugues de Montalembert returned to New York from Benin , where he was working on a television documentary about traditional African religion. On his travels he made documentaries, including about the dancers Rudolf Nurejew and Margot Fonteyn and about war orphans in Vietnam, and occasionally sold some of his pictures.

On May 26, 1978, he fought against two burglars in his New York apartment in Greenwich Village . Due to the chemical burn of the retina with solvent, which one of the perpetrators sprayed into his eyes, he became completely blind immediately after the attack at the age of 35. He spent three months in St. Vincent's Hospital, where a corneal transplant was in vain, and another ten months in the Rehabilitation Center for the Blind of New York Association for the Blind Lighthouse in Manhattan to work with orientation and mobility training, training in daily living skills, and the Learning to use Braille to restore independence. He also learned to play the piano. A year and a half later, he traveled alone again for the first time, first to Indonesia, then to China, northern Greenland and in 1984 to the Himalayas.

He has published several books, of which À perte de vue was awarded the Prix Ève Delacroix of the Académie française in 1991 . His story became the basis of the 2005 documentary Black Sun (Original: Black Sun ), for which Hugues de Montalembert wrote the script. In his memoirs The Meaning of Life is Life , he describes the process of blindness and his efforts to find independence nonetheless. In several trips to Indonesia and India, he gained the sovereignty to travel unaccompanied and describes his inner perception of the world. After his blindness he also conceived a ballet at the Warsaw Opera .

He has been married to the Danish artist Lin Utzon, daughter of the architect Jørn Utzon , since 1992 . The couple live in Paris, Denmark and Mallorca.

Works

  • The meaning of life is life (Original: Invisible ). From the English by Anke Kreutzer and Eberhard Kreutzer. DuMont, Cologne, 2011, ISBN 978-3-8321-9645-5
  • Eclipse . 2006
  • À perte de vue . 1991
  • Eclipse: A Nightmare . 1985
  • The stolen light (Original: La lumière assassinée , 1982). SV International, Swiss publishing house, 1987, ISBN 3-7263-6498-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Los Angeles Times: Blind man in Paris creates visions (English), May 15, 2010
  2. ↑ Newsday: Despite loss of vision, artist, teen embrace life (English), April 21, 2007
  3. ↑ The Huffington Post: First Steps , January 24, 2010.
  4. ↑ Süddeutsche: Art and Life by Hugues de Montalembert , November 20, 2011.
  5. ^ Academie francaise: Prix ​​Ève Delacroix . Retrieved August 8, 2014
  6. ^ Frankfurter Rundschau: Meaning of Life: Dancing with All Senses , October 11, 2011.
  7. ↑ Newsday: Despite loss of vision, artist, teen embrace life (English), April 21, 2007.
personal data
SURNAME Montalembert, Hugues de
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French painter, documentary filmmaker and writer
DATE OF BIRTH 1943
PLACE OF BIRTH France