LITMIR.BIZ

      Michel Montvert loves books. He was six or seven when he first leafed through an art album he had casually pulled off a shelf at home. With the old Blaupunkt radio humming in the background, he sat crossed-legged on a fading Persian rug, the large tome stretching across his lap. He would forever be transformed by the experience.

      “They were all there,” Montvert told me years later as we dined at Jo Goldenberg’s on Rue des Rosiers in Paris. “Titian. Botticelli. Michelangelo. Rembrandt. Van Eyck. Van Gogh. Corot. Gainsborough. Turner. Toulouse-Lautrec. Utrillo. Gauguin. Degas. Renoir. Monet. Cézanne. I couldn’t get enough. I was seduced by the interplay of light and color, awed by motion so deftly captured and frozen in space, inveigled by the lyricism and gauzy quality of impressionism, the precision of neo-Classicism, the refinement of the Venetian School, the probing intensity of portraiture.”

      There was one artist he kept revisiting, and one painting in particular among several strange works by an old master whose name meant nothing to Montvert at the time. Nor did the mysterious and exotic title of a legendary masterwork he found himself staring at and dissecting inch by inch for hours on end.

      “I was only a kid but I sensed that, unlike the other painters, this artist didn’t just replicate life. He imagined it,

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