‘The passionate love affair that triggered a revolution,
and the story of a remarkable woman living in extraordinary times’
– Gabriële
[ About Gabriële ]
The year is 1908, the height of the Belle Epoque, and a brilliant, young French woman named Gabriële, newly graduated from the most elite music school in Europe, meets a volcanic Spanish artist named Francis. Following a whirlwind romance, they marry and fall headlong into a Paris that is experimenting with new forms of living, thinking, and creating.
Soon after marrying Francis, Gabriële meets Marcel, another young artist, five years her junior. Soon, Francis, Marcel, and Gabriële are all three involved in a fervent affair that will change the course of art history and redefine the avant-garde. Surrealism, Dada, and Abstraction are among the new artistic practices and new ideas that emerge from this electric love triangle in the following decade, during which the Belle Epoque sours and the world descends into the devastation of World War I.
Francis Picabia, Marcel Duchamp, and Gabriele Buffet—the protagonists of this brilliantly imagined “true novel”—are vividly reimagined by the Berests. Moving between Paris, New York, Berlin, Zurich, Barcelona, and Saint-Tropez, Gabriële is as audacious, uninhibited, and unforgettable as its central character, the mercurial, pioneering Gabriële Buffet.
[ My Review ]
Gabriële is the superb new novel from the best-selling author of The Postcard, Anne Berest, and her sister, the acclaimed novelist Claire Berest. Based on the life of their great grandmother, Gabriele Buffet-Picabia, it is described as ‘an atmospheric, exuberant novel about love and sex, art and revolution, experimentation and creativity’. Gabriële published May 8th with Europa Editions and is translated from the French by Tina Kover.
In 2023 I was astounded by The Postcard, which was a phenomenal and very powerful novel based on the true story of the Berest family’s extraordinary history. Anne Berest and her sister Claire Berest have now teamed up to write about an earlier branch of their family tree, which included their great-grandparents Gabriële Buffet-Picabia and Francis Picabia. Their mother is Lelia Picabia and, growing up, the sisters were very much unaware of ‘the origins of her name‘. When Gabriële Buffet-Picabia died at the age of 104, neither were at her funeral ‘for the simple reason we didn’t know that she existed‘. As they began to research her history, they were to discover incredible stories about the life of Gabriële, their great-grandmother, who had almost disappeared from family lore through the cracks of time.
‘We had a sense that this woman, unknown and unremembered, had been an extraordinary individual. Unknown to us. Unremembered in the history of art…
And so we set about reconstituting the life of Gabriële Buffet, visionary art theorist, wife of Francis Picabia, mistress of Marcel Duchamp, close friend of Guillaume Apollinaire.’
– Anne Berest & Claire Berest
Gabriële was born in 1881and was a music student at The Schola Cantorum de Paris. Never one inclined to tread the expected path, her destiny was inevitable when in 1908, at the age of twenty-seven, she met the Spanish Impressionist Francis Picabia. He was an acclaimed and successful artist but was frustrated by the traditional restrictions of his craft. In Gabriële he discovered a like-minded creature, one who was willing to break convention, a risk-taker who channelled an inner strength and determination into everything that she believed in.
‘In September 1908, Francis Picabia loses his heart to a woman’s mind. He’s just met the most intelligent woman he’s ever known, one whose intelligence is ‘instinctive’ as opposed to ‘the kind one meets everywhere, in sophisticated gatherings, at concerts and in theatre boxes and conference rooms’
Gabriële had an opinion and an independent streak that was quite unusual for the time. Convention was a concept she abhorred and together they began experimenting with change, mixing with like-minded artists and individuals who were all interested in more cutting-edge ideas. At that time in Paris, the avant-garde movement was challenging traditions and introducing new styles and concepts. Gabriële and Francis thrived in this environment crossing paths over the years with Pablo Picasso, Marcel Duchamp, Guillaume Apollinaire, Tristan Tzara, Marie Laurencin and so many more renowned names of the avant-garde period.
Gabriële relished the conversations and late night debates that spawned from their meetings with other radical thinkers. Francis was inspired and they were happy in the early years but, as their family grew, Francis’ struggle with his mental health became more evident and Gabriële became his protector. She had sacrificed her musical career after meeting Francis and now, with small children, her ability to be available to everyone was stretching her both emotionally and physically. Gabriële and Francis were incidental parents. They shared a passion for each other’s minds but their children were only in the way of their hunger for this new world that they had readily embraced. As the years passed, their relationship experienced many fractures, but their underlying love for each other remained true. Their children, however, were cast aside and left to others to mind, as both were totally obsessed with their work, and the circle they mixed in.
‘The children are there. A mere statement of fact. They’re cared for year after year by an army of successive nannies with their hair in identical tight buns…
The Picabias never mention them. They simply aren’t a topic of conversation.’
The Picabia’s story is exquisitely reimagined by Anne Berest and Claire Berest. This woman, their great-grandmother was an iconic and influential woman who stayed in the shadows while devoting herself to promoting the work of others. She was a selfish mother, a focussed creative who did things her way as much as possible. Gabriële Buffet-Picabia was an extraordinary woman but also, I would imagine, quite driven and lonely. She appeared to be somewhat removed from society at large, fully immersing herself into her chosen world of artists and creatives, many who lived their lives against the grain. She rebelled against societal standards, defying conventions and blazing her own trail.
Littered with an almost encyclopaedic knowledge of who’s who, all excellently supported by research, Gabriële is an outstanding account of this uninhibited & fascinating individual. An extraordinary insightful and wholly immersive read, Gabriële is a powerful tale blurring the boundaries between fact and fiction. Skillfully written by two sisters, with an obvious personal interest in their family’s astonishing history, this striking interpretation of the life of Gabriële Buffet-Picabia is truly epic and ambitious. C’est magnifique!
[ Bio ]
Anne Berest’s first novel to appear in English, The Postcard (Europa, 2023), was a national bestseller, a Library Journal, NPR, and TIME Best Book of the Year, a Vogue Most Anticipated Book of the Year, winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, and runner-up for the 2024 Dayton Literary Peace Prize. It was described as “stunning” by Leslie Camhi in The New Yorker, as a “powerful literary work” by Julie Orringer in The New York Times Book Review, and as “intimate, profound, essential” in the pages of ELLE magazine.
Claire Berest is the author of the novels Mikado (2009), The Empty Orchestra, Bellevue (2016), Rien n’est noir, winner of the ELLE Readers Grand Prize, Artifice (2024) and two works of nonfiction, Class Struggle: Why I Resigned from National Education, and Lost Children: An Investigation in the Minors Brigade.
Tina Kover’s translations for Europa Editions include Anne Berest’s The Postcard, Antoine Compagnon’s A Summer with Montaigne and Négar Djavadi’s Disoriental, winner of the Albertine Prize and the Lambda Literary Award, and a finalist for both the 2020 National Book Award for Translated Literature and the PEN Translation Prize.
