Pierre Le-Tan

"His drawings must be read, and his words must be seen,” it was said of his work. But who was Pierre Le-Tan (Neuilly-sur-Seine, 1950 — Villejuif, 2019) really? Drawings, canvases, portraits, designs – the French-Vietnamese artist, considered one of the great illustrators of his time, covered them all. The son of a painter father and a journalist mother, for years Le-Tan collaborated with publications like Vogue Décoration, The World of Interiors, Harper’s Bazaar or Rolling Stone. At the age of 19 he signed the first of many covers he would produce for the New Yorker magazine. And the French Nobel literature prize winner, his friend Patrick Modiano, chose over 13 of Le-Tan’s drawings to illustrate the covers of his novels published by Gallimard. His delicate, elegant artistic language, part literature and part art, positions him as one of the great creators of the past 50 years.