The forbidden "box of colors" or the pictorial temptation of Romain Gary

Romain Gary, a lover of painting and a collector, experienced a crisis of pictorial creation in the early 1950s, a bitter failure that revived the pain of a childhood renunciation. From Les Couleurs du jour, the pictorial imagination permeates his novels, leading him in Pour Sganarelle to take the opposite side of the Nouveau Roman, defending figuration against abstraction, at the risk of a caricatured vision of abstract painting as a cultural, inhuman and cynical counter-model.