In a notebook, on a scribbling pad, in the margin of a letter, on a paper tablecloth... these are sketched designs, rough diagrams or meticulous plans which express something fundamental: a thought at its moment of birth, a burgeoning which already contains a whole spiritual universe.
Darwin, Freud, Descartes, Goethe, Klee, Nabokov, among others, have all left these "thought pictures" illustrative of thinking in action, a word not yet formulated but intensely present.
The pure expression of an internal thought process, these images were not intended to be published. To observe them - something made possible by this collection - is to penetrate to the very heart of what is perhaps the origin of thought.
Jean-Christophe Averty
Kostas Axelos
Alfred Barr
Walter Benjamin
Joseph Beuys
Merce Cunningham
Charles Darwin
René Descartes
Alfred Dreyfus
Peter Fischli
Sigmund Freud
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Thomas Hirschhorn
Friedensreich Hundertwasser
Johannes Itten
Louis I. Kahn
William Kentridge
Paul Klee
Fritz Lang
Henri Langlois
Mark Lombardi
Jean Malaurie
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti
Dimitri Mendeleïev
Joseph Michel de Montgolfier
Vladimir Nabokov
Georges Perec
Raymond Queneau
Peter Rice
Paul Ricœur
Claude Simon
Paul Valéry
Iannis Xenakis
