at weekends, and during the family holidays in Brittany. Paradoxically, these short moments of tranquility saw an explosion in his productivity. His painting became more and more obscure to the outsider, but he always left clues. It is by painting that he attempted to overcome despair, but the paintings themselves are desperate. He wrote about his painting Voici venir l'automne, 1961: "Only a touch of dark rose madder could warm up such a landscape of metal. The sharp blue of a pale clear sky; the steely hue of streams and roads; the trees chiseled by the hard frost: aIl this requires a bloody corpse. Let a hand with sharp claws tear from my chest this heart, red and hot, and throw it in the winter woods: now my picture is composed. It is right as it should be. It is to winter that my heart belongs." (Guy de Montlaur, Petits écrits de nuit.) A tragic episode affected Montlaur greatly in the summer of 1966. The vehicle in which he was a passenger, was involved in a road traffic accident with a young boy. Montlaur comforted the boy in his agony. The accident brought back to the fore all the unbearable experiences of the war. His paintings during August 1966 express his misery (Du sang sur la route, Cauchemar d'une nuit d'été, A la mémoire de ma tante, tuée à Ravensbruck). Montlaur had declared Paolo Ucello and Vassili Kandinsky to be his masters, this is how he described himself in 1971 during his exhibition at the Galerie des Editions Rolf Lutz, quai Voltaire, Paris: "He looks at the world with a somewhat skeptical eye because he knows that the utility of things doesn’t matter much. What really matters is the mysterious manner in which forms and colours organize themselves inescapably. Nothing is motionless in what he sees. He never stops marveling at what is being born under his hand. The only thing he knows is that he is the medium between the mystery which wraps him and this new painting he would not have dreamed of previously." (Guy de Montlaur, Petits écrits de nuit). Pierre Vintéjoux wrote in Le Figaro at the time of the exhibition at the Galerie Rolf Lutz: "Over the course of recent paintings, the lyrical verve, often unbridled by the past, has attained a rigour without lessening the liberty of expression that is dear to Montlaur. A