Nearly a year after David Lynch's death, the English publisher Frances Lincoln has released a magnificent, lavishly illustrated biography of the great American artist's life and work. A comprehensive and essential book. 

He died exactly one year ago, on January 16, 2025, a victim of the devastating Los Angeles fires. Ten films, a legendary television series, and dozens of short films, musical experiments, and pictorial works made David Lynch a unique artist, a master for several generations, whose surname has even become a common adjective: "Lynchian." His epic and mysterious life, also dark, has been recounted countless times. His influences have often been analyzed. There have been, and still are, many books about David Lynch. Some thirty in French alone, since Michel Chion's first monograph published by Cahiers du cinéma in 1992—that is, before the release of Lost Highway et Mulholland Drive, joining his most famous films and redefining his strangely unsettling style. Countless books have been published on Twin Peaks : in 2017, Brad Dukes "returned" there (Back to Twin Peaks, Huginn & Muninn) and Axel Cadieux "traveled" there (Journeys to Twin Peaks, Capricci); Guy Astic saw a laboratory there (Twin Peaks. David Lynch's laboratories, Deep Red, 2008), Hervé Aubron a season in hell (Twin Peaks 3. A Season in Hell, Capricci, 2017) and Léo Henry a rereading of Beverly Hills (Twin Peaks 90210, The Rules of the Night, 2018), while Mark Frost – the co-creator of the series – has reopened his archives (Twin Peaks: The Final File, Michel Lafon, 2018) and which was published The Autobiography of Special Agent Dale Cooper et The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (Michel Lafon, 2017). We could continue the list for a long time, and the same goes for Mulholland Drive, Lost Highway, And even Dune, , Blue Velvet, Eraserhead, Elephant Man ou A true storyLiterature about David Lynch fills the libraries, and this trend shows no signs of slowing down. Academic Nathalie Bittinger has just compiled his writings as a filmmaker into a fascinating book with an enigmatic title. "Keep your eye on the donut, not the hole!", recently published by Hoëbeke. We must also add, of course, David Lynch's own autobiography (The dream space, Le Livre de Poche, 2019) and the countless documentaries devoted to the filmmaker, the most famous of which, David Lynch: The Art Life, was released in theaters in 2016.  

And yet, despite this more than abundant material, the excellent British publishing house Frances Lincoln has released (in English) the definitive work that was missing on David Lynch, covering both his life and his films. Simply titled David Lynch: his work, his world, Its title is borrowed from the autobiography of another genius of his time, Henry Ford, whose memoirs My Life and Work were published in 1922. A complete, precise, and referenced biography, but also very enjoyable to read, written by veteran journalist Tom Huddleston (already the author of books on Dune, , Star Wars ou George RR Martin), the beautifully produced book – which also makes it a collector's item – is above all rich in illustrations. While there is much to read, and one learns everything there is to know, one also discovers rare photographs of the artist with the legendary haircut, as well as reproductions of his many inspirations. For example, a self-portrait by Oskar Kokoschka, the Austrian expressionist painter whose work David Lynch, who studied fine arts, sought in Salzburg. Another by Edvard Munch, whose unsettling and theatrical darkness seems to foreshadow the figures in the Black Lodge. One also admires paintings by Francis Bacon, which resonate vividly with shots ofInland Empire, Lynch's final feature film. Further on, there's an ocean of butterflies in the work of Jean Dubuffet, one of the filmmaker's favorite painters, evoking the overly perfect nature of Blue Velvet and encourages us to see beyond what seems apparent at first glance. These works, placed alongside David Lynch's life, allow us to understand the cultural environment that gave rise to this unique style, but also to decipher his films in a new light, situating them within a different art history, not strictly cinematic (even if classic Hollywood cinema remains a key source of inspiration for the filmmaker). David Lynch was a protean artist, and he is remembered primarily as a director, given his revolutionary impact on kinetic art. Yet, it was essentially to painting that he devoted the last years of his life. Reading this beautiful book and exploring its numerous illustrations, one might wonder if David Lynch wasn't, ultimately, a great painter whose most famous works were, perhaps by chance, films and television series.