On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the Little Prince, a statue by the Norman artist, Jean-Marc de Pas, will be installed on Fifth Avenue, in the heart of New York. The mischievous little boy, hero of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novel, finds his native town.
Here is a little guy who does not age. A curious child who celebrates his 80th birthday this year. In 1943, in the midst of World War II, aviator Antoine de Saint-Exupéry moved to New York. From his place of exile, he publishes “The Little Prince”. A legend was born… and success is still there: even today it remains one of the most translated books in the world.
If the Little Prince only saw well with his heart, the details of Jean-Marc de Pas’s sculpture will be clearly visible next September in the heart of Manhattan. “We have to try to find the emotions of the same order that we have when we look at the drawings or when we read Saint-Exupéry’s book. All my tension, all my attention, as an artist goes towards this“, explains this second “dad” of the Little Prince.
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It is an invitation to have the look and the heart which rise
Jean-Marc de Pasat France 3 Normandy
In a few weeks the model will be cast in bronze before crossing the Atlantic, heading for New York where the novel was written and where the original manuscript is kept at the Morgan Librairy. At the end of 2020, theAmerican Society of French Souvenirs (responsible for preserving the memory of French soldiers across the Atlantic) decides to pay homage to the war hero that was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and to his universal tale. The project presented by Jean-Marc de Pas, already the author of a bust of “Saint-Ex” exhibited at the Air and Space Museum is retained. A Little Prince gazing up at the stars, his home. It will be installed on a low wall of the Villa Albertine, the cultural services of the French Embassy, on 5th Avenue, opposite Central Park.
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A slender, almost poetic statue, with human dimensions and near which passers-by can stand to look up at the sky together. And perhaps remember what Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “Loving is not looking at each other, it’s looking together in the same direction“.
