En plein air - 1968

By perfumer Caren Roberts Jouissance Citrusy Unisex A citrus overdose grounded by earth and rain. Grass imprints on bare skin, underwear clutched in one hand, the soft touch of a stranger’s lips, Rohmer movies at La Cinematheque Française, the hedonistic thrill of cruising, typewriter keys cataloguing a litany of explicit details and the witching hour spent somewhere secret... We pieced together En Plein Air from fragments of Catherine M’s world. Though Catherine Millet is best known for her erotic 2002 memoir The Sexual Life of Catherine M, she has another life in the art world. As the editor of Art Press – a magazine she co-founded in 1972 – she inhabits a place among the French intelligentsia. Art, sex and hedonism alike are approached in her writing with an intellectual sense of detachment, an apparent affectlessness that hides a girlish need to belong. The community she finds in the incongruous worlds of art and group sex ultimately lead her towards a reconciliation of the physical and spiritual.