Turner

Rouve, whose real name was Pierre Ouvaliev, was a Slavic diplomat born in Sofia, whom Gary helped to escape into exile while posted in Bulgaria. Gary secured British nationality for him in 1948, allowing him to settle in London, where he began a career as a screenwriter and film producer — notably producing Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up in 1966.

A passionate admirer of the English painter’s work, this Turner – Étude de structures was the only book Rouve ever published. He was, notably, the brother of a major historian of modern art, Dora Vallier, a specialist in Braque, Le Douanier Rousseau, Kandinsky, Mondrian and Malevich. She left Sofia shortly after her brother, in 1950, to enroll at the École du Louvre.

Pierre Rouve was, twenty years before Paul Pavlovitch, Gary’s first “real” double. In 1955, Gary planned to publish L’Homme à la colombe, first in the United States, under the name of a certain Jack Ribbons. The project fell through, but Gary, back in Europe, sought a friend willing to sign an agreement to embody an invented Corsican-Italian author, Fosco Sinibaldi. He turned to Pierre Rouve, who agreed to sign the publishing contract in Gary’s place — but stipulated that his photograph not appear in the press kit, and refused to impersonate Sinibaldi in public.

Paul Pavlovitch would officially take on this role a few years later.