May 10, 2024
Marjane Satrapi, the award-winning French-Iranian graphic novelist and filmmaker, has been elected to France’s prestigious Academie des Beaux-arts or Fine Arts Academy which has only 63 members. Satrapi is the second Iranian-born personality to be elected to the Academy. Former Empress Farah Diba has been a foreign associate member of the academy since 1974.
Other foreign members include Sheikha Moza bint Nasser of Qatar (who joined in 2007), Prince Karim Aga Khan IV (2007), Woody Allen (2004), and 10 other cultural personalities. The Academie des Beauxarts is a French scholarly society created in 1816 in Paris and which brings together 63 members from nine artistic disciplines: painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving, musical composition, cinema and audiovisual, photography and choreography.
“I’m finally considered French,” she told the daily Le Monde. In 2021, she spoke of her special relationship with France. “France is my adoptive stepmother,” she told Paris Match magazine. “She has been kind to me, kinder than my own mother.
Many of the things that I was able to do in my life, I owe to France and to its generosity.” Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht. The only child of secular, Westernized intellectuals, she grew up in Tehran and attended the Lycee Francais until the age of 14, when her parents decided to send her to Austria to study, fearing that she might get in trouble with the authorities as she was already too outspoken to survive in the Islamic Republic.
Once in Vienna, she had a failed relationship which sent her into a downward spiral that led to homelessness and drug abuse. She returned to Tehran at 19, studied art, and, after a short lived marriage, moved to France in 1993. After completing a degree in illustration from the Strasbourg School of Decorative Arts, she moved to Paris where she has lived ever since, now with her Swedish husband, Mattias Ripa.
Satrapi is best known for her autobiographical graphic novel “Persepolis,” a graphic novel that chronicles her adolescence and young adulthood in post-revolution Iran and in Austria before she settles in France. Published in French in 2000, “Persepolis” is today considered one of the most successful graphic novels of all time.
Translated into English and at least 20 other languages, it has sold millions of copies worldwide. The book was subsequently adapted by Satrapi for the big screen, and the film was nominated for an Academy Award for best animated feature in 2007.
Satrapi continued to explore the boundaries between the graphic novel and the memoir with “Embroideries” (2003), an account of her candid conversations in Tehran with her mother, grandmother and other female relatives and friends about love, sex and men; “Chicken with Plums,” (adapted into a movie in 2011), the story of her great uncle, a renowned “tar” (lute) player who resolves to die when he cannot properly replace his broken instrument; and the illustrated children’s books “Monsters Are Afraid of the Moon” (2001) and “The Sigh” (2004).
She also directed “The Voices” (2014) and “Radioactive” (2019), a biopic about Marie Curie. In 2023, Satrapi, together with four Iranian and 13 non-Iranian illustrators, released a book titled “Woman, Life, Freedom.” Originally published in French, the book has been translated into English and other languages, and the Persian version of the book is accessible online.
