Etienne Bouche

Étienne Bouche (born 1988, France) is a journalist. After studying at the Lille School of Journalism, he moved to Moscow, where he worked from 2013 to 2020 as a freelance correspondent, with a particular interest in geography, history, and the arts. He has also reported from several countries in the former Soviet Union, from Moldova to Uzbekistan. He is currently in charge of Russian news coverage at Courrier international. His essay Memorial in the Face of Russian Oppression (Plein Jour, 2023), dedicated to the memory of the repressions committed by the Soviet state, was a finalist for the Albert Londres Prize.

At the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, an entire room is dedicated to The Appearance of Christ to the People, a monumental painting known to everyone in Russia. The artist, the Russian painter Alexander Ivanov (1806–1858), devoted twenty years of his life to this painting, yet remained dissatisfied with it. This paradoxical patriot spent most of his life in self-imposed exile in Rome, where he harbored the ambition to lay the foundations for a genuine national school of art. As a resident at the Villa Medici, Étienne Bouche will undertake in-depth research on this obscure artist, little known outside his own country, whose obsessions reflect a quest for legitimacy and meaning.