There’s something fairly addictive about Thomas Schlesser’s Mona’s Eyes (Les yeux de Mona in French). When you begin studying it, you can not cease, although nothing a lot occurs over the course of its 300 pages, and the 52 chapters all observe the identical sample. Written within the vein of Jostein Gaarder’s Sophie’s World (1991), a fictional survey of Western philosophy as seen by means of the eyes of a 14-year-old woman, Schlesser’s novel, a bestseller in Europe, presents a equally compact, usually exhilarating cruise by means of the previous few centuries of Western artwork.
Schlesser’s novel presents an usually exhilarating cruise by means of the previous few centuries of Western artwork
There’s solely the barest of plots. After the ten-year-old Mona suffers a short lived bout of blindness, her octogenarian grandfather, or “Dadé”, a former photojournalist referred to as Henry Vuillemin, springs into motion. Blind in a single eye himself, on account of an damage suffered in Lebanon, Henry can also be an artwork historian manqué. Involved that Mona would possibly lose her sight completely, he plans to “lodge in her reminiscence all that artwork supplied when it comes to magnificence and significance”. And so, each Wednesday afternoon, for a 12 months, he takes Mona to view a rigorously chosen murals within the Musée du Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay and the Centre Pompidou. (There’s at all times just one work, a rule towards which Mona, extra compliant than the ten-year-olds I’ve identified, by no means rebels).
Artwork historian within the making
Whereas Mona’s dad and mom consider that Henry is accompanying Mona to a baby psychiatrist (did they by no means ask why there have been no payments?), he’s turning her, one rigorously ready mini lecture at a time, right into a formidable artwork historian in her personal proper. Henry’s tour begins with Sandro Botticelli’s Venus and the Three Graces (round 1475-1500, Louvre), which he says reveals the fantastic thing about receiving items. His classes—in a way, Henry’s present to Mona—finish with Pierre Soulages’s Portray 200 x 200 (2002, Pompidou), 5 stable bands of black painted on a fibreboard panel: a reminder to Mona that black is greater than the absence of sunshine.
In contrast to Henry, his alter ego, Schlesser is a scholar, the director of the Hartung-Bergman Basis, a small museum in Antibes, France, and a professor of artwork historical past on the Ecole Polytéchnique in Paris. And so Henry’s lectures are awash in technical phrases, from “three-quarter view” to “barycenter” to “golden ratio”. Absolutely a problem for most kids, although not for the precocious and super-smart Mona, who’s each bit as inscrutable as her grownup namesake in Leonardo da Vinci’s portray (round 1503-19, Louvre). The reader breathes a sigh of reduction when, like different ladies her age, she asks for chocolate and vanilla ice-cream.
Who would blame Henry, then, when he forgets how younger his interlocutor is? He stops himself simply in time earlier than figuring out what feminine physique half he believes Georgia O’Keeffe is alluding to (regardless of the artist’s denials) in Pink, Yellow and Black Streak (1924, Pompidou). That stated, in any case, he’s by no means too anxious about Mona’s sensibilities. The subject of violated or endangered sight dominates a number of of his decisions, from the partly open useless eye of the slaughtered animal in Francisco de Goya’s Nonetheless Lifetime of a Lamb’s Head and Flanks (round 1808-12, Louvre) to the empty eye socket of the masks in Hannah Höch’s Mom (1930, Pompidou). Claude Monet’s hazy Saint-Lazare Station (1877, Orsay), painted with the lightest of brushstrokes, Mona thinks she will be able to really feel “the specter of blindness” that darkened this artist’s final years.
Essentially the most pleasant moments within the e-book occur when Mona factors out issues Henry has missed: she gives the precise variety of crows in Caspar David Friedrich’s The Tree of Crows (round 1822, Louvre) and finds the face of a gnome hidden within the sleeve of the girl portrayed in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s Relaxation (1905, Orsay). Maybe my favorite Mona remark is about Vincent van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers (1890, Orsay), which reveals, she jokes, the constructing’s butt (les fesses within the French authentic).
The choice by Europa Editions to cram the illustrations, barely greater than postage stamps, for the English-language e-book onto the fold-out mud jacket is a serious distraction. However one ought to be glad about small mercies: the French version had no visuals in any respect. For me, studying Mona’s Eyes over the course of every week grew to become a pleasantly reassuring ritual—the comforting affirmation that, irrespective of how complicated the world, how scary the long run, artists have at all times discovered, and can at all times discover, methods to pour their fears and hopes onto a number of sq. toes of canvas, a block of marble or a chunk of wooden.
Thomas Schlesser, translated from the French by Hildegard Serle, Mona’s Eyes: A Novel, Europa Editions, 300pp, 52 color illustrations (on fold-out jacket), £18.99 (hb), revealed 25 September Christoph Irmscher is a critic and biographer
