The Stories of the Mona Lisa: An Imaginary Museum Tale About the History of Modern Art
Piotr Barsony
Language: English
Pages: 22
ISBN: B00FKYC3OM
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"Dad, will you tell me a story?" asks a little girl. "Sure," artist Piotr Barsony responds. "I’ll tell you a story about a painting. And the Mona Lisa, the most beautiful painting in all the world, will be our subject.” Thus begins the fascinating history of modern painting through what many consider the most famous work in the history of art: the Mona Lisa by Léonardo De Vinci. Piotr acts as the museum guide for his young daughter throughout the book, taking us on a journey through an imaginary museum. He describes famous art movements and artists, including: impressionism, cubism, expressionism, favism, minimalism, surrealism; Monet, Manet, Cézanne, Picasso, Bacon, Pollock, and more. All of the most famous painters of the modern and contemporary art movements are explained with their own Mona Lisa portraits, in their signature styles.
Throughout the book, Piotr acts as a guide, explaining to his daughter (and the reader) each genre of paintings in a clear, simple, and entertaining way. By the end of the book, we discover that he’s actually the artist who’s been painting all those Mona Lisas and the results are spectacular. The Stories of the Mona Lisa is the perfect book for any child who loves art, history, and a good story.
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why it was so different and why it announced the arrival of modern painting. He used to say that painting was like thinking with your brush.” “I understand it better now. Monet looked with his eyes, Van Gogh with his heart, and Cézanne with his mind.” “I guess you could say that, yes.” “This Mona Lisa is pretty. She’s covered in little dots!” “This is a painting by Georges Seurat.” “Did he have dots in his head, just like Van Gogh had waves in his?” “In order to draw all these thousands of
But to get back to Seurat, he was trying to find a link between art and science.” “Was he a researcher too, like Cézanne?” “I suppose so, yes. He was a researcher, but the important thing for him was that his painting be beautiful. There’s another very nice Seurat painting that you must have seen before. It’s called A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. It shows people walking along the banks of the river Seine and a pretty lady under a parasol.” “Now this one is a Fauvist Mona
wheel to a stool.” “But that’s not art!” “Duchamp didn’t want to make art anymore. He hated the word ‘artist.’” “Why? Why didn’t he want to be an artist?” “It could have been because he was upset at the bad reception he got for one of his pieces, Nude Descending a Staircase. He must have thought to himself: ‘They’re all dumb. I’ll show them what art really is.’ To help you understand his thinking, I’ll tell you about one of his most famous Readymades. Duchamp exhibited an upside-down urinal
“No, not really. Picasso had created a new kind of representation of the world, but his models were still natural. There were still faces, bodies, landscapes. As for Malevich, he painted using geometric shapes: squares, triangles, rectangles, circles, and crosses. Signs that were invented by humans. It was his way of placing man at the center of creation. Malevich called this movement Suprematism.” “Like God, the Supreme Being?” “Yes, and just like God, he was all alone. He was pretty much the
furniture. All of these screens are just part of our environment these days. There are artists who make videos, others who make installations with TVs and computers. Me, I’m more interested in the surface of things. The screen and the light.” “You’re like a Screen Impressionist!” “I hadn’t thought of it like that.” “I like your paintings. At night everything is reflected in them.” “Well, here we are at the end of our little trip. There are a lot of painters we couldn’t talk about here; it’s