“There are lots of Mona Lisas here, and this time they’re pretty!”
“These were painted by Andy Warhol, a New York artist.”
“Why are they all the same?”
“Warhol was the first American artist to paint in a way that ignored all European influences. The United States was a society of consumerism and mass production. Warhol used this idea and called his studio The Factory. He used a machine to print his paintings manually, which allowed him to produce series of the same image. This process is called screen-printing. I’ll draw a little diagram to help you understand.”
Factory → Workers → Machine → Products Factory → Painter → Screen-printing ← Picture
“So, we’re not really talking about painting anymore?”
“It is still like painting, because when he printed his photos onto the canvas, he did them one after another, causing the images to fade bit by bit. This meant that each Mona Lisa was slightly different. After that, he colored them. He printed Mona Lisas, Coke bottles, Campbell soup cans, and movie stars like Marilyn Monroe.”
“He put cans in his paintings as though they were art?”
“Yes, and the Mona Lisa as though she was a consumer product. By printing his photos like this, he was working in a similar way to Marcel Duchamp. He was producing Readymades. His work was different from Duchamp’s though, because it was mass-produced.”
“I don’t really understand.”
“Duchamp believed that the act of repeating something, starting the same thing over again, created taste.”
“Taste?”
“Seeing something over and over again is what makes you decide whether you think it’s beautiful or ugly; it’s called aesthetics. Duchamp didn’t want his Readymades to become aesthetic objects or works of art. He deliberately limited the number he produced. They were there to provoke thought and nothing else. Warhol did the same thing as Duchamp but in mass-production. In this way, he created a new kind of aesthetic.”
“How did he come up with the idea of painting Campbell’s soup cans?”
“He loved this brand of soup. Once he was eating with his mom …”
“He lived with his mom?”
“Yes. So, during lunch, he asked her:
WARHOL: Mom, what do you think I should paint?
HIS MOM: Paint these soup cans, Andrew, you know how much you love this soup.
She was getting a bit tired of all the questions her eccentric son would ask her. Andy Warhol got up and quickly left the table.
HIS MOM: Aren’t you going to finish your soup, Andrew?
WARHOL: No, I’m going to paint it.
HIS MOM: Don’t forget to call if you’ll be home late!
Warhol: Yes, Mom.
For Andy Warhol, fame was the very definition of beauty. And because America had so many stars and famous products, he decided to put them down on his canvas. By treating popular icons as works of art, he became one of the major figures of what would become known as Pop-art.”
“This one looks like a cartoon.”
“Yes, the painting process is similar to that of cartoons, with black outlines filled in with bright colors. This Mona Lisa is by Roy Lichtenstein, an American painter. Like Warhol, he reproduced magazine images onto his canvases, but he actually painted them by hand. The tiny dots that you see are like a blown up version of a printed image.”
“Is he a Pop-artist too?”
“Yes. It was his son who gave him the idea. His son was reading Mickey Mouse one day and asked his dad whether he was that good at drawing too. That’s how Lichtenstein began reproducing magazine images.”
“This one makes my eyes hurt!”
“This is an Op art Mona Lisa.”
“Op?”
“It comes from the word optical. It’s art that uses optical illusions.”
“Like Seurat with all his little dots?”
“Yes, I suppose you could say that Seurat was the first person to take new notions of perception and apply them to his art. He wasn’t trying to create visual confusion though—quite the opposite in fact—but that is exactly what the op art artists were trying to do. Victor Vasarely, a French artist born in Hungary, was a key figure in this movement.”
“Why did they want to cause visual confusion?”
“To ask questions. Think of a fly, or maybe a cat; they have a different kind of vision than we do. Maybe the world you see is just an illusion.”
“Let’s go back to France.”
“I thought we were done with France.”
“In the 1960s, a French art critic named Pierre Restany brought together several artists and elaborated on his theory of New Realism. It was a way of resisting the power of America.”
“This Mona Lisa is all ripped up though.”
“This is by Jacques Villeglé, what we call a found-object artist. He would walk around the streets collecting old bits of posters. There are lots of layers, old ones under new ones, and he saw these as being like layers of time. Another artist, sculptor Pierre Arman, piled cars on top of each other and embedded them in concrete. He could compile all sorts of things like watches, glasses, and so on. Another of his friends, Cesar, who was also a sculptor, compressed cars into cube shapes.”
“Weren’t there any painters?”
“Yes, Yves Klein, for example. He lived in Nice, by the sea in the south of France. He loved the blue of the sky so much that if a seagull flew across it, it made him really angry. He thought that the white line polluted the sky. So, he set about doing paintings that were entirely blue.”
“Just blue, on its own?”
“Yes, we call it monochrome—just one color.”
“Everything Malevich did was white.”
“He lived in Russia, where everything is white in the winter. Yves Klein invented a blue that he called IKB (International Klein Blue), like a brand name for an industrial product. To get back to Restany’s definition, New Realism is a poetic recycling of urban, industrial, and advertising reality.”
“So, did they manage to beat the Americans?”
“No, but they did get some international acclaim, and Arman became a very important sculptor. And he moved to the United States.”
“Was it hard if you didn’t live in America?”
“Well, where does Superman live?”
“In America!”
“This Mona Lisa is just an outline. There isn’t anything there!”
“This is a piece of minimalist art by the artist Joseph Kosuth. Minimalism was a movement that was a reaction to Abstract Expressionism and to the abundance of brightly colored images being created by the pop artists.”
“Why do they always want to do the opposite?” “It’s a way of moving forward, of searching, existing, making yourself known.”
“Like trying to be fashionable?”
“If you like, yes. The Minimalists made no distinction between the object on display and the space in which it was displayed. Those were the two things that made up the work of art.”
“I don’t get it.”
“Let’s make up an example of a minimalist work of art. On top of the floorboards, going in the same direction, I build a rectangle and fill it with water. Everything will be reflected in it. I’m changing the perception you have of the floor and of the room. The work shows the place, and the place shows the work.”
“Can you give me another example?”
“You can do the same thing with light and with structures. Minimalism is one of the important origins of modern sculpture and conceptual art.”
“Conceptual?”
“Conceptual art, in broad terms, can be described as an idea. Look at this Mona Lisa.”
“But it’s not a Mona Lisa. It’s a word!”
“Yes, the word ‘smile.’ And so the Mona Lisa is … ?”
“She’s smiling.”
“When you write the word ‘smile’ on a canvas, it’s like you’re creating a conceptual Mona Lisa.”
“It’s easier to understand than painting. So, Dad, what is ‘laugh’ the concept of?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s The Laughing Cow!”
“Not bad!”
SMILE
“This Mona Lisa is blurry, but I still think she’s pretty!”
“This is a German painter, Gerhard Richter. He paints most of all from images, magazine photos, and newspapers. By blurring the photos, he jumbles up their message.”
“What message?”
“What the images were trying to say to us.”
“What’s the difference between an image and a painting?”
“Images explain or sell things. They are a tool that promotes a person or a product. They are aimed at as many people as possible. A painting, though, acts from the inside. It’s more intimate; it only speaks about itself. And everyone who looks at it sees something different. It’s the opposite with an image, where everyone is supposed to see and understand the same thing. The message is: ‘Vote for me, buy me.’”
“Do you prefer paintings or images?”
“I don’t look at them in the same way. As I just said, images and paintings have different functions, but sometimes the borders between them are a little blurred. Gerhard Richter uses this blurring to shake up the intention behind an image and turn it into a painting. This isn’t the only kind of painting he does though; he also paints abstract and figurative works of art. Painting is all he needs in life; everything else is just words.”
“What do you think of this Mona Lisa?”
“It’s not like the others.”
“This one is by Jean-Michel Basquiat, a young American who started by painting walls in the street. It’s what became known later as street art, or urban art.”
“But he wasn’t allowed to do that!”
“He did it anyway. If you look carefully at his paintings there are streets, cars, housing blocks, and roads at right angles. It’s New York, his city. Basquiat was a musician. His pieces are like a kind of strange sheet music. If you want to listen to the music of New York, you just have to look at one of Jean-Michel Basquiat’s paintings.”
“What kind of music was it?”
“All genres of African American music, except maybe disco. Basquiat was the first major African American artist to become famous internationally.”
“There were no African Americans in big positions before?”
“Today we have an African American president in the United States, Barack Obama, but not too long ago this would have been unimaginable. Almost like science fiction.”
“How did Basquiat become such a big painter?”
“Thanks to his talent, first of all, but also thanks to one particular meeting. When he was selling his drawings in a restaurant one day, he bumped into Andy Warhol, who bought them all. The two developed a great friendship and had a lot of admiration for each other. They even did some paintings together. Warhol was convinced that this young man was going to become the biggest artist of his day. He was proud to pass the torch down to him. Unfortunately, Basquiat died of a drug overdose at the age of just twenty-seven.”
“Like a rock star?”
“Exactly. Basquiat was one of painting’s first stars. He was young, handsome, and famous.”
“This Mona Lisa was drawn by Keith Haring, who also got his start as a graffiti artist.”
“Like Basquiat?”
“Yes, they were great friends. They met at Club 57, a night club that was a meeting place for the young artists on the New York scene. Musicians, painters, and so forth. Like Basquiat though, he died very young.”
“Because of drugs?”
“No, he died of AIDS. Today, if you look around the walls of our city, you can see graffiti and tags. Some of these artists, the best ones, will move from city walls to art galleries and onto fame and celebrity.”
“I like this Mona Lisa a lot! It’s like a box of colored pencils.”
“You’re right; it makes you think of childhood. This is by Robert Combas, a French painter who is inspired by popular imagery: cartoons, signs, kids’ drawings. Behind a figurative appearance hides an abstract painting. Looking back, I think that all I do is abstract paintings, but then I add flowers, a house, Dad, Mom, everything that reminds me of my childhood. Combas belonged to the movement called Free Figuration, which was given its name by Ben, a French artist who writes funny sentences on canvases. For example: Nothing to say, It’s just art …”
“One of my friends had a pencil case with one of Ben’s sentences on it …”
“Which one?”
“I’ve forgotten.”
“‘I’ve forgotten?’”
“No, I mean I’ve forgotten!”
“Oh, I see! ‘I mean I’ve forgotten?’”
“No!”
“Because of these sentences, which we see everywhere and recognize by their graphics, Ben has become a brand, like Adidas or Nike. By poking fun at art, artists’ egos, and the art market, he actually tells us a lot about our current time and all of its vanities.”
“What’s an ego?”
“The ego is the ‘me, I’; the ridiculous side of many of today’s artists.”
“What about you, Dad? Are you ridiculous too?”
“I hope so!”
“This is an Internet Mona Lisa.”
“I see lots of little squares.”
“Those are what we call digital pixels. It’s a Mona Lisa done on the computer. This marked the beginning of the future. Leonardo da Vinci was around when the printing press was starting its life, a discovery that was just as important then as the Internet is today. We are in the midst of a new Renaissance. An artist in Africa can talk to an artist in New York City, who in turn can communicate with an artist in China. Borders are disappearing. Globalization and instant communication are shaking up the art world. The network and the web have become a canvas for artists. The art market will be greatly changed by this invention. You just have to look at music, for example, and see what a huge impact digital downloads have had on the CD market.”
“I love this Mona Lisa. She shines in the dark!”
“This one’s by a French artist called Piotr Barsony, who was born in Toulouse, France.”
“I think I know him!”
“You’re right. I painted this one myself. It’s so shiny that you can see your reflection in it.”
“So, whoever is looking at it is in the painting too?”
“Yes. All he or she has to do is smile and they become the Mona Lisa too.”
“How do you make it so shiny?”
“I paint on transparent polyester, mostly using a paint gun, an airbrush, or sometimes a regular brush. This technique allows me to give off a light similar to the light that comes off a television or computer screen.”
“Do you like that kind of light?”
“Do you remember the song I wrote about the TV? The chorus went like this: ‘Without images and without noise, like a moment of clarity, how beautiful, how beautiful a TV is.’ My inspiration came from this piece of light-up 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 hard to look at everything at once. But I hope that this story has helped you learn how to think about painting.”
“You mean look at painting!”
“Look, think, understand, enjoy contemplating a work of art. That’s what I’ve tried to teach you. If not, you’re like someone who doesn’t know how to read, who can marvel at the calligraphy when looking at a manuscript, but is too ignorant to
understand what is written. In modern art, everything is expressed; the best and the worst. That’s the price of freedom. There are lots and lots of snobs out there, but also some rare artists who tell us a little something about our moment in time and who can help us better understand it. Now it’s your turn to do your own research and, who knows, maybe one day I’ll come into your studio to admire your work.”
“I think that when I grow up, I’m going to be a singer.”
“A singer?” “Yes, because they get to wear nice dresses.”
“That’s a good enough reason.”
The Stories of the Mona Lisa Page 3
