Stealing the Mona Lisa:
What Art Stops Us from Seeing
By Darian Leader
Counterpoint, 187 pp., $26
In 1911, an Italian house painter exited one of the side doors of
the Louvre with a lady known for her enigmatic smile. Vincenzo
Peruggia had taken Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona
Lisa off the wall, slipped it out of its frame, put it under his smock, and
left. It wasn’t until over 24 hours later that anyone even realized it was
missing. And it wouldn’t be recovered until two years later.
The story of the painting’s disappearance is a fascinating one, from
the assumption that it was simply being photographed in the museum’s
annex to inadequate police investigations to the hordes of visitors who showed
up at the Louvre interested in seeing only one thing: the spot where the
painting no longer hung. In Stealing the Mona
Lisa, Darian Leader tries to explain why people would want to see that
blank spot and what this means about what and how we think about art. As
such, even though the story is gripping, Stealing the Mona
Lisa is really for art historians and psychoanalysts and not
the average reader.
Parts of it are extremely engaging. Leader argues, for example, that it
was the painting’s very disappearance that made it the sensation it remains today.
It was only in the absence of the image that the image saturated our culture: Loss
created value. However, the story and Leader’s theories surrounding it
are drowned in weighty references to Sigmund Freud, Jacques Lacan,
sublimation, castration, and the fear of what he calls the “dead stare.”
When people mock the art world, Leader states, they often ridicule
the exorbitant prices. To explain those prices, he writes: “It is not that
a woman is prohibited from us, creating a zone of emptiness, but that we
put the image of the woman into that space which has been produced by the
world of language. If Lacanians would refer to castration here, it evokes less
the woman’s inaccessibility than the gulf that separates ‘natural’ objects and
images from the symbolic universe. And that is why art is so expensive.”
Huh?
Of course, there’s more to Leader’s arguments, but that excerpt should
give you an idea. So instead I’ll give away the ending of
Stealing the Mona Lisa: The modest Peruggia hides the painting in
a trunk and returns to the Italian city where it was painted. He offers it to a buyer
for half a million lire, the buyer turns him in to authorities, and Peruggia
spends eight months in jail. And the Mona
Lisa returns to her spot on the wall, back in the public eye and imagination.
— Mary Cashiola
Strapless:
John Singer Sargent and the Fall of Madame X
By Deborah Davis
Tarcher/Penguin, 293 pp., $24.95
What becomes a legend most? Is it a Renaissance beauty portrayed, then
lost, then found, as in Leonardo’s Mona
Lisa? Is it a classical beauty rediscovered
but missing some of its parts, as in the Venus de Milo, the subject of Gregory
Curtis’ new Disarmed (Knopf)? Is it an
architectural beauty skewed, then rescued, as in the leaning Tower of Pisa, the
subject of Nicholas Shrady’s new Tilt (Simon
& Schuster)? Or is it a famous Parisian beauty captured on canvas, then
scorned by viewers, then embraced by viewers, as in John Singer Sargent’s 1884
portrait called Madame X, the subject of
Deborah Davis’ new Strapless?
Sargent may have posed Virginie Amélie Avegno Gautreau
unconventionally and outfitted her scandalously, but to the contemporary eye she
still cuts a formidable figure, an embodiment of feminine mystery and
drop-dead chic that carries very much into the 21st century. (Just ask the
crowds still seeking her out at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New
York.) That’s not the surprise in Davis’ comprehensive but compulsively
readable account. Prepare, rather, to enter the Creole world of 19th-century
New Orleans, the enameled world of belle époque Paris, the aestheticized
world of Dr. Samuel-Jean Pozzi, the academic world of traditional artist training,
the social-climbing world of America’s newly rich, and especially the world
of John Singer Sargent, his rise to fame and censure and greater fame, his
supporters and detractors, and his objects of affection (women and men).
Strapless requires no degree in art history
and no background in psychoanalytics, which makes it an entertaining
intro to every topic it touches.
— Leonard Gill
