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Darian Leader, Stealing the Mona Lisa, London: Faber & Faber, 2002. ISBN 0-571-21263-8. £10.99. (Reviewed by Simon Morris)
Books on paintings are two-a-penny, so that a book on the absence of a painting is unusual and maybe closer than the rest to the point of art. Artists are, after all, fascinated by the void, the big NOTHING, as recent exhibitions on the subject testify (see E. Carpenter & G. Gussin (eds) (2001). Nothing, Northern Gallery for Contemporary Art, Sunderland). There is a lot of something in an exhibition on nothing, there is a lot written about nothing and many people will travel the distance, make the journey to view nothing. As John Cage so clearly observed in his work Silence: `Every something is an echo of nothing'. So Darian Leader is prescient to examine the space left by the missing painting. His book starts with the theft of the world's most famous painting by a housepainter in 1911. Queues quickly form at the Louvre and viewers of the void take notes. Kafka and his friend Max Brod are amongst the people queuing to see nothing.
A perfect irony for any Lacanian, it was the mirror image that finally led to the discovery of the missing painting. In 1911, concern over conservation saw many paintings in public museums covered with a protective layer of glass. This had the disadvantage of creating a highly reflective surface, making the viewer acutely aware of their own gaze in the process of their visual engagement. One gallery visitor signalled his displeasure at this development by using the reflective glass on a Rembrandt painting to take a shave. Leader's book is full of wonderful anecdotes like these. Another personal favourite is the description of the Surrealist artist Max Ernst who, as a little boy, ran away to find the point where the railway tracks and telegraph poles converges.
The absence of the Mona Lisa was only discovered when an artist went to photograph a model doing her hair in the reflective glass. The space of absence itself did not register to the gallery guards but when the artist went to see the potential of the glass for making his own photographic image he found four iron pegs in the wall and the absence of the world's most famous painting was finally detected. Leader goes on to talk about how we don't notice something hidden when it is completely exposed. We look for something hidden in unexpected places rather than in our immediate field of vision. Which is why the housepainter was able to walk straight out of the Louvre with the painting quite obviously shoved up the front of his smock.
We understand that the act of looking is not the same as that of perceiving and I can't help but wonder if the mass act of staring at the void left by the stolen painting was a collective act of covering over the absence. The more people who looked, the more the space of emptiness was filled.
(the rest of this review can be found in JLS Vol. 1 No.1)
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