Mona's Eyes Quotes

“The lesson is that one must ceaselessly, time and again, compose one’s being.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“fact, that’s what we learn from childhood: loss. Starting with the loss of childhood itself. We learn what it was by losing it, and we learn that we’ll lose everything, always. We learn that losing is the indispensable condition for feeling alive, for the intensity of the present. We think that growing up is about accumulating gains: gains in experience, in knowledge, material gains. But that’s a delusion. Growing up means losing. Living our life means accepting that we lose it. Living our life means being able to bid it farewell, at every second.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“she understood why her grandfather had taken her to the museum. That was the point of all those visits, from the start: for her to archive herself through the beautiful works he’d chosen for her, for her to archive mentally these treasures, and for them to remain forever her reservoir of colors and joys, should blindness catch up with her one day.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Vincent said something very moving on that subject, in a letter to his brother Theo in 1888. He wrote that ‘there’s nothing more truly artistic than to love people.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“collector at the time called Charles Ephrussi had commissioned Manet to paint a picture of an entire bundle of asparagus. The artist named his price at eight hundred francs. That might seem derisory compared with the millions just one of Manet’s paintings would be worth today, but it was a far from negligible sum. The average pay for a day’s work at that time was around five francs. Anyhow, Charles Ephrussi was so happy with the painting (now in a museum in Germany) that he sent a thousand francs to Manet! And the artist, with wit, ingenuity, and generosity, painted this extra asparagus on a separate canvas and gave it to the collector, along with the following note: ‘There was one missing from your bundle.’ Manet is urging us to see that there’s basically very little to see. It’s a simple asparagus, or a banal bit of table, and it’s a small burst of generosity that made him create a painting from it and give it away. But this painting tells us that life’s charm lies precisely in the almost nothing; if that almost nothing is present, life brightens up. Without these almost nothings that we overlook, things would only be what they appear to be. But with just a certain something, they suddenly become delightful. ‘Less is more,’ as the English say, with perfect brevity.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“I swear to you, on all that’s beautiful on earth.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: ‘It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“human nature, to be capable of great and beautiful things, must be ready to embrace the kindness of others, their desire to give pleasure, to embrace what it doesn’t yet have, and what it isn’t yet.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“and her partner, Ulay, decided to each start walking from opposite ends of the Great Wall, which is itself seen as a giant dragon by the Chinese. Ulay started from the east and Marina from the west, and they walked, walked, and walked some more until they finally met, after two thousand kilometers of exertion. There, at that junction, that meeting point, they hugged. And then they decided to split up as a couple . . . Their shared life was over. So, their reunion was,”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“1974, Marina Abramović appeared in a gallery, immobile and offered to the public, and in front of her there was a table with seventy-two objects of all kinds on it—flowers, photographs, knives, and even a loaded revolver . . . People were supposed to be able to do whatever they wanted with her; she was passive as a puppet. Until the moment when someone picked up the revolver, placed her finger on the trigger, and turned the gun on herself.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“You need to know that Marina Abramović is still alive and is one of the major artists of the 20th century. Born in Belgrade, in what was then Yugoslavia, she became a global star in the 1990s. We have her to thank for the flourishing of a new form of expression: performance art. Of course, performance art developed throughout the 20th century but really came into its own thanks to Marina Abramović.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“From your grandmother,” Henry explained. “‘Forget the negative, my darling; keep the light forever inside you.’ This very last sentence made such an impression on you that your subconscious absorbed it at the deepest, most intrinsic level; it formed and informed you, even down to the way you speak. To keep the light inside you, you effectively banish the negative . . . But from now on, Mona, you need to know how to say ‘no,’ okay?” “Yes, Dadé.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“And so that’s Louise Bourgeois’s lesson: know how to say ‘no.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“The “7” also reminded Henry of the (supremely mythical) age at which Basquiat had died—he overdosed at twenty-seven.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“he started off doing his art outside, in the street. He’s one of the pioneers of what today we call graffiti or street art.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“The crowd applauded. Who was Georges Perec? A writer Henry was fond of, and whose books were written under occasionally unfathomable lexical constraints. For example, he explained to Mona, Perec was the author of La disparition—The Disappearance—, a novel written entirely without the letter “e.” Hundreds of pages without a single word containing that vowel. And all to tell the story of a disappearance, itself a metaphor for the disappearance of the author’s parents, who had died in concentration camps. Mona set her grandfather a challenge:”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Well now I know why Mamie liked it more than anything else,” Mona concluded. “Because I remember what she said to me before disappearing: ‘Forget the negative; keep the light forever inside you.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“First World War had just started. And at first, he wanted to be a preacher. He had a very religious temperament. He then abandoned that vocation to dedicate himself to gazing at the stars, because he wanted to study astronomy.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“In 1963, the same year this Bride was created, a poet who was deeply committed politically, in the Resistance, and a well-known Communist, writes a line that corresponds exactly to the lesson Niki de Saint Phalle is giving us.” “Who is it? What did he say?” “He’s called Louis Aragon. And he writes this: ‘The future of man is woman.’” “Yes, sure, but Niki would’ve said: ‘The future of man is the Nana.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“He died young, drunk at the wheel in a car accident, in 1956. His United States was that of the Native Americans. Look: he has a rhythm, a beat, he’s almost dancing. Alcohol enabled him to come out of himself, to experience trance-like states. His way of painting has a shamanistic dimension to it.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Anyway, Pollock didn’t only have detractors. Not only did influential critics adore him, saying that he represented the culmination of art history, but he also had support among collectors and men in power.” “In what way?” “In the United States, after the war, much store is set on what today is known as ‘soft power,’ that’s to say, the power of culture, of symbols, of values. For many Americans at that time, abstract painting such as this could initially seem stupid, even offensive, particularly since Pollock had a volatile temperament, drank a lot, and leaned politically to the left, when the US had a right-wing government. But you see, rather than humiliate and ostracize Pollock, that government realized that it would be in its interest to promote him as the embodiment of the freedom and daring of the new continent: a kind of James Dean of art. It was an ideal way to differentiate itself from the old Europe and give the Soviets a good lesson.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Picasso was a voice for freedom and he was reduced to silence, much as the woman on the right holds her mandolin without playing it. That’s what the little frame is saying. You need to know that the Nazis detested Picasso’s art; they called it ‘degenerate.’ The Nazis thought that art had to depict human bodies with all their power and appeal; when Picasso paints a green and blue head with a pointed skull, or an armpit where a breast should be, they see it as an insult to the human race, contributing to its decline, its decadence, its deterioration.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Picasso painted some pictures that were fervently against war, notably a huge, very famous painting called Guernica, denouncing the massacre of ordinary people, civilians, at a market in Spain in 1937.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“It’s a style that was called ‘Cubist’ at the time, a style profoundly inspired by Cézanne, and which really began to make its mark from around 1910.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“And Picasso’s voice was among them. Spanish, born in Malaga in 1881, the son of an artist, he had first been an exceptional technician, gifted with a highly precocious pictorial mastery. ‘When I was a child,’ he would say, ‘I drew like Raphael, but it took me an entire lifetime to learn to draw like a child.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“But in 1918, Hannah Höch, along with Raoul Hausmann, do invent what’s called ‘photomontage’ (Mona repeated the word carefully), and she gives this process a highly political connotation. By cutting out and combining popular images from magazines, scholarly ones, and those from her personal archives, she’s not after mere innovation; she wants to destabilize our usual points of reference, shatter our way of seeing things, and their supposed unity.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“As you can see, this work is called Mother and depicts a pregnant woman. But Hannah Höch had two abortions when young, in 1916 and 1918. And as I said, Raoul Hausmann was a frequently cruel partner. On the one hand, he wanted to do away with family traditions, inviting her to be a free, emancipated woman. On the other, he wanted to live egotistically and possess her; she ended up fearing him so much that she only painted in secret, and stopped as soon as she heard him coming up the stairs.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Hannah Höch was linked to the Dada movement, which I briefly told you about outside the BHV, in particular the outrageous cabarets they would organize.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“Indeed, Magritte, when commenting on this painting, said that it was hinting at how leather boots are made: with tanned skin . . . There’s a macabre nod to that practice here. This Red Model is full of black humor.”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel

“artists in the movement to which René Magritte belongs, called Surrealism, were born at the same time as the first movies. And”
― Thomas Schlesser, Mona's Eyes: A Novel