Every Picture Hides a Story

Cane, William and Gabrielle, Anna. Every Picture Hides a Story: The Secret Ways Artists Make Their Work More Seductive. London : Rowman & Littlefield 2023. Print.

First Sentences:

Each year 11 million people trek to the Louvre to gawk at the Mona Lisa. Many visitors clutch guidebooks in hand describing the painting. For some, it's the experience of a lifetime, one they'll talk about with friends and family for decades.

 

Yet modern researchers say that the vast majority of people will never recognize the hidden messages in this painting. That's because those hidden messages are subliminal.  

Description:

I picked up this unexpectedly wonderful art book because I wanted to learn more about Berthe Morisot, the woman painter featured in the hisgtorical novel, The Lost Masterpiece which I had just finished reading. She was considered the first female Impressionist artist, living in the 1870s and painting alongside Manet, Degas, Renoir, Cassatt, and other revolutionaries during their earliest days when their work were so radical, the artists were completely disdained and not shown at the famous Salon exhibition in Paris. I just wanted to view some of her paintings and understand more about her life.

 

First the book itself. It is printed on heavy, glossy pages which make the accompanying paintings for each artist appear as the highest quality. Each painting is crystal clear, allowing readers to see and easily understand the subliminal messages the artist portrayed in the piece. Details rendered so clearly help readers finally understand both the background and message behind the works.  

 

Second, the book covers a wide variety of artists, including short chapters on Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Caravaggio, Vermeer, Eakins, Degas, Klimt along with those artists mentioned above. And, of course, there was a section on Berthe Morisot, her life and works, and her possible relationship with Edouard Manet, the focus of The Lost Masterpiece historical novel. 

 

Third, the book is addicting. While I started out only wanting info on Morisot, I could not resist poking into the works of other favorite artists, captivated by the glossy paintings and soon engrossed in reading about the backgrounds of the artists' lives along with details about their most famous works. The authors' research into each artist is thorough and yet succinctly written to captivate readers with fascinating details without forcing them to slog through more than five pages for any artist.

 

I learned:

• The Mona Lisa's smile is fascinating because Da Vinci used scientific optics to change a viewer's impression based on what part of the painting the viewer's eyes focused on and what is seen out only of the corner of their vision;

• Several contemporary art critics considered Berthe Morisot the finest of the Impressionist artists. She created nearly 400 paintings; 

• Marie Cassatt, in contract to her reputation as a painter of domestic scenes of families, mothers with children, and other domestic scenes, was a fierce advocate for women's rights, rejected the institution of marriage, and had no family or children of her own. "I am independent! I can live alone and I love to work";

• Van Gogh based his startling use of bold colors after researching a book that proposed there is a psychological process at work in which when the viewer's eye perceives adjacent colors, it intensify the other colors, such as putting red next to green. (Also, his ear-cutting episode was a result of Van Gogh's manic personality after he several times threatened to kill his roommate Gauguin with a razor;

• Sargent's masterpiece, Madame X, scandalized the female model and her family by depicting her gown's strap as having fallen off her shoulder. Sargent eventually repainted the strap to be on her shoulder, but the damage had been done. Unable to show or sell it, Sargant kept it for himself for years.

• Klimt's father was a gold engraver, giving the artist a familiarity with this glittery material which later became an integral part of his paintings, such as The Kiss.

History after history brings these artists, their paintings, and their world vividly to life for even art novices life me. I was captivated and therefore read all the artists' chapters, learning a wonderful amount of fascinating information about works I was familiar with as well as those I knew nothing about. The accompanying glossy reproductions of these paintings made clear all the points the authors referred to.

 

Whether you are an art connoisseur or just someone interested in creative people and the works that made them famous, this is definitely the book for you to skim, study the paintings, or read cover to cover as I did. You won't be sorry, and it will bring you great pleasure whenever you encounter one of these famous pieces or artists again. 

[If this book interests you, be sure to check out:]

 Shapiro, B.A. The Lost Masterpiece

Historical fiction about the life and masterpiece of Berthe Morisot, one of the original Impressionists, as well as the struggle for a modern day woman who inherits this masterpiece to hold onto it against pressures from others who claim it. (Previously reviewed here.)

 Happy reading.

Fred

[P.S. Click here to browse over 480 more book recommendations by subject or title and read the introduction to The First Sentence Reader.]