THOMAS SCHLESSER Mona’s Eyes. Reviewed by Ann Skea

Art historian Thomas Schlesser brings 52 artworks to life in this fable-like story of a grandfather discussing art with his granddaughter.

Mona is a ten-year-old French girl living in Paris with her parents, Camille and Paul, and near to Dadé, her beloved grandfather, Henry Vuillemin. One day, while quietly doing her maths homework, everything suddenly goes dark.

As a funeral garb. Then, here and there, some flashes, like those bright spots that appear when you vainly stare at the sun from behind eyelids that are as tightly clenched as fists fighting pain or emotion …

‘Mommy, it’s gone all black!’

Mona was blind.

Frantic calls to the family doctor, an urgent visit to the hospital, then many questions and tests, all find ‘nothing there’. Meanwhile, Mona’s sight has returned.

Having run more tests, the doctor can make no clear diagnosis, so he suggests hypnosis (which Paul rejects), then weekly blood and arterial tests, eye tests, and a consultation with a child psychiatrist. He does not mention the possibility of a relapse, but when Henry, who is not ‘the sort to run away from questions, however dreadful they might be’, hears what has happened, he fears that his granddaughter may go blind.

Henry, who is a lover of art, lives in an apartment in which his art books are ‘piled right up to the ceiling’. When he sees Mona’s bedroom full of glittery knick-knacks and cuddly toys, ‘plastic jewelry’ and ‘cartoon-princess-style’ furniture, it horrifies him. There is a single beautiful painting on the wall (which he recognises as a Musée d’Orsay poster of Seurat’s Les Poseurs), but he can’t bear to think that the kitsch clutter is all Mona will remember if she loses her sight.

He imagines her living her ‘entire life in the dark with only the worst the world produces to draw on mentally, with nowhere for those memories to go. It was unthinkable.’ So, when Camille asks him to help out by taking Mona to a child psychiatrist, he comes up with a plan.

He wouldn’t take his granddaughter to see a child psychiatrist, no! Instead, he would administer a therapy of a totally different kind, a therapy capable of compensating for the ugliness inundating her childhood …

Once a week … he would go with Mona to contemplate a work of art – just one – first in prolonged silence, so the infinite delights of colour and line penetrate his granddaughter’s mind, and then with words, so she went beyond visual rapture to understand how artists speak to us of life, how they illuminate it.

Without revealing his plan, he gets Camille and Paul to agree that he will be in charge of this psychological therapy ‘without question or intervention’. So, he and Mona embark on this secret routine.

After their first outing, when Henry takes Mona to the Louvre and introduces her to Botticelli’s Venus and the Three Graces, Mona wants to know what she will tell her parents when they ask the name of the doctor she has seen. ‘Tell them he’s called Dr Botticelli’, says Henry, and mischievous Mona is delighted at the ‘naughty trick they were playing on her parents’.

Mona is a bright, cheeky, likeable little girl, and through Henry she learns to look closely at the art to which he introduces her, to learn from the explanations he offers, and to apply his lessons in her life. Thomas Schlesser, however, is an art historian who teaches at the Ếcole Polytechnique in Paris, and the heart of this book is the art, rather than the story of Mona, her Dadé, her parents, and her school friends, in which he embeds his insights and knowledge.

Over 52 weekly visits to the art galleries of the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, and the Beaubourg (Centre George Pompidou), Mona and the reader look closely at art by Botticelli, da Vinci, Titian, Poussin, Goya, the Impressionists, Klimt, Kahlo, Kandinski, O’Keeffe, Pollock, Basquiat, Soulages and many others. Each visit is given a chapter heading that suggests the lesson in life Henry wants Mona to learn: ‘Learning to receive’, ‘Respect humble folks’, ‘All flees, all fades’, ‘Know how to say “no”’, etc. Each artwork is described in detail and is illustrated on the inside of the dust jacket, but the reproductions on the internet are, of course, better, and the details that Henry and Mona discuss can be enlarged and studied.

Henry talks about each artwork and also tells Mona about the artists. Raphael, for example, became ‘a big star very young’, and ‘swore only by absolute perfection’. He employed others to help him and

‘would hire and train the best, considered them like brothers or sons. And then he would try out all possible formulas to obtain his pearly tones and reflective effects; he created vast frescoes, tapestries, had his paintings printed to multiply the images and circulate them.’

Henry is scathing about the crowds of visitors who pour through the galleries wanting ‘to gobble it all up in one go … not knowing how to moderate their dreams’. He and Mona will consider a ‘single work of art, only one’. Mona finds this concentration difficult at first and Henry’s explanations are sometimes too long for her. To ruffle him, she once cheekily put her fingers in her ears and closed her eyes, but he just smiled and ignored that. She soon begins to love their routine and she starts to notice small details, to see the landscape behind Mona Lisa in da Vinci’s painting, for example, and to wonder about the partially carved monkey behind the leg of Michelangelo’s marble statue of the Dying Slave freeing himself from matter. On one visit she questions Manet’s choice of subject matter – a stalk of asparagus – and learns about Manet’s attention to the ‘means of painting’ – the tiny details, the brushstrokes, the contrasting colours, the weave of the canvas. ‘Manet’, Henry tells her, wants to show that ‘life’s charm lies precisely in the almost nothing’, and when we pay attention to that ‘life brightens up’.

When Mona herself begins to worry that she might become blind and not see the colours of life – how the autumn leaves change from green to yellow – Henry takes her to see a panting by Georgia O’Keeffe. She sees images of the human body in the flowing colours, like the images she sometimes imagines in clouds, and she understands when Henry says that O’Keefe’s painting makes ‘the elements of the world melt into anatomical elements’ and those elements become the elements of world, so ‘The world is one flesh’, we are part of it, and the colours of life remain in the world.

It is not always Henry who explains the artworks. On their final visit to a gallery, Mona feels confident enough to offer her own interpretation of an abstract black painting by Pierre Soulages. ‘Seeing as it’s the last one, Dadé, it’s my turn’, she says. Then she watches for a long time as her grandfather loses himself in the work. Finally, she explains:

‘Soulages’ work is full of details. But they’re the details of the material, the details of the wood’s veneer, and those of the light that floats on the surface. And there are also those four white lines drawn with pastel. They’re like rays of light …

‘You must see what you want to see, too … Because each person must be left free …

‘There are plenty of images that are forming, but they’re in the mind of each person, and that’s what matters.’

This, too, is what Mona’s Eyes seems to tell us applies to all art. Schlesser, through Henry, may explain the works and suggest how they might offer a lesson about life, but the reader may not always agree with his interpretation. But for anyone who loves art, this book is a delight. There is pleasure in reading about familiar works, revisiting old favourites, and, perhaps, seeing small details never noticed before; and, in reading about some of the things that influenced the artists and made them choose a particular subject or materials, and shape them in a particular way. There is always the chance, too, that Mona’s Eyes will introduce readers to works and artists that are new to them, and offer the chance of finding new favourites.

Thomas Schlesser Mona’s Eyes, translated by Hildegarde Serle, Europa Editions 2025 HB 300pp $39.99

Thomas Schlesser discusses his book on the Mona’s Eyes website at https://monaseyesnovel.com/

Dr Ann Skea is a freelance reviewer, writer and an independent scholar of the work of Ted Hughes. She is author of Ted Hughes: The Poetic Quest (UNE 1994, and currently available for free download here). Her work is internationally published and her Ted Hughes webpages (ann.skea.com) are archived by the British Library.

You can buy Mona’s Eyes from Abbey’s at a 10% discount by quoting the promotion code NEWTOWNREVIEW.

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Tags: art history, blindness, Botticelli, French writers, grandfathers and granddaughters, Hildegarde | Serle, life lessons, Manet, Michelangelo, Paris, Raphael, Soulages, Thomas | Schlesser