Thomas Schlesser: What is ambitious for us is not necessarily ambitious for a child [WYWIAD]

“Mona’s Eyes” (Wydawnictwo Literackie) is a story about 10-year-old Mona, who is at risk of losing her sight. Grandpa decides to explore the world of art with her. For 52 weeks, every Wednesday, they go to the museum to admire, move, discuss and learn from each other about what is most important in life in front of a carefully selected work of art. Anna Kowal () talked to the author.

Anna Kowal: I am a mother of two girls, so I will start with a question: how to talk to children about art?

Thomas Schlesser: In my book I try to show that it is primarily about parallel education. Here we have a specific relationship between Mona and her grandfather, and this learning takes place parallel to school. It’s quite a casual relationship, where you can use your imagination. The book is also based on the fact that there is an equal relationship between Mona and her grandfather. Henry always takes Mona’s comments seriously, even if they are absurd or very naive. He wonders what might be hidden behind this naivety of the question, he looks for meaning in it. Of course, it can also be done differently, but this allows us to avoid a vertical relationship, which may be uncomfortable for the child.

It is good to start with “high art”, e.g. a visit to a museum, or perhaps a mural seen on the street can be a starting point for a conversation?

It seems to me that it is difficult to talk about ambitious and unambitious art here. To an adult, a work of abstract art may seem ambitious because that person’s culture, education taught them that art was first figurative art, and then gradually in the 20th century abstraction emerged for conceptual and philosophical reasons. However, to a child, such a play of colors and forms, expressed in a quite casual way, may seem simple. So what is ambitious for us is not necessarily ambitious art for a child. We must also remember that each child is different and has different sensitivities. A child is also not the same between the ages of five and 10. So, first of all, you should listen to your children.

What about children’s interpretations of art? We know that it can be simple, sometimes naive… Should we let the child develop it or “straighten it” in some cases?

I think you should never criticize someone who shows freedom of thought. It is thanks to this freedom that civilization has progressed. I am very attached to freedom as the highest value, especially since we live in a world (I am talking about the entire planet) where freedom is disturbed practically everywhere. For example, freedom of conscience is really under threat today. This is the first rule. We should not go to the other extreme, which is to admit that this work has open meaning. Of course, it is the work of a specific artist, it fits into a specific context, a specific vision of the world. It seems to me that such a correction or rather reorientation of thinking is okay, but children need to be taught one by one. It should also be remembered that a child may give the impression that he did not understand or listen, and years later, after puberty, those seeds that are planted suddenly bloom and their flowers are huge and amazing.

Thomas Schlesser in Poland promotional materials – Wydawnictwo Literackie

Have you ever looked at a well-known work completely differently after a casual comment, e.g. by a child?

I have such a memory. These are the abstract works by Hartung mentioned above, who is a very important artist to me and I deal with him professionally. [autor jest prezesem Fundacji Hartung-Bergman – red.]. These are colorful works by the artist from the final period of his life. I once witnessed how they brought great joy to a child. Then I realized that these were euphoric and enthusiastic works, even though they were created just before the author’s death.

Is admiring art a form of therapy for you?

In answering, I would like to distinguish between the content of the book and my personal view. The book can, or even should, be read this way. However, I know many sick people and doctors – people who want to be cured and people who want to cure them. Suffering and illness are very serious issues, too important to pretend that art has therapeutic values. It seems to me that art cannot heal. However, it can be comforting – this is a weaker word, but it is also very valuable.

Now I would like to refer to topics that are very important from my, but also, I think, social perspective – mental health and disability. Disability appears in the book, its coming is very real, but adults do not prepare Mona for it, no one accustoms her to the situation. Is this a way for adults to escape from a topic they cannot come to terms with?

Exactly. The problem with disability is that we don’t see it well in society. It’s quite natural, because everyone is afraid of it, it’s a very painful problem. I included a metaphor for this taboo in the book. Parents do not have the courage to ask doctors what will happen next. They feel blocked. This is what I would like to emphasize very strongly, a metaphor for the general taboo in our society. I professionally deal with disabled people in the foundation I run. This topic is particularly important to me, and since I am an art historian, I set myself the challenge of how to make art visible to blind people. I know this challenge may seem a bit absurd to some.

I really wanted “Mona’s Eyes”, which talks about vision problems and blindness, to be available also to visually impaired people. So that they too can learn about the history of art through this book. That was crazy. I am very pleased that the book has been translated into Braille and, of course, is also available as an audiobook. We organized a wonderful meeting with the French Minister of Culture in the so-called National Institute for the Blind, where I could talk to visually impaired and blind people about this book. It was an emotional meeting, and the fact that I made the book “Mona’s Eyes” accessible to blind people is the proudest moment of my life.

Mona Lisa – billboard in Paris Agencja Wyborcza /Shutterstock

This explains the book’s incredibly detailed descriptions of images and poetic language. However, I would like to return to the topic of mental health. I feel that this is also an area that is taboo and I really missed Mona’s visits to a child psychiatrist in the book…

This is supposedly true, but even if Mona does not go to a child psychiatrist, her relationship with her doctor tends towards hypnosis. Of course, this is not the analysis of a specialist in psychology or child psychiatry. However, using hypnosis, Mona gains access to deeper areas of her subconscious. It’s a bit as if this made her realize, albeit indirectly, the importance of psychology.

I sometimes encounter accusations that a book is anti-psychological or anti-psychiatric. I’m very sorry if anyone gets this impression because I personally truly believe in the importance of psychiatry as a branch of medicine. I went to doctors for years. This is a big problem and challenge when it comes to health, at least in France.

And maybe finally. The way I talk about hypnosis is novelistic. I know that hypnosis, especially with children, doesn’t work exactly like that, but it’s fiction.

The novel was written over 10 years. A lot has probably changed in your life during this time. Can we also find traces of these changes in the book?

Yes of course. I started writing this book when I was about 35 years old. At that time I was going through many very painful, personal experiences and I invented Mona to bring me relief and comfort. I knew from the beginning that it would be a book about loss, the loss of life, the loss of loved ones, the loss of objects as well, there are objects lost and found, but above all, this book is about the loss of childhood. About the transition between the ages of ten and eleven, when we enter another continent, i.e. adolescence, and childhood is left somewhere behind.

This is a book filled with melancholy. Over the last eleven years – although I am a rather cheerful and joyful person – my melancholy has unfortunately deepened and been more and more present in my life. So, if something changed while writing, it was because I wanted to deepen certain elements that were in the book from the beginning.

I wrote it for ten years, sometimes even abandoning it for two or three years. When I returned to the book after a long break, I read the earlier part with fresh eyes and it seemed to me that it was okay. I rarely corrected a text I had already written. Maybe that’s why I never finally abandoned this story and this way I was able to finish it.

I’m very glad that you mentioned saying goodbye to childhood, because after reading the book I was wondering how you could combine so much beauty with such a sad story about an extremely sudden and unpleasant separation of childhood…

Maybe now it’s time for a personal touch from me. I was not a very intellectually developed child. I wasn’t stupid, but I wasn’t particularly developed either. In junior high school, I was a very bad student. I started developing quite late, only around high school leaving exams. However, I was a very emotionally developed child. I understood the feelings of the people around me and that started at an early age. When I was ten years old, in the summer of 1988, I realized that I was losing my childhood, that it was already behind me. I felt that it was a wonderful paradise – because my childhood, although not always perfect, was happy – from which I was saying goodbye. When I got to middle school, maybe life was different, I was more worried and restless – it hasn’t changed since then. The anxiety no longer left me.

If we are talking about happiness and anxiety… is the beauty that the novel’s characters surround themselves with to compensate for the misfortunes that befall them?

Unhappiness, melancholy and loss are inherent parts of happiness. If there were no loss, if there were no melancholy, we would remain in a state of superficial joys that would not be satisfying. Beauty, experiencing various emotions, is even more amazing because it is combined with great admiration, smiles, as well as a full sense of our sensitivity and feeling the past. So, even though this book has melancholic elements, this melancholy actually gives meaning to life. This is amazing and intense. We live for this intensity, and those who don’t live for it probably don’t know what they’re missing.

Mona Lisa in the Louvre in Paris Photo REUTERS/Pool

I was captivated by the relationship between the granddaughter and the grandfather. Why did their shared admiration of art, which had brought them so close to each other, end so suddenly?

For purely literary reasons. I wanted there to be a tragic necessity, a threat to Mona. I assumed that in this tragedy there would be a unity of place, i.e. Paris, three acts – the Louvre, the D’Orsay Museum, and Beauborg, and a unity of time, i.e. 52 weeks. In other words, it was a formal, literary device. It would be possible to write this book completely differently, to include the whole world in it, to describe it in a more contemplative way, but then we would lose the dynamics, the necessity that determines the quality of the story’s ending. It couldn’t exist if it were less closed, more fluid.

Can we look forward to another novel that combines the world of art with everyday life?

Yes. I’m writing a novel that is – you could say – a cousin of “Mona’s Eyes”, so it won’t be about the same thing, but it will be a bit similar. But this will not be a continuation of “Mona’s Eyes”, although of course, there is still a lot to tell about this relationship you mentioned… However, please remember that since it took me ten years to write “Mona’s Eyes”, so perhaps I will write The next book will take twenty years…

Thomas Schlesser – art historian, director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation, lecturer at École Polytechnique and author of essays published, among others, at Gallimard publishing house. “Mona’s Eyes” is his novel debut.

Mona’s eyes promotional materials – Wydawnictwo Literackie