Thomas Schlesser – författare

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.  While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s. READER REVIEWS"This is a novel that will touch many.""Hypnotic.""This beautiful, well-researched book is captivating.""A pleasure read!""I loved every page.""Heartwarming and refreshing."

Ten-year-old Mona and her beloved grandfather have only fifty-two Wednesdays to visit fifty-two works of art and commit to memory “all that is beautiful in the world” before Mona loses her sight forever.  While the doctors can find no explanation for Mona’s brief episode of blindness, they agree that the threat of permanent vision loss cannot be ruled out. The girl’s grandfather, Henry, may not be able to stop his granddaughter from losing her sight, but he can fill the encroaching darkness with beauty. Every Wednesday for a year, the pair abscond together and visit a single masterpiece in one of Paris’s renowned museums. From Botticelli to Basquiat, Mona learns how each artist’s work shaped the world around them. In turn, the young girl’s world is changed forever by the power of their art. Under the kind and careful tutelage of her grandfather, Mona learns the true meaning of generosity, melancholy, love, loss, and revolution. Her perspective will never be the same—nor will the reader’s. READER REVIEWS"This is a novel that will touch many.""Hypnotic.""This beautiful, well-researched book is captivating.""A pleasure read!""I loved every page.""Heartwarming and refreshing."

Hans Hartung was one of the twentieth century’s greatest artists. His works mark him out as an outstanding practitioner of abstract painting, but he was also a highly perceptive commentator on a wide variety of artists and artistic styles. In this volume, the distinguished art historian Thomas Schlesser—currently the Director of the Hartung-Bergman Foundation—gathers together Hartung’s most illuminating remarks on his predecessors and contemporaries, as well as on the creative process more generally. Hans Hartung in His Own Words will prove an indispensable companion to a major figure in the cultural life of the last century.

Long neglected by art historians, Anna-Eva Bergman (1909-87) was a painter of major importance who invested her work with an almost mystical ambition. The story of her life, told for the first time in this meticulously researched biography, is extraordinary: a Norwegian childhood that was constantly overshadowed by fear; a bohemian and adventurous youth that spanned much of Europe; a career as an illustrator; encounters in Nazi Germany; increasingly severe health problems; three marriages, two of which were to the same man (Bergman’s fellow artist Hans Hartung); and a tragic end in the splendour of their villa in Antibes.But above all Bergman’s was a life dedicated to creation, often in defiance of fashion. Only recently has the scale of her achievement begun to be adequately acknowledged. Bergman undoubtedly enjoyed a distinguished career, crossing paths with such key artists as Wassily Kandinsky, Pierre Soulages and Mark Rothko. In many respects, however, she remained a marginal figure—little known in her homeland, and championed by only a handful of allies in France and the rest of Europe.Characterised by the use of gold and silver leaf and by the distinctive rhythm of her lines, Bergman’s paintings are hieratic and simplified, radical evocations of the great structuring forces of the universe—minerals, the elements, and even time itself. Thomas Schlesser’s biography, which draws upon the considerable body of written material that Bergman left behind, at long last enables us to understand this extraordinary artist in all the complexity of her character and the dramatic circumstances of her life.