Synopsis: Quentin Blake takes the reader on a tour of paintings, pastels, prints and drawings featuring Parisian women of the 19th and 20th centuries. In 77 pages, he organises the paintings, all selected from the Petit Palais in Paris, into broad themes, including portraiture, city and country, family, theatre, society, workplace, and idyllic.

Blake illustrates the chapter head for each of these themes with his own black and white drawings, then displays the paintings in colour (between two to five paintings per spread) listing just the artist name and image title; on a following page he writes a paragraph of historical background and thoughts about each painting.

Review: I clearly remember the delight of seeing Blake's exhibition, 'Tell Me a Picture' at London's National Gallery in 2001. The curation style seemed fresh and innovative, with Blake's figures drawn on the walls, peering up at the paintings. While I would have expected the space to have a distinctly educational feel to it, it didn't come across this way, more as something wonderfully stylish and quirky. (I found a similar intoxicating environment at the National Maritime Museum in their 'Tintin at Sea' exhibition, with Tintin images blown up huge on the walls and the museum's related objects displayed.)

 In Blake's setting, the chosen masterpieces took on more of a narrative, illustrative feel than usual, and made me feel I was falling into a book, instead of making me feel like a child being forced to look at fine art in a didactic situation. I loved the way it brought illustration and fine art together in a way that worked beautifully, without a doubt about the appropriateness of them appearing side by side. It also raised the profile of the Children's Laureate to me; I suddenly grasped that when one becomes a national treasure like Blake, one can pretty much do whatever one likes, including cherry-picking National Gallery paintings and painting one's own graffiti all over its walls. (How cool is that!) I can imagine Blake pulled off a similar feat at the Petit Palais with what seems to have been a similarly curated exhibition in 2005, 'Quentin Blake and the Demoiselles des Bords de Seine'. At the National Gallery exhibition, I never questioned buying the catalogue; I wanted to take away something from the amazing thing I had witnessed. At home, however, the catalogue languished, unread, for many years. Looking at it now, it's a beautiful book and I love Blake's illustrations in it. But somehow it loses much of the magic of the exhibition space and takes on the more didactic feel I had been so glad to avoid earlier.

 I think 'Women of Paris in Pictures' may have had a similar fate with people who snatched it up as a souvenir from the exhibition; it seemed like a brilliant idea at the time, but does it stand up to other educational type books on painting? And is it really geared toward 'an audience of all ages', requiring 'no previous knowledge' as the book's sleeve proclaims? I like Blake's idea of letting the viewer look at the paintings without commentary at first, and then turning the pages to read his comments. Except for the wording of the titles, no one's telling the viewer from the start that they have to think certain things about each image, and a viewer of any age can look at a picture.

 I don't think young children would connect with Blake's text; phrases like 'the people seem rather restrained', or 'the woman's striking costume is the element that gives focus to the picture; it, too, seems animated by the life that vibrates everywhere across the luminous white of the page'. Many artistic terms, such as 'colour lithography' were left undefined. Then again, I felt grateful to Blake for not talking down to the reader or pointing out the blindingly obvious. If someone falls in love with a picture, they can always look up these things. If given to a young child, this book would most likely work best with the child looking at the pictures, the adult reading the comments to him or herself and then pointing things out to the child that seem most appropriate. Children may struggle with the very occasional nude; in my limited classroom experience, I've found that groups of American and British children go to pieces if there's even a hint of nudity. It might work better in a one-on-one situation, or possibly with children from other cultures.

 I thought that the most likely readers of this book would be adults and teenagers, possibly pre-teens, with their own artistic aspirations. I could imagine myself as a teenager enjoying the exhibition and buying the book with the hope of making some sketches out of it or copying a painting or two. But I was saddened at how small many of the pictures were printed; I found it difficult to lose myself in them, the way I would at an exhibition, and it was often difficult to work out the artists' techniques. Very occasionally, when an image was printed full page, such as Gaston Béthune's 'The Charmer', I could imagine a reader looking at the picture for a long time and contemplating both its creation and subject matter. I wish the entire book could have been printed like this, even if some of the pictures had to be turned on their sides to fit. Because of the graphic simplicity of Blake's own drawings, they work much better in this setting, but the paintings tend to look cramped and slightly fussy at this size. I also missed the way that Blake's illustrations interact with the paintings as they do in the exhibition space; his drawings are never seen side-by-side with the other artists' work in this book. Seen on blank white pages, the paintings go back to the more formal 'white cube' gallery setting.

 I was glad Blake didn't only go for big-name artists. There were several names I didn't know, but whose work was interesting enough that I felt I ought to know, and therefore wanted to go away and look them up. I can imagine readers being struck by the interesting angularity and mark-making of Edgar Chahine's 'Midinette' and 'Winter Morning on Boulevard Ney', the swirling movement of Joseph-Marius Avy's 'Dance Class' and the interesting pencil textures of Théophile Alexandre Steinlen.

This book provides a good taster, but one gets the feeling there is much more to be had, which is a good thing, really. And if the book does look like it might languish unread, one could always cut it up, and either get out pencils and colour Blake's drawings (like I did with 'George's Marvellous Medicine' or hang the pictures on a wall. (But shh, don't tell anyone I said that.)

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2008-06-18