INTERVIEW: New book explains slightly odd stories behind famous art and artists
Image courtesy of Penguin / Provided by official site.
When most people enter an art museum and take a look at a masterpiece on the wall, there’s usually an internal ooh and aah factor that bristles the hair on their back and causes their eyes to hang open in a dreamy stare. Think of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci or The Starry Night by Vincent Van Gogh or Girl With a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer.
For Jennifer Dasal, curator of modern and contemporary art for the North Carolina Museum of Art, that deep appreciation is definitely there, but it’s also coupled with a fascination for curious oddities. Simply put, Dasal wants to go behind the paintings and painters, figuratively speaking, and understand the unexpected and strange occurrences tied to the piece of work and its creator.
She has been exploring these “slightly odd” stories for a number of years on her successful podcast, ArtCurious, and now she has taken her explorations to the book world with the recent publication of ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History, now available from Penguin Books.
“I was never somebody who was particularly interested in art when I was growing up,” Dasal said in a recent phone interview. “I started realizing that I loved the stories behind it. Over the years, I usually meet people who seem to fall either on one side of the spectrum where people say, ‘Oh my goodness, I love art so much. I go to museums all the time. I read about art.’ Or I meet people on the complete other side who say, ‘I think it’s boring. I just don’t get why people go to museums. I don’t understand it.’ And I always tell people that I understand and I sympathize because I used to be in their shoes, and one of the big things that really helped me was to hear a really good story about art.”
This light-bulb moment got Dasal thinking about how to convey these “really good” stories that can be found in the annals of art history. She appreciated the democratic medium of the podcast, given that the content is available on smartphones, computers and tablets, and ArtCurious was born.
“I think when I first started I was at best estimating that maybe 100 people would listen, and that half of them would be friends and family members who felt obliged to tune in,” she said.
But there were many more listeners besides those dedicated family and friends. The podcast took off, and Dasal found an audience, which she finds “wonderfully gratifying” and “very exciting.” In fact, there have been many listeners who fell in love with art because of these journeys of curiosity.
“My favorite thing that has happened still to this day is within that first year I received an email from a listener who was in college, and she said that she had started listening to the podcast on a whim and that she decided to go into having a minor in art history that she tacked on to her college career just because she was inspired by the podcast,” Dasal said. “That made me feel so happy. It was that little thing that I always will carry with me.”
The research for the podcast, and now the book, is intense. At any given time, Dasal is working on two or three different stories, and she utilizes a team of volunteer researchers. Their efforts are trained on amassing as many facts as possible, and double and triple-checking them before recording or publishing.
“Back when I was first beginning, I would be researching one episode while writing another, while recording a third one,” she said. “It would usually take me about two weeks of research before I felt comfortable with writing the script, so my episode is completely written out in advance. It’s basically like writing a term paper every few weeks. And so I’m very lucky in that during my day job I work as a curator in an art museum in North Carolina, and within steps away from my office space I have an art research library that’s open to the public but also obviously super-useful for people who work on site. So not only do I have things like internet access, but I also have books and periodicals that are right there at my fingertips. So, for sure, it’s very intense. I have to fact check everything.”
The stories that Dasal and the team have been able to find are truly eye-opening. Some of them are new spins on old yarns, and others are deep dives into relatively unknown corners of the art world. In the book, under the title “Your Mom’s Favorite Painter Was a Badass,” Dasal looks at Claude Monet and the subversive Impressionists. Another chapter looks at artist Walter Sickert, who some believe (including Patricia Cornwall) was actually Jack the Ripper. Dasal counts herself a skeptic on this front. Another one looks at the supposed thefts and forgeries of the Mona Lisa.
“I have to give full credit to my husband,” Dasal said of the book project. “It was actually his idea, so he is trained as a filmmaker and a screenwriter. And so he’s always looking for that next step, and he pushed me after about a year and a half of starting the podcast. He said, ‘You have all this material. You’ve done the work. You’ve done the research. Why don’t you think about turning it into something like a book?’ And I balked. I did not think that that would be something that could ever happen. It didn’t seem like that would be a possibility to me. I’m not sure quite why. I just thought, oh, writing books is for other people. It kind of seemed like a fantasy for me, and so I kind of ignored his suggestions for about a year. Then finally I said, OK fine, you’ve worn me down. I’ll go ahead and I’ll just see what I can do, and very methodically sat down, wrote a book proposal, and it happened just like that. It was a surprisingly quick process once things got rolling.”
For fans of the podcast, the book has lots of brand-new material, plus a few choice favorites from the audio archives. If it’s an oldie but goodie, Dasal has expanded and updated the case for the print version.
“It was exciting to be able to pinpoint some stories that I had not had the opportunity to tell before, especially like talking about the Impressionists,” she said. “That’s a group of artists, especially Monet, who I had never really covered much of on the podcast, and that was somebody I was intrigued by from the very beginning. So it really did allow me this opportunity to jump back into this long list of subjects and artists that I definitely wanted to talk more about and gave me that opportunity to go deeper.”
That’s the key to ArtCurious’ success, the ability to go deeper.
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
ArtCurious: Stories of the Unexpected, Slightly Odd, and Strangely Wonderful in Art History by Jennifer Dasal is now available from Penguin Books. Click here for more information.
