Thirty Are Better Than OnePostcards of the Mona Lisacollected by Joshua Sofaer

First published in Great Britain and Norway 2009by Little Museum

ISBN 978-0-9561365-1-0

Artist & Editor, Joshua SofaerResearch & Production Assistant, Rona TangrandLIAF ’08 Curators, Taru Elfving and Rickard Borgström

With thanks to Lofoten Museum and Nordland Kunst Og-Filmfaskole

Copyright © Joshua Sofaer, 2009

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,stored in any retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by anymeans, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,without prior written permission of the copyright holder for whichapplication should be addressed in the first instance to the publishers.No liability shall be attached to the author, the copyright holder, or thepublishers for loss or damage of any nature suffered as a result ofreliance on the reproduction of any of the contents of this publicationor any errors or omissions in its contents.

www.joshuasofaer.comwww.liaf.no

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Collections in Lofoten HomesDuring the summer of 2008, British Artist, Joshua Sofaer, travelled around the Lofoten Islands visitingcollections in private homes. He met many people and saw many interesting things. By way of an invitationto collectors to share their passions, Sofaer exhibited 350 of his own large collection of postcards of theMona Lisa, some of which find their way into this catalogue.

In September 2008 there was a public programme of events in which collectors opened their homes tosmall groups of the public.

As part of the legacy of his travels, Sofaer has also collaborated with some of the collectors on small booksthat highlight aspects of their collection.

Collections in Lofoten Homes is a project for LIAF 08, the Lofoten International Art Festival. Lofoten is anarchipelago in the county of Nordland, in the north of Norway, lying within the Arctic Circle.

Some people are collectors without really knowing it: corks tossed from opened bottles of wine into abowl, or change from their pockets thrown into a jar of coins. Other people form collections withoutthinking about them as a collection: vinyl records of a particular singer, t-shirts, books. We are guardians offamily collections in the form of heirlooms. We all form collections by writing things down: shopping lists,letters to friends, dreams. Then there are those people who collect objects, antiques, paintings andephemera. Practically everyone is a collector of something.

Above all collecting is about passion. People labour much of their spare time searching garage sales and fleamarkets, junk shops and online auctions for the elusive ‘thing’ that they want to add to their set. Somepeople lock their collections away, others have them out on display. Some people categorise, label andindex their collections, others simply order them so they look nice.

The portrait of Lisa del GiocondoThirty postcards of Mona Lisa, exactly the same and yet completely different, privately collected orsent around the world. Occupying such an unexampled cultural position, Mona Lisa offers itself as a sitewith many meanings, no longer simply a painting of a Florentine noblewoman by a renowned artist.

The thirty postcards reproduced here are selected from a growing collection of nearly a thousand,dating from the late Nineteenth Century to the present day. Although each postcard represents the‘same’ image of Leonardo’s famous painting, the vast differential in printing processes, especially inrelation to colour and contrast, the quality of the ink, the paper stock, layout, design and individualhistory of each card, make the woman appear a different person each time. Sometimes it is the samewoman but a different painting altogether.

Mona Lisa is taken for granted. She has entered popular consciousness and her fame has rendered her‘an attraction’. Celebrity has made Mona Lisa mean only that: celebrity. We think we know what she is,when in fact she continually escapes us.

The title of this catalogue is taken from that which Andy Warhol gave to the screen print where herepeated the image of the Mona Lisa thirty times in black and white on a single canvas. Warhol makesthe ‘great’ Mona Lisa a simple ‘thing’, an image to be reproduced, like any other. With each postcardreproduction meaning is multiplied, becomes promiscuous, so that, as for Warhol, the painting Mona Lisano longer signifies the woman it depicts, or the artfulness of the painter who painted her, but ratherbecomes a permissive surface onto which we project our own legends.

Mona Lisa is a cliché. It is a paradox of our times that the painting that represents the zenith of culturalachievement is also subject to ridicule and scorn. At once a groundbreaking and definitive masterpiece ofthe Renaissance and the poster-child of tat, the Mona Lisa is an artefact with a unique worldwide status.There are countless uses and re-workings that have been found for Mona Lisa; practically no form ofcultural production is left unmarked: journalism, poetry, fiction, film, academic research, and advertising,not to mention painting itself. Mona Lisa is an industry. No wonder she is exhausted.

As with all popular culture icons, Mona Lisa is collected. These collections, almost without exception, aremade up of versions of Mona Lisa: artistic derivations, strange sightings, fictionalised accounts. The names

for these collectors: ‘Jocondophiles’, ‘Jocondomaniacs’ or ‘Jocondologues’, take after the French title ofthe painting La Joconde (a name with double-meaning, both as wife of Giocondo and ‘jocund’, or light-hearted woman).

The collection of postcards that form the basis of Thirty Are Better Than One are not of versions of theMona Lisa. There is no graphic or artistic play, no joke, no subversion. They are, very simply, postcards ofa famous painting that have been collected as souvenirs or sent as missives.

Interview with the collectorRickard Borgström: So Joshua, tell me about your collection.

Joshua Sofaer: My collection is of postcards of the Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci, dating from the lateNineteenth Century through to the present day.

RB: And how long have you been collecting these cards?

JS: I don’t know exactly but probably about ten years. Maybe more.

RB: And why did you start collecting them?

JS: Well I was walking along the River Seine in Paris where they sell second-hand books and ephemera.Anyway, I saw a postcard of the Mona Lisa there with this densely packed French handwriting on theback and I bought it, and that was the first one.

RB: And how many do you have now?

JS: It must be coming up for a thousand.

RB: Are they all different?

JS: Well it depends what you mean. They are all different is insomuch as they feel different and theprinting process or history of the card makes her look different each time but there are repetitions interms of more than one card being from the same publisher, edition and layout. Part of the point for meis to see the difference in repetition, so there is no such thing as a duplicate in my collection, or a sparefor swaps. Having said that, sometimes I do look at a card that I don’t own, wondering whether to buy itor not and think that it is not so desirable because it is altogether too similar to cards I have already.

RB: So what are the collecting rules, in terms of what is in and what is out?

JS: Well one of the rules is that it has to be a painting that purports to be the Mona Lisa itself. There arelots of postcards that are adaptations of the Mona Lisa, play with it, refer to it or include the Mona Lisain some way but I don’t collect those. So the collection only includes postcards that state that theyrepresent the actual Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci. In many cases though, the postcard is not of theMona Lisa. There are, for example, several copies of the Mona Lisa that have been made into postcards;there are also etchings, which are early postcards before photographic processes became stable. Andthese are often cards that I look out for particularly. So those are the rules really. It doesn’t matter howold they are or where they come from. Most of the postcards were produced and sent from Paris(because that’s where the painting is located) but there are postcards that have been produced in othercountries, for example, I have a postcard printed in Russia.

RB: And where do you get them?

JS: Well there are a lot of online dealers of postcards but I also go to the postcard fairs in Paris, whichare held twice a year in the Palais Omnisports, which is basically the sports stadium to the east of thecity. The dealers don’t rate highly postcards of the Mona Lisa, or any work of art for that matter, so theyare often just one or two euros each. Most postcard collectors collect topographical postcards, that ispostcards of a certain district or place. And they would not collect duplicates. When I tell these dealersthat I collect postcards of the Mona Lisa they either presume I collect playful versions of the original orsay something like, ‘but aren’t they all the same?’

RB: And why the Mona Lisa? Why that image?

JS: Well part of it was by chance because that was the postcard that I first stumbled across when walkingthrough Paris. I had the writing on the back translated and it was interesting to fill the gaps in the storythat arose. Actually the stories on the back are of great interest to me and I much prefer a card that hasbeen written on and sent, than one in so called ‘mint’ condition. I’ve had a lot of the backs translated andhave discovered quite a lot of interesting things about the people who have sent them.

RB: Such as what?

JS: Well for example one of the postcards that is scribbled over is sent from an artist called István Pál,who was Hungarian. He sent his postcard in 1910, which is itself quite interesting because that was

before postcards of the Mona Lisa were mass produced in large numbers. The Mona Lisa was stolenfrom the Louvre in August 1911 and found again and returned in December 1913 and it was really onlyonce she was stolen that she became famous. Before that she was just another painting on the gallerywall. When she was missing she became news worthy, and that is when a lot of postcards were printed,often with the words “Volée” or “Disparue du Musée” underneath the image. So any postcard producedbefore August 1911 is rare. Anyway, István Pál sent his postcard before the image was popularised andhe writes in Hungarian, “I only write on this out of commercial interest, so that whosoever should see itwill remember that there is art in the world.” In other words, he is using the Mona Lisa as a kind ofadvertisement for art itself, which is also his profession. Actually I did a bit of research on this guy andhis paintings are really quite interesting. He suffered from mental illness and spent a lot of time in a clinic,which to this day has the biggest collection of his paintings. So these human stories, on the back of thepostcards are quite interesting to trace.

RB: And do you have a favourite card?

JS: Erm, not really. The cards that are less common, or that appear less frequently seem the mostprecious, I guess. But often the ones that I like are a bit worn out or have ink spills on them or thingslike that. What I really like about the cards is them ‘as a collection’ rather than each separately.

RB: How do you preserve them?

JS: Well normally they are kept in individual clear plastic acid free archive wallets in a large two-drawerbox but they have also been displayed before in a long line for exhibition.

RB: And do you like the Mona Lisa as a painting?

JS: Well every time I go to Paris I make a point of going to the Louvre and saying hello to her. Of course Ialso want to see if there are any new postcards produced. The thing is, you can’t see the painting anymorebecause she has become this popular culture icon, which means that her status as painting becomesmore difficult to access. There is also the very pragmatic point that you literally can’t see her because ofall the crowds taking photographs of her and the fact that she is so dirty now. I don’t dislike her. Do I likeher? Not really. I really do wish they would clean her. There has been years of debate in conservationcircles about whether or not she should be cleaned. Apparently it would be a very straightforward jobbut there is a lot of resistance from traditionalists. I’d love to see some of the original colour and hueshine through. It would take a very courageous director of the Louvre to instigate a cleaning process.

RB: And then they would have to release another postcard.

JS: Yes, that’s true.

RB: And will you ever stop collecting?

JS: I don’t know.

Thirty Are Better Than OnePostcards of the Mona Lisacollected by Joshua Sofaer