Darian Leader takes the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa, and the crowds who came to see the blank wall where it had hung, as the way into a Lacanian account of how we look at paintings. His question is not what a picture depicts but what it holds back. Moving through Leonardo, Picasso, Duchamp, Bacon, Lowry and the Young British Artists, he treats the image as a screen that offers something to the eye while shielding us from the gaze that looks back.
He argues that art is bound up with absence and loss: a painting can carry what is no longer there. Leader links the pull of the visible to mourning, to the scopic drive, and to the economics that make such objects priceless.
For the clinician, the book sharpens a way of thinking about seeing and not-seeing, about what a patient shows and keeps back, and about the register of the gaze in the consulting room.
About the author
Darian Leader
Darian Leader is a British psychoanalyst and author working in the Lacanian tradition. Born in 1965, he was a founder member of the Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research (CFAR) in London and serves as president of the College of Psychoanalysts (UK). His books include Why Do Women Write More Letters Than They Post?, The New Black: Mourning, Melancholia and Depression, What Is Madness?, and Hands. He is also a trustee of the Freud Museum.
Details
- 2002
- Faber & Faber
- Faber & Faber
- 202
- 9780571212637