Customer Reviews

The Salon

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The Salon is a murder-mystery that portrays the most influential painters and artists of the belle epoque, including Leo and Gertrude Stein, Apollinaire, Henri Matisse, George Braque and a hilariously ribald Picasso as they follow a mysterious blue female serial killer who rips the heads from the bodies of her unfortunate avant-garde victims.

Between bouts of whoring and flashes of artistic brilliance (Braque and Picasso create Cubism while staring out the window of a moving train in the middle of the narrative), the cabal of creatives chase the mysterious murderess through their own paintings with the aid of a magic blue absinthe discovered by Paul Gaugin, who has disappeared mysteriously and is presumed dead.

The story begins when the Steins invite George Braque to their salon and induce him to swallow a draught of the potion, which sends him spinning straight into a painting by Rousseau. Absinthe in this narrative is the tool of transport to magical realms, a place where every artistic creation exists as its own complete universe.

The art is undeniably comic-based but the use of color is intruiging and the story is very well crafted. It will make a fine addition to any collection of modern absinthe-related literature.

Early Cubism was born out of the back-and-forth visual exploration of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso and "The Salon" re-imagines turn of the century Paris and the players that turned art on its head as a crime drama. Think MOMA meets Paul Pope's "Heavy Liquid" meets "Law & Order". Bertozzi's own artwork is beautiful and the reserved color palette matches the tone of the story. Bertozzi's take on Picasso's "Les Demoiselles d'Avignon" on the back cover is pretty brillant as well.

The murder mystery is fun, but actually less interesting than the author's imagined conversations between Picasso and Braque as well as Gertrude and Leo Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Erik Satie, Henri Matisse and Guillaume Apollinaire. Art history was one of my favorite subjects in college, particularly Cubism and "The Salon" captures the optimistic forward-looking energy of this movement, the catalyst for every major art movement to follow.

The Salon by Nick Bertozzi has a fascinating pretext: The artists living in Paris in 1907: Picasso, Braque, Satie, plus Gertrude Stein, are being stalked and killed off by a strange vengeful being who has the ability to pass in and out of paintings. Stein's salon serves as homebase for these painters who come together to discuss art, their current works, and engage in hedonistic behavior. A strange blue absinthe gives them the ability to jump into paintings. The story is intriguing, and the artwork occasionally striking, but I was disappointed in this book. It got a lot of wonderful reviews leading me to believe it was transcendent and more than "just" a graphic novel. I loved the discussions between Braque and Picasso about how to paint all perspectives at once, giving birth to cubism. But so much of the book focused on the baser instincts of the artists. There were far too many panels of Picasso's penis for me. Bertozzi seemed to revel in his characters' hedonism, to the detriment of the story. I expected more from this book.