Or rather, he illustrated one. Gallery Ghost, from Birdcage Press, and written by Anna Nilsen, offers a decidedly supernatural take through the halls of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
The idea is that at night in the museum, all the ghosts of dead painters like Paul Gauguin and Lyonel Feininger (hey, he did comics too!) come out and put details from their own work into other people’s paintings, a Rousseau cow inserted in van Ostade’s “The Cottage Dooryard” for example.
The reader’s job is to help intern and art student Sarah out and figure out who added to whose painting and which one added the most (just for clarification’s sake, Sala only illustrated the opening and closing pages, plus the portraits of the painters — he didn’t attempt to replicate Mary Cassatt or anything). To help you in your quest, the book comes with its own magnifying glass. How cool is that?
Sala’s art is much softer and friendlier than longtime fans of his work may be used to, but they’ll still want to track it down, if for no other reason than to his rendition of a ghostly Gustav Klmit, something I’m sure readers of Delphine have long wanted to see.
