Siyana Zaharieva - Put Some Pants on These Paintings!

This small book is a great educational resource, published in collaboration with the city art gallery in Kazanlak – a beautiful town in Bulgaria’s Rose Valley. The goal is to ridicule the puritanical attitude towards art from past eras, and even today, through the prism of satire. Why were royals, popes, and high-ranking church officials – and many ordinary people as well – outraged by the nudity of people depicted in paintings, to the point that they even ordered the figures to “get dressed”? The text, written by Zornitsa Hristova,as well as the illustrations by Siyana Zaharieva are bursting with humor. The artist draws with a confident and lively line, economically using only black, to which she adds two colors to enhance the impact of the satirical ideas in the drawings. The tourists in Florence, as well as Queen Victoria with her pages, and the famous artists behindthe “pantsless” subjects, and even the no less famous nude models Venus de Milo, David, and The Thinker are recognizable and ridiculously hyperbolized at the same time – because the great creators of art were also ordinary people. From the pages of the book, Michelangelo and Leonardo, Delacroix and Rodin make their case for freedom in art, and more specifically, for their reluctance to draw pants, which spoil everything.