A Painterly Puzzle – One-Shot Story

Art is often a puzzle. But the above piece is especially lively fun.

It’s my 1×4-foot ink-jet print of Sonia Delaunay’s 3×11-foot 1913 painting “Le Bal Bullier.”  In 2009, Kate and I faced the massive work in Paris’s Pompidou Center, and it turned out to be our favorite find of the entire trip. I captured four sequential shots with a 6.3-megapixel Fuji FinePix F31fd pocket cam, and back home, manually stitched them into a 25-megapixel panorama.

A local lab then printed the result as wide as their equipment would reach. And I made the frame from ordinary crown molding. (It would be my first and only woodworking project.)

The painting is Delaunay’s abstract depiction of people in one of the city’s most popular turn-of-the-century dance halls. Some were depicted entering, some watching, and some dancing in tight Tango embraces under a few of Paris’s first electric lights.

But how many people do you think there are? And how many faces have any recognizable detail? That’s the puzzle I often pose when people visit our kitchen. Zoom into the photo as much as you can and look carefully.

I have an idea, but am not certain. And I’ve found no answers on the web. I’ll post my guess in a comment after yours are in! And do you know any original photos that are similarly puzzling?

–Dave Powell is a Westford, Mass., writer and avid amateur photographer.

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