Kahlo’s Koalas

Kahlo’s Koalas by Grace Helmer is a fun introduction to some artists with popular styles able to be easily evoked. As this small board book counts from one to ten, we see the same number of creatures in two-page spreads, from “1 Picasso Panda” to “10 Monet Mice”.

Other artists include Matisse, Pollock, and Van Gogh. (The only woman is the titular Kahlo.) The book concludes with a couple of sentences about each artist, summing up the most obvious elements of their styles.

As a jumping-off point, this could spur some great web searches to see some of the better-known works by these artists. It impressed me, in thinking about branding, how these artists have become names, summed up with just a few key characteristics (one could say cliches), whether it’s Warhol’s repetitive prints or Lichtenstein’s dots. Of course, the meat of their most famous pieces — such as Lichtenstein’s plagiarism of comic artists — can’t translate to a picture of, in his case, llamas, but the animals, by being cute, make up for it in other ways. And I learned about Kandinsky!

(The publisher provided a review copy.)