The current Munch exhibition at the British Museum includes his 1892 sketch for what soon became The scream* (my title: People taking pleasant stroll). This suggests further drôle potential—such as

• Leonardo’s charming landscape Just got a text from Mona Lisa saying she’s held up in traffic
• Vermeer‘s early sketch Girl not wearing any earrings (“Oops, forget me turban too—What Am I Like?!“). The internet is awash with such memes, like this:

and of course The last-but-one supper, without the kangaroo:

And then there’s the ouevre of Alphonse Allais (see The world of Alphonse Allais, “translated” by Miles Kington), including a totally white canvas called Anaemic young girls going to their first Communion through a blizzard, and a red composition entitled Apoplectic cardinals harvesting tomatoes by the Red Sea (the latter an early version of the popular Explosion in a tomato factory at sunset). Such experiments were yet more radical than that of Monet’s Rouen cathedral in the morning fog (see also “F. Huehl and his Monet are soon parted“).

Further suggestions welcome.

For Chinese poetry, I think of the Tang genre “On visiting a hermit and not finding him in“. And on the musical front, there’s a popular series called Music Minus One, providing recordings of the accompaniments to famous pieces of chamber music, jazz, and so on without the solo part, to help soloists practise. Some Wag once gave me a blank CD entitled Music Minus One: the Bach partitas for solo violin.

I still await a response to my requests for versions of Das Lied von der Erde without the mandolin, L’enfant et les sortilèges without the cheese grater, and the finale of Éclairs sur l’au-delà … without the triangle.

On a rather different tack, note the mini-museum for gerbils under quarantine. See also The global art market, and Yak re-enactments.

* For some musical screams, see my posts on Sibelius 7 and, notably, the horrifying sequence in Mahler 10.