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Who drew Mona/Monica?
Wednesday, February 10, 1999 By Tom Gibb, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. - Penn State sophomore Alysia DeAntonio's visual arts professor was so wowed by her painting melding Monica Lewinsky and Mona Lisa that he shopped it around last October to national magazines.
He was in disbelief 11 days ago when he heard that Cokie Roberts flashed a fresh New Yorker with the Monica-Mona marriage on ABC's "This Week."
Then things went sour.
The work turned out to be another artist's, not DeAntonio's.
And now, Richard Alden, assistant architecture professor, is saying that four months after he dropped a print of DeAntonio's work off at the New Yorker, he thinks the magazine may have violated copyright, lifted the idea and given it to another artist.
"I want the credit to go where it belongs," Alden said yesterday. "This is the work of a student."
Not so, the New Yorker says.
Everything is above-board, nothing was stolen, and when the New Yorker got the alternate piece of artwork a few weeks back, it went with it because it "was done at a particularly appropriate time and done particularly well, and we decided to use it," magazine spokeswoman Perri Dorset said.
And, for the record, Monica as Mona has already been done elsewhere, she said.
"I've seen it," she said. "On post cards and T-shirts."
"We don't know if there can be a lawsuit," said Edward Connor III, a State College lawyer Alden hired for the case. "We're still investigating."
Although Pittsburgh attorneys who specialize in intellectual property law said they weren't aware of the specific facts of the case, they had some advice for anyone else who might find themselves in similar circumstances.
In addition to urging artists to contact an intellectual property lawyer before trying to sell their work, the lawyers recommended that artists sign their work, place the copyright symbol on it, register it with the U.S. Copyright Office and sign a confidentiality agreement.
"From a practical point of view, you run a risk when you shop around an idea or a piece of work without having thought everything through and established intellectual property protections beforehand," said George Dickos, a partner in the law firm of Kirkpatrick & Lockhart.
George Baier of Buchanan Ingersoll said DeAntonio "doesn't have copyright rights to the broad concept of using Monica as the 'Mona Lisa,' but she does have copyright rights if the magazine cover duplicates her work."
George P. Faines of Thorp, Reed & Armstrong said the New Yorker cover "could have been a coincidence given the high profile of Monica Lewinsky, but the timing is suspect.
"The three key elements [the student] has to establish are her ownership of the work, that it was copied and that there is substantial similarity between her work and the cover of the magazine."
The situation started last September, when DeAntonio, a sophomore from Altoona, was enrolled in Alden's class.
The assignment: Get oil paints and a 14-by-17-inch canvas and paint something fitting the title "Monica Lisa." Turn it in in four days.
DeAntonio's meld of Monica Lewinsky and the Mona Lisa got big applause from faculty at Penn State.
"This is up there, one of the best pieces I've seen done by a young student," said Alden, who assigned the piece as part of a visual communications class.
So, three weeks later, on Oct. 9, he was shopping prints to the New Yorker and other national magazines in New York.
But what appeared on the cover of the Feb. 8 New Yorker was a computer-officiated marriage of images by Philadelphia artist Dean Rohrer, a veteran of such publications as Spy, Details and the Utne Reader, making his premier appearance in the New Yorker.
It was full-frame, not cropped to the chest like DeAntonio's. The face carried the Mona Lisa's trace of bemusement, not Lewinsky's expression that wigwags between wide-eyed and wary.
Rohrer's work came after DeAntonio's, New Yorker spokeswoman Dorset said yesterday, but Rohrer knew nothing of the Penn Stater's painting and instead followed a well-worn idea of inserting a newsworthy figure into a recognized piece of art.
And, New Yorker be darned, the work still got commercial exposure.
Jerry Noviello, who owns the local Manhattan Bagels shop and is a friend of Alden's, suggested several months ago that DeAntonio's work be made into T-shirts and other novelities.
So - with Alden and Noviello fronting the cash and DeAngelo getting one-third of yet-unseen profits - "Monica Lisa" is on T-shirts and mugs, sold at Noviello's shop and on the World Wide Web.
The mugs are just arriving. About 200 of the shirts have sold at $15 per, Alden said.
Yesterday, Noviello rolled out the newest product: "Monica Lisa" boxer shorts, all extra-large Fruit of the Looms "because they have to be that big for the image to fit," Noviello said.
And DeAntonio? How rankled is she, a young, aspiring artist who thought she might be bound for a brush with national exposure?
"I'm just a little upset," she said. "But if they took the idea, I don't know why they'd do that."
Staff writer Lawrence Walsh contributed to this report.
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