For Mandell - a Bala Cynwyd artist who has created mosaics for private collectors and public institutions such as Citizens Bank Park, Lower Merion High School, and the National Liberty Museum - interpreting dozens of masterpieces with broken bits of tile and gemstones was a "crazy challenge."
It wasn't the first time he has rendered Matisse in miniature. Earlier this year, Mandell created another Barnes mosaic, showing the opposite end of the Great Room - complete with the museum's idiosyncratic founder, Albert C. Barnes, resting on a bench - for real estate developer Lenny Feinberg, who financed the film The Art of the Steal. The 2009 documentary recounted the decades-long spat over the museum's finances and the controversial decision to move it to Philadelphia.
Feinberg, who also studied at the Barnes, said he commissioned the piece after working for two years on the movie.
"Dr. Barnes would sit in the main gallery and take inspiration," he said, "and I wondered if Jonathan could capture that."
Mandell said he started by researching pictures of the Great Room, then came up with the perspective and decided which paintings, or pieces of paintings, to include. For Feinberg's 6-by-4-foot piece, he had to re-create Georges Seurat's The Models, a small but luminous canvas showing models in his studio with a partial painting of Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte pinned to the wall behind them - two masterpieces in one.
That meant reproducing in miniature the exceedingly detailed La Grande Jatte, which was the inspiration for the Broadway musical Sunday in the Park with George.
Because the rendering of Grand Jatte in The Models painting is set on an angle, Mandell's likeness is distorted as it goes back in space.
