Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

Language: English

Pages: 288

ISBN: 1101874783

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


An extraordinary collection—hawk-eyed and understanding—from the Man Booker Prize–winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life.

As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting . . . But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.”

This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Some level of consciousness, the following question: how would we know about these people on the raft, if some or all of them had not been rescued? What backs up this presumption? The ship is on the horizon; the sun is also on the horizon (though unseen), lightening it with yellow. Sunrise, we deduce, and the ship arriving with the sun, bringing a new day, hope and rescue; the black clouds overhead (very black) will soon disappear. However, what if it were sunset? Dawn and dusk are easily.

There is also a shift in the time of day being represented: previously, there were many evening scenes, in mood as well as in fact; now there are almost none. Everything – even Marthe in her bath – seems to take place a few hours either side of lunchtime. There is another shift too – of personnel. Bonnard’s early work is quite normally populated: street scenes, conversation pieces, family gatherings; in the south, the population is quickly reduced to one dog, a cat or two, the painter himself, a.

Daughter of the picture-dealer Alexandre Bernheim. He had known her for four years; it seems to have been a marriage based on both love and good sense. Vallotton, never over-emotional in expression, told his brother Paul that ‘she is a woman of surpassing goodness with whom I shall get along very well’; everything would be ‘very reasonable’; while the Bernheim family was ‘very honourable and rich’. Gabrielle, thirty-five to his thirty-three, a widow whose first husband had killed himself, had.

People the surprise of any Vallotton show. In every decade he was painting sunsets – always sunsets, never sunrises. This would seem to chime with his temperament – except that they are bold, lush things, his sunsets, fiery explosions: Sunset at Villerville (1917), almost hallucinatory in its swathes of orange, purple and black, is closer to Munch. The Pond (Honfleur) by Vallotton In his daytime landscapes he brought his own interpretation to the idealising tradition of Poussin and Rubens.

Overlook such shiftingness, the hypotheticals that never occurred. We also easily forget that a great and serious artistic adventure may still contain a strong element of fun at its start: see the Bauhaus. Old artists grow solemn when feted by young critics, and may misremember the glee, the jokiness, the risk and the doubt of their less-observed younger days. Cubism was a profound reinvention of how and what we see; it was, as Picasso told Françoise Gilot, ‘a kind of laboratory experiment from.

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