Paintings Worth Thousands of Words
Gustave Flaubert — the subject of Julian Barnes’s magical novel-biography- meditation, “Flaubert’s Parrot” — argued that great paintings required no words of explanation. But as Mr. Barnes writes in “Keeping an Eye Open,” an illuminating new collection of essays on art, “put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way.”
Mr. Barnes chatters like the gifted novelist he is, using his eye for the telling detail, his narrative intuition and his understanding of the creative process to help us see familiar artists like Degas, Braque and Magritte afresh, and to appreciate the work of lesser-known masters as well.
Mr. Barnes writes with an easy understanding of the tension between life and art. He also conveys an appreciation of artists’ technique, as it has been learned from predecessors and developed through experimentation. He situates a masterwork in the context of its creator’s career, and that career within the larger arc of art history.
He contrasts the work of the arrogant, dominating Picasso to the
Pcalm, almost Zen-like paintings of Braque; and he suggests a connection between Lucian Freud’s careless, unfaithful life — running through scores of lovers and fathering at least 14 children — and what he describes as a “cold and ruthless” quality to his paintings of women.
The subjects here are chosen somewhat arbitrarily. But taken together, they tell the story of how artists moved from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism. He traces the shifting values we place on the sort of transformations — subtle, grand, surreal, satirical — these painters worked on reality, while examining the mysterious dynamic between individual artists’ gifts and an emerging cultural zeitgeist.
Mr. Barnes succinctly evokes the contradictions embodied by Delacroix: a “self- defended man who feared passion and valued above all tranquillity,” but whose art spoke of “extravagance, passion, violence, excess.” He describes Courbet — “a great painter, but also a serious publicity act” whose family motto might well have been “Shout loud and walk straight.” And he asserts that much as Manet made Courbet seem part of the tradition, so would Cézanne make Manet feel like a part of the fast receding past.
The speed with which these changes occurred is breathtaking in retrospect: How quickly the Cubists and many who followed “took over, absorbed and cannibalized Cézanne.”
“He is where modern art — even Modern Art — begins,” he writes.
Of Courbet’s “L’Atelier,” Mr. Barnes notes that its depiction of the painter working on a landscape (in a studio) implies that Courbet is “doing more than merely reproducing the known, established world — he is creating it anew himself.”
In another chapter, he wryly observes that portraits created by Cézanne, who once exhorted a model to be still “like an apple,” were really still lifes, not depictions of “human beings who do normal human things like talk, laugh and move.”
These may not be revelatory insights, but one appeal of “Keeping an Eye Open” is that Mr. Barnes does not write as a scholar, but as an avid and thoughtful amateur — adept at conveying a tactile sense of a painting and its emotional penumbra, and its philosophical subtext, too.