This new collection from the amiable Francophile gathers his various writings through the years on art. It's chatty, benignly perceptive and has well-presented reproductions of the paintings under consideration.
Among his many books - which are mostly filed under 'fiction' - Julian Barnes is author also of Levels of Life, the moving and memoir/imaginative exploration of his life after the passing of his wife, the much-loved literary agent Pat Kavanagh. Prior to that, he wrote that fine novel, The Sense of an Ending which won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.
In this new selection of essays, he treats with Delacroix, Courbet, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenbourg, Howard Hodgkin and Lucien Freud. Géricault is also given due consideration, whose The Raft of the Medusa he wrote about in a chapter of his 1989 novel, A History of the World in 10 1/2 chapters.
Barnes is a perceptive `reader’ of art and picks up on the salient, necessary stuff, with no boring tangents. He springboards on the poet Philip Larkin, who once questioned that oft-vaunted notion of the artist’s `development.’ “An artist’s true development may be less a discussable succession of styles than a determined readressing of visual truth, a fretting at the way in which beauty emerges from form, or form develops out of beauty,” writes Barnes.
He quotes the artist Pierre Bonnard (1867-1947) towards the end of his life. “I am an old man now and I begin to see that I do not know any more than I knew when I was young.” Barnes remarks that Bonnard was not only being modest, but was also wise, by stating such a home truth.
He has a chatty, amiably bossy style in the 272-page collection. “Forget the weather; what can be deduced from the personnel on the raft itself? “ he demands, prodding us to take a good look at The Raft of the Medusa, which like many of the paintings being discussed is reproduced on its own page.
Barnes proceeds onwards, rolling up his sleeves to address Géricault’s masterpiece. “Why not start with a head-count. There are twenty figures on board.” The reader is always foremost in Barnes’ mind, you never feel left out. “There are two main problems with (Odile) Redon, “ he writes, “one of them ours, one of them his.” You simply just have to read on to find out what’s wrong with you, even in the matter of art appreciation.
Clearly the author's late wife is still proving to be a fount of inspiration."Pat Kavanagh saw most of these pictures with me, and is at my side in the text" is the final line in the list of acknowledgments.
Paddy Kehoe
