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Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

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Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

An extraordinary collectionâ€”hawk-eyed and understandingâ€”from the Man Booker Prizeâ€“winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life.

As Julian Barnes notes: â€œFlaubert 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.â€

This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10Â½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on GÃ©ricaultâ€™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, CÃ©zanne, 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.

From the Hardcover edition.
Country USA
Manufacturer Vintage
Binding Kindle Edition
ReleaseDate 2015-10-06
Format Kindle eBook
EANs 9781101874790

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