'Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art', by Julian Barnes

Δημοσιεύθηκε: 8 Μαΐου 2015 - 16:46

This collection of Julian Barnes's writings on art spans more than 25 years, opening with his chapter on Gericault's "The Raft of the Medusa" in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, and closing with his 2006 musings on his friend and hero Howard Hodgkin, although the most recently composed is an essay on Fantin-Latour from 2013.

So, the writings are not placed in chronological order; the art and the artists are. The project of the whole, loosely speaking, is to investigate what Barnes, in his delightful quasi-autobiographical introduction, describes as "how art (mainly French art) made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism", the -ism he calls "my" movement.

From Gericault, therefore, the essays move through the French artists - Delacroix, Courbet - to a superb piece on the unevenness of Manet, and others sharply defending Degas against charges of misogyny and Bonnard against charges of, well, basically being very nice to look at. There is Cezanne, of course, and Braque. Then, echoing perhaps the course of European 20th-century art, he moves away from the French and towards Belgium (Magritte) and finally to Britain, to Lucian Freud and Hodgkin. His single foray into the Americas is a cheerful demolition job on the work of Claes Oldenburg - "an art that gooses you, that gives you a visual gargle".

With that exception, Barnes's version of the long 20th century has no place for the great American abstractionists, pop artists and the rest. A good decision: this magnificent survey draws its strength from its intensely personal focus, each piece reverberating off others despite the long span of their composition. It's a stream of thinking, over years, rather than a set of disparate essays.

That thinking about the visual sphere is profoundly informed by his own primary art, literature. He may well quote his beloved Flaubert saying that one art cannot inform another, but it's no use - his perceptions are peppered with literary parallels, references, anecdotes. Here's one, a skippy way of describing the birth pangs of modernism: "Ezra Pound said he would throw the brick through the window while TS Eliot went round the back and grabbed the swag; and so it proved. And there's a sense in which Manet threw the brick and Impressionists grabbed the swag . . . "

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Barnes is a disarming stylist, and he sets his tone as a jovial guide rather than a prescriptive expert. Phrases such as "It look me a lot of looking before I understood that . . ." or "I didn't realise - couldn't yet see - how . . . " preface opinions in a way that is both charming and apparently egalitarian, almost humble. But watch out with that. There is real intellectual steel here, and no quarter given to sloppy thinking. Barnes's reactions and analyses are predicated on careful and precise looking. For instance: at the feet of the firing squaddies in Manet's "The Execution of Maximilian" (position; weight distribution; addition of unrealistic white spats for emphasis). He relishes this detail, "feet sinking themselves in for useful work, like when a golfer shuffles for balance in a bunker", which in turn leads us to feel that "these executioners are not a block of death-dealers . . . they are soldiers carrying out quotidian duties which happen to include executing an emperor".

Something else is going on in this volume, too: Barnes is caught between his predilection for a story and his disdain for the biographical. Opening his piece on Freud, he evokes Rembrandt's "The Painter in His Studio", in which the small figure of the artist is overshadowed by the great easel in the foreground: an unmistakable statement of priorities. Barnes underlines it: "So we are to understand: it is the art which illuminates, which gives the artist both his being and his significance, rather than the other way round."

And yet . . . this book might well have been subtitled "Essays on Artists". The lives are invariably an essential ingredient in Barnes's mix. He delves into Degas's views on women (did he or didn't he?); Delacroix's relish of social position; the other important woman in Bonnard's life; and much more. Yet he rails against "personal art" in a think-piece called "So Does It Become Art?"; on Vuillard, he calls attributions extracted from the life story "a small but significant betrayal of the artist". Again and again, he worries at the backstory question: this is so, but does it matter? What if it weren't so, would it make any difference?

It's a struggle that lends these essays extra subtlety and depth. Barnes the great wordsmith is beguiled by the wordless art he feels very deeply, but also feels himself challenged and perhaps even rebuked by it. The non-verbal arts do that to the writer. He quotes Freud's remark that anything he said about his art would be as relevant "as the noise a tennis player produces when playing a shot". Barnes's own role in making that noise, in writing about art, is not something on which he comments. He just gives us this fascinating and brilliant book instead.

Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art, by Julian Barnes, Jonathan Cape, RRP£16.99, 288 pages

Jan Dalley is the FT's arts editor

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