Keeping An Eye Open: Essays On Art

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Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & 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 we are very far from reaching that state We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things to form opinions to argue It is a rare picture which stuns or argues us into silence & if one does it is only a short time before we want to explain & understand the very silence into which we have been plunged' Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Gericault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 1012 Chapters Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays chiefly about French artists which trace the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism & into Modernism Fully illustrated in colour throughout Keeping an Eye Open contains Barnes' essays on Gericault Delacroix Courbet Manet Fantin-Latour Cezanne Degas Redon Bonnard Vuillard Vallotton Braque Magritte Oldenburg Howard Hodgkin & Lucian Freud