Julian Barnes. (2015). Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Julian Barnes. 2015. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays On Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays On Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

Julian Barnes. Keeping an Eye Open: Essays On Art. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2015.

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1. • value: Romanticism
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31. • value: Design
32. • value: Renaissance
33. • value: how to
34. • value: Essays
35. • value: Cezanne
36. • value: artwork
37. • value: Manet
38. • value: julian barnes
39. • value: art book
40. • value: art books
41. • value: braque
42. • value: magritte
43. • value: bonnard
44. • value: delacroix
45. • value: gericault
46. • value: howard hodgkin
47. • value: lucien freud
48. • value: redon
49. • value: the raft of the medusa
50. • value: vallotton
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1. • role: Author
   • fileAs: Barnes, Julian
   • bioText: JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty previous books, for which he has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, the David Cohen Prize for Literature and the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in France, the Prix Médicis and the Prix Femina; and in Austria, the State Prize for European Literature. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. He lives in London.
   • name: Julian Barnes

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2015-10-06T00:00:00-04:00

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title

Keeping an Eye Open

fullDescription

An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending.
“An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review
As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert 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.”
This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and since then he has written about many great masters of art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, 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.

reviews

1. • premium: False
   • source: Sara Catterall, Shelf Awareness
   • content: "Perceptive and entertaining. . . . Anyone with a serious interest in art will enjoy these essays, no matter their level of knowledge. This is a book to be read and reread for both information and pleasure."
2. • premium: False
   • source: Cate McQuaid, The Boston Globe
   • content: "Barnes puzzles over the intimate lives of artists and casts a generous and discerning eye over the small, painterly decisions that imbue a canvas with force. . . . Great art can take all we've got to throw at it, and as time passes, whatever we throw turns to dust and the art remains. Barnes knows this. Indeed, he revels in it. Great art, to him, is an interrogator and a liberator. The more we look, the more our presumptions shatter."
3. • premium: False
   • source: Becca Rothfeld, The Washington Post
   • content: "Barnes places static images within narrative contexts that enliven and animate them [and] all of these essays share this novelistic tone and are rich with anecdotes. . . . [Barnes's] strikingly eloquent lines [hit] with the force of a kick. He deals not in argument but in persuasion. . . . The point is sheer enchantment."
4. • premium: False
   • source: The Independent
   • content: "A dazzling collection. . . about many wondrous things."
5. • premium: False
   • source: The Financial Times
   • content: "Fascinating and brilliant. . . . This magnificent survey draws its strength from its intensely personal focus, each piece reverberating off the others. . . . It's a stream of thinking, over years."
6. • premium: False
   • source: The Tatler
   • content: "Erudite, entertaining and highly personal."
7. • premium: False
   • source: The Irish Independent
   • content: "An artwork invites the eye to look. How head, heart and imagination respond is explored and captured here with apparent ease and great skill. . . . It's a readable, riveting, informed work with sharp, marvellous anecdotes and observations. . . . In this beautifully illustrated book you're in great company."
8. • premium: False
   • source: The Evening Standard
   • content: "Extremely rewarding, informative, attentive, thoughtful, entertaining."
9. • premium: False
   • source: Art Quarterly
   • content: "Barnes weaves biography, history, philosophy in this fascinating, richly illuminating and beautifully written book."
10. • premium: False
    • source: The New Statesman
    • content: "If only all art writing were as good as this."
11. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 22, 2015
      In these sharply observed essays, English novelist Barnes (Sense of an Ending), levels his fine critical eye at the visual arts, principally focusing on French painting and the transition from romanticism to modernism. The Booker Prize–winning novelist first wrote about art for his novel A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), which contains a study of Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa; that study is this collection’s stirring opener. French art remains Barnes’s forte, and the book includes pieces on Eugène Delacroix, Édouard Manet, Odilon Redon, and Georges Braque. He submits thoughts on these and other artists with sentences that coolly snap and continually delight. In his wonderful study of Edgar Degas’s portrayals of women, Barnes knocks down the charge of misogyny and shows an argumentative spirit that is somewhat wanting in other places. “Do you constantly and obsessively fret at the representation of something you dislike or despise?” he provocatively asks. Barnes also revisits Édouard Vuillard’s late paintings and Henri Fantin-Latour’s star-studded group portraits; vividly brings out the crude bravado of Gustave Courbet, “a great painter, but also a serious publicity act”; and questions some of the more astronomical praise of Paul Cézanne. He is equally deft on non-French artists, too. Pop artist Claes Oldenburg’s work is “about as political as a hot dog,” and Lucian Freud’s pictures are exclusively about the “here and now.” It’s both a pleasure and an education to look over Barnes’s shoulder as he interrogates, wonders at, and relishes works of art. He’s a critic who prioritizes the objects themselves, and his work is always satisfying. Illus.

12. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from June 1, 2015
      English novelist Barnes (Levels of Life, 2013, etc.) focuses his analytical prowess on significant artists and their oeuvres, opening fresh vistas to readers-and viewers. The author is an accomplished critic with a penetrating grasp of art history, but erudition never overwhelms the cogency or delights of his prose, as much about the heart as the mind. He decodes the romantic notion of a "charismatic, secret process" of art, arguing persuasively for the revolutionary influence of Manet and Cezanne on painting and stating that Cezanne is where modern art began. Art changes over time, as does what is considered art, and Barnes claims that it is difficult today to respond to an older work as the artist intended. Especially with works that have endured, we forget how quickly "the shock of the new becomes absorbed, museumified and commodified." Also, each new art movement implies a reassessment of the past, thus altering it, but also "re-alerting the sensibility, reminding us not to take things for granted." So we locate new stimulation in the work, knowing that all art movements have inherent strengths, weaknesses, and shelf lives and that painters seldom live to see exactly what they achieved. Barnes weighs the possibility of prejudice in his own observations, yet little is betrayed. Cannily, he wonders if the greatest art is that which melds beauty with mystery, which withholds "even as it luminously declares." He reminds us that just as art moves on, so do art history and museum conventions. Works of art are not spared the vagaries of fashion or material decline. In time, subject matter becomes less important, while the skill of exhibition hanging (its geometry and narrative) remains pivotal. Barnes knows that one of the immeasurable pleasures of art is its capacity to approach us from unexpected angles and excite our senses of wonder. The same may be said of his scholarly and astute yet accessible and exciting essays.

      COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

13. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      October 15, 2015
      Whether he's writing Booker Prizewinning fiction (The Sense of an Ending, 2011) or delving essays, Barnes is a consummate stylist, not only because of his artistic command of language but also by virtue of his searching intelligence, incisive candor, rogue wit, and righteous fairness. He brings these fine-honed qualities, along with his fluency in human complexity, to art criticism, elevating the entire endeavor to a spirited form of inquiry into creators, creations, and their reception. And his subjects are magnetizing. Barnes' reassessment of French painter Edouard Vuillard is a standout as he parses the tricky intersection of biography and critical analysis. Personal elements enliven his keen scrutiny of the work of Swiss painter Felix Vallotton. Barnes vividly recounts the wretched tale of ineptness, shipwreck, cruelty, and horror that inspired Theodore Gericault's shrewdly composed The Raft of the Medusa. Fantin-Latour, Braque, Magritte, Redon, Freud (Lucian)all are given the invigorating Barnes treatment as he tracks the course art (especially French painting) took as it made its leaping, alarming, liberating way from romanticism to modernism. Handsomely illustrated, superbly written, felicitously thought-provoking.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2015, American Library Association.)

14. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      Starred review from December 1, 2015
      

      This impressive title examines 19th-century French art as a manly morality tale beginning with romanticism in 1825 and extending up to cubism in 1925. Four final chapters address English and American art since World War II. Barnes is a well-known, multi-award-winning English author of fiction (A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters; Flaubert's Parrot) and nonfiction (The Pedant in the Kitchen; Nothing To Be Frightened Of). This volume assembles key book and exhibition reviews Barnes published in leading journals such as Modern Painters and the New York Review of Books since the 1980s. The author digs into fascinating details of isometric proportions based on many scholarly biographical and autobiographical works. Some illustrations are absent, but they can be pieced together by readers. Both artists and their clients have been aware of the destructive effect of industrialization for hundreds of years, and this book explores its impact on the socioeconomic base in the lives of artists and the forms of paintings. VERDICT Comparable to New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's Let's See, Barnes's latest is highly recommended to all art readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr., MA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

15. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      May 1, 2015
      

      Man Booker Prize winner and best-selling novelist Barnes here collects 17 of his essays on art--not so unexpected when you consider that his 1989 novel, A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters, has a chapter on Gericault's magnificent The Raft of the Medusa. As Barnes himself says, "Flaubert believed 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." Here's to understanding painters from Delacroix to Magritte to Lucian Freud.

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

16. • premium: True
    • source:
    • content:

      December 1, 2015
      

      This impressive title examines 19th-century French art as a manly morality tale beginning with romanticism in 1825 and extending up to cubism in 1925. Four final chapters address English and American art since World War II. Barnes is a well-known, multi-award-winning English author of fiction (A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters; Flaubert's Parrot) and nonfiction (The Pedant in the Kitchen; Nothing To Be Frightened Of). This volume assembles key book and exhibition reviews Barnes published in leading journals such as Modern Painters and the New York Review of Books since the 1980s. The author digs into fascinating details of isometric proportions based on many scholarly biographical and autobiographical works. Some illustrations are absent, but they can be pieced together by readers. Both artists and their clients have been aware of the destructive effect of industrialization for hundreds of years, and this book explores its impact on the socioeconomic base in the lives of artists and the forms of paintings. VERDICT Comparable to New Yorker art critic Peter Schjeldahl's Let's See, Barnes's latest is highly recommended to all art readers. [See Prepub Alert, 4/13/15.]--Peter S. Kaufman, Boston Architectural Ctr., MA

      Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

popularity

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An extraordinary collection of essays on the great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art—from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending.
“An engaging and empathetic volume.” —The New York Times Book Review
As Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert 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.”
This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa, and...

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