(Jonathan Cape, £16.99)
The essays in Julian Barnes’s new collection, Keeping an Eye Open, all on the subject of art, were written between 1989 and 2013. They mainly cover French painting between 1850 and 1920 with three outlying chapters about Claes Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They are typical of their author in that they provide a masterclass in how to think aloud without showing off.
There’s a temptation for critics to treat a novelist’s essays and non-fiction as a source to be mined for insights into the fiction but here, Barnes is characteristically ahead of his readers; he blurs the distinction right from the beginning. The collection (arranged chronologically by painter) opens with the piece that was written earliest: a chapter on Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, lifted from his novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989). Barnes’s recreation of the real voyage the painting describes, followed by an account of how Géricault came to paint the scene, then by his own analysis of what’s on the canvas, is a virtuoso mix of lightly worn learning, speculation and description.
Barnes neatly describes his own method when he writes, “Let us reimagine our eye into ignorance.” The essays on Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, particular highlights, reveal Barnes to be excellent at looking: at describing what he sees—and what it feels like to see it. And when writing of René Magritte that “He rejects the fantastic, and the free-associative, in favour of the argued, the systematic,” it’s easy to see why Barnes approves of the qualities his own work epitomises.
The essays in Julian Barnes’s new collection, Keeping an Eye Open, all on the subject of art, were written between 1989 and 2013. They mainly cover French painting between 1850 and 1920 with three outlying chapters about Claes Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. They are typical of their author in that they provide a masterclass in how to think aloud without showing off.
There’s a temptation for critics to treat a novelist’s essays and non-fiction as a source to be mined for insights into the fiction but here, Barnes is characteristically ahead of his readers; he blurs the distinction right from the beginning. The collection (arranged chronologically by painter) opens with the piece that was written earliest: a chapter on Théodore Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa, lifted from his novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters (1989). Barnes’s recreation of the real voyage the painting describes, followed by an account of how Géricault came to paint the scene, then by his own analysis of what’s on the canvas, is a virtuoso mix of lightly worn learning, speculation and description.
Barnes neatly describes his own method when he writes, “Let us reimagine our eye into ignorance.” The essays on Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, particular highlights, reveal Barnes to be excellent at looking: at describing what he sees—and what it feels like to see it. And when writing of René Magritte that “He rejects the fantastic, and the free-associative, in favour of the argued, the systematic,” it’s easy to see why Barnes approves of the qualities his own work epitomises.
