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Keeping an Eye Open

ebook
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.

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Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Kindle Book

  • Release date: October 6, 2015

OverDrive Read

  • ISBN: 9781101874790
  • File size: 39775 KB
  • Release date: October 6, 2015

EPUB ebook

  • ISBN: 9781101874790
  • File size: 41720 KB
  • Release date: October 6, 2015

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Formats

Kindle Book
OverDrive Read
EPUB ebook

subjects

Art Nonfiction

Languages

English

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.

Expand title description text