Keeping an Eye Open

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.

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.

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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.)

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.

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.

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.