Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.14 (615 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1101874783 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 288 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 2016-10-16 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
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. 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. 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. An extraordinary collection—hawk-eyed and understanding—from the Man Booker Prize–winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. 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 nineteenth- and twentieth-century 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.
Anyone with a serious interest in art will enjoy these essays, no matter their level of knowledge. And his subjects are magnetizing. How head, heart and imagination respond is explored and captured here with apparent ease and great skill. Kaufman, Library Journal“Perceptive and entertaining. This is a book to be read and reread for both information and pleasure.” —Sara Catterall, Shelf Awareness“Barnes puzzles over the intimate lives of artists and casts a generous
My eyes were certainly opened This is a collection of 17 elegant and immensely knowledgeable essays in which Julian Barnes discusses some famous artists (all but three francophone) and their work. The paper copies of the book illustrate a certain number of the works in colour; the Kindle illustrations are a rather muddy black and white. But Barnes analyzes far more paintings than he can illustrate. Many of these are rather little known, and for these you will have to go to Google Images. This makes for very slow reading, but without such access the book loses a good. "Great chronological review of the artists that changed art" according to Ken Mitchell. I have read this a couple of times through. I am a lover of art history and the artists that paved new paths. Mr Barnes is well educated in the subject. His essays review various artists chronologically so you get a sense of how art was evolving during the age of modernism. There is a good but not extensive set of plates but i found myself going on line to see more images than were provided. Glad to have it in my art history collection.. Five Stars Jared D Kaplan Fantastic essays on art for the interested onlooker
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. In 2004 he was named Commandeur de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. He lives in London. His work has been translated into more than thirty languages. M. . Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts a