Keeping an eye open : essays on art / Julian Barnes.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Barnes, Julian, author.

Standardized Title:

Essays. Selections

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Art, Modern--19th century.

Art, Modern.

Art, Modern--20th century.

Genre:

Essays.

Physical Description:

viii, 278 pages : color illustrations ; 23 cm

Edition:

First American edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Summary:

"An extraordinary collection-- hawk-eyed and understanding-- from the Booker Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. As Julian Barnes explains: "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." This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. Barnes, in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters, had a chapter on Gericault'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, Cezanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Howard Hodgkin, and Lucian Freud. The seventeen essays gathered here are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read " -- Source other than Library of Congress.

Contents:

Géricault : catastrophe into art

Delacroix : how romantic?

Courbet : it's not like that, it's like this

Manet : in black and white

Fantin-Latour : men in a line

Cézanne : does an apple move?

Degas : and women

Redon : upwards, upwards!

Bonnard : Marthe, Marthe, Marthe, Marthe

Vuillard : you can call him Édouard

Vallotton : the foreign Nabi

Braque : the heart of painting

Magritte : bird into egg

Oldenburg : good soft fun

So does it become art?

Freud : the episodicst

Hodgkin : words for H.H.

Notes:

Originally published: London : Jonathan Cape, 2015.

Includes bibliographical references.

Local Notes:

Athenaeum copy: Jones Fund bookplate.

ISBN:

9781101874783

1101874783

OCLC:

907391590

Online:

Cover image