‘Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art,’ by Julian Barnes

The challenge for anyone who writes about the static arts is to make the mind of the reader move in imagined (or recollected) response to them. [...] a novelist such as Julian Barnes, celebrated author of “Flaubert’s Parrot” and “Arthur and George,” among other fictions, and of a cluster of nonfiction books in moods ranging from bemused meditation to still-stinging grief, ought to enjoy an advantage when he turns his attention to visual art. The first segment in the anthology, devoted mainly to French and British art and ordered chronologically by the artists’ birth dates, reproduces the centerpiece of Barnes’ narrative-juggling 1989 novel “A History of the World in 10½ Chapters”: a gripping forensic and interpretive account of Theodore Gericault’s “The Raft of the Medusa” (1818-19). Reaching to the roots of the painting’s history in political scandal and human disaster — cowardice, betrayal, mutiny, cannibalism and legal redress — Barnes ends with an existential reading of Gericault’s epochal image of castaways desperately calling for rescue that brings it home to the present: “We don’t just imagine the ferocious miseries on that fatal machine,” he writes of the “Raft,” we don’t just become the sufferers. More than chronology justifies this essay’s priority: it forewarns us of Barnes’ critical severity, as well as his recognition that every account of an artwork is an elaborate story, with many sources to draw upon. See his spirited defense of Edgar Degas against accusations of misogyny by feminist critics’ and the facile orthodoxy they seem to have spawned. At times, Barnes persuades, even prevails, as I believe an art critic must, by sheer evocative force of description, as when he writes of Pierre Bonnard: These French interiors, with heat outside and languor within, these meals, this fruit, those fat-bellied jugs, the window, the view from the window, the blood-red under-tablecloth, the propped-open door, the fat radiator, the appealing cat — doesn’t this look like the platonically ideal gite from Vacances Franco-Brittaniques? A recurrent theme, along with Barnes’ dislike of art governed by concept or prescriptive taste, is his disdain for the marketing uses of bits of artists’ biographies. The book’s disappointing surprise, especially following a vehemently ambivalent assessment of the vaunted Lucian Freud, is Barnes’ oddly stuttering appreciation of Howard Hodgkin, whom he knows well and collects. A few remarks about the art, such as that Hodgkin’s painting “burns,” regardless of its palette, hit home. From time to time, sitting in a bar, looking across a piazza, relaxing in a restaurant, he will say, with a delivery poised between self-satire and true contentment, ‘I feel a picture coming on.’