Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (Vintage International) [9781101873373]

Overview

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.


The book, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art (Vintage International) [Bulk, Wholesale, Quantity] ISBN#9781101873373 in Paperback by Julian Barnes may be ordered in bulk quantities. Minimum starts at 25 copies. Availability based on publisher status and quantity being ordered.