Keeping an Eye Open
Julian Barnes
Vintage Publishing
<span>An extraordinary collection—hawk-eyed and understanding—from the Man Booker Prize–winning, best-selling author of </span><span>The Sense of an Ending </span><span>and </span><span>Levels of Life</span><span>.<br><br>  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.”<br><br> This is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel </span><span>A History of the World in 10½ Chapters,</span><span> Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s </span><span>The Raft of the Medusa,</span><span>  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.</span>