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Keeping an Eye Open
Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art | Julian Barnes
2 posts | 1 read | 1 reading | 7 to read
An extraordinary collectionhawk-eyed and understandingfrom the Man Booker Prizewinning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. 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 10 Chapters, Barnes had a chapter on Gricaults 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, Czanne, 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. From the Hardcover edition.
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MrBook
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#TBRtemptation post 4! This is a poignant collection of essays on art history & criticism. It seems an arbitrary, unimportant discussion topic, but having been with the masterful @Bookbabe for a good while now, I've come to understand its vital role in culture & society. This collection traces art's development from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism, illustrating how this evolution reflects life itself. #blameLitsy #blameMrBook 😎

LitsyGoesPostal 😊👍🏻 7y
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TheLazyReader
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Mehso-so

You can judge this book by its title in this case because it is what it says "Essays on Art", not on a specific work of art rather on different artists sometimes relating to each other on throughout essays. I mostly enjoyed it but it is a slow read although it does not feel like academic writing.

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