Keeping an Eye Open

Keeping an Eye Open Synopsis

An extraordinary collection--hawk-eyed and understanding--from the Booker Prize-winning, bestselling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life.As Julian Barnes explains: "e;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 which 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."e; 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.