Keeping an Eye Open Quotes

“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 we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way. Proust, when going round an art gallery, liked to comment on who the people in the pictures reminded him of in real life; which might have been a deft way of avoiding the direct aesethetic confrontation. 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.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (like the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age you were, remain persistently, indomitably great (Piero, Rembrandt, Degas). And then – perhaps the slowest advance of all – I permitted myself to believe, or rather see, that not all Modernism was entirely wonderful. That some parts of it were better than others; that maybe Picasso could be vainglorious, Miró and Klee could be twee, Léger could be repetitive, and so on. I eventually came to realise that Modernism had strengths and weaknesses and a built-in obsolescence, just like all other art movements. Which, as it happens, made it more rather than less interesting.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“We believe too little, and aesthetically know too much; so we re-create, we find new categories of pleasure in the work.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“The woman (assuming the artist is male) is always on a loser: if she brings money into a marriage, this is imprisoning; if she doesn’t, she brings anxiety. If she makes him happy, she dulls his artistic edge; if she doesn’t, she acts as an additional distraction from his art. And then there is sex (which a lot of this is often about). Even if prevailing social hypocrisies apply, and the man is allowed to roam – but appearances are kept up – what happens if he wants to write about it?”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“There is a strong tradition in the nineteenth century and on into the twentieth of artists seeing marriage as the enemy of art. Love, yes; marriage, no. Flaubert took the wedding of any literary friend as a personal betrayal, and beyond that, a betrayal of their shared art.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“You don’t paint souls, you paint bodies, and the soul shines through.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“Valéry held up Cézanne as ‘the example of the dedicated life’. Alex Danchev, in his new biography1, calls him ‘the exemplary artist-creator of the modern age’. An example more powerful than that of the artist who throws it all up (Gauguin found the voluptuous consolations of Tahiti in work and play; Rimbaud made good money as an arms trader), or the artist who goes mad and/or kills himself. More powerful because continuing to live can require more heroism than suicide: the constant work, constant striving, the frequent destruction of unsatisfactory work, and the need, as Cézanne saw it, for an incorruptibility in the life, on which incorruptibility of the work depended.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“It’s generally true that success, however defined, drives artistic friends apart more than failure does.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“Many artists live with the shadow version of themselves. Unawareness of how things might have been if they have done this and not that. If life had made this choice for them rather than that. The road not taken remains at the back of the mind. For some their shadow exists as an external presence, for others an inner haunting.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art

“The title of The Raft of the Medusa, incidentally, is not The Raft of the Medusa. The painting was listed in the Salon catalogue as Scène de naufrage – Scene of Shipwreck. A cautious political move? Perhaps. But it’s equally a useful instruction to the spectator: this is a painting, not an opinion.”
― Julian Barnes, Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art