As an art enthusiast, I figured that this book would be
right up my alley. Barnes is a rather well-known novelist who has written about
art and artists for a while. This is a collection of his essays on the subject.
To be honest, I felt as though the quality of these essays
was rather variable. I quite liked the first one, but it's fundamentally
different from all of the other essays in the collection. The first one is a
deep dive into the circumstances surrounding a particular painting, while the
others are typically essays about a painter's general life and work. I can't
help but wish he had the increased focus of the first essay on a single
painting instead of the broader focus which often feels like too much in the
other chapters. Similarly, I liked his essay on "So is it art?" towards
the end, but again, it stands alone in this book.
On a related note, I'm not sure what the order was of these
essays. I would have ended with "So is it art?" but that essay is
followed by two more chapters on specific artists. My best guess is chronological
by the artist he's talking about, but then the more meta essay is just thrown
in at random. Possibly it's chronological based on when he wrote the essays,
but that just seems so insufficient for a work that is focused on art rather
than collecting all of Barnes' essays. Either way, I don't understand the
order, for the most part it flows alright but I have no idea what the overall
structure is.
My biggest problem though with this book is that it has this
annoying tendency to allude to all of these fancy painters and pictures, but
doesn't show examples of half of them! This leads to either pulling out a phone
and Googling every other sentence or just accepting that the example goes over
your head and moving on. Books about art need to show art as well, just
describing it is hardly enough. And even if I was familiar with the painting
being referenced, the work would still benefit from giving an example right
there, next to the text.
I'm being rather harsh though, Barnes has a number of
interesting insights into the lives of the painters he writes about, and how
their work affected the world around them. I quite liked the chapters on Manet,
Degas, and Hodgkin in particular. But I do wish that I went into this book
knowing a little more about what to expect and what I would be getting out of
it.
No comments:
Post a Comment