Book Reviews - Review 330

In his free-form early novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters, Julian Barnes included a philosophical-aesthetic appreciation of Géricault's "Raft of the Medusa". "Catastrophe into Art" was his first foray into art criticism; it was a wry but informative analysis of the painter's compromises with the historical truth of the depicted scene, a group of desperate sailors on a raft from a shipwreck, hailing the tiny speck of a ship on the horizon:

He answers his own question thus:

Such nuggets of insight abound in "Catastrophe into Art", an edited version of which starts this collection of art criticism. The pieces that follow are commissions from literary and fine arts periodicals, and mostly focus on individual artists. Barnes makes no claim to expertise in the visual arts, but his professional understanding of literary metaphor and allusion stands him in good stead, as does his deep and enthusiastic familiarity with French cultural history (most of the artists he writes about are French). His visual sense is acute, and his prose is always penetrating and well-crafted, steadfastly avoiding cliché and unthinking adherence to received opinion.

The book is well-organised, the essays in order of the artists' dates, rather than of publication. Therefore, it constitutes a narrow but coherent slice of art history from the early 19th Century (Géricault and Delacroix) to the recent past and present (Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin). Read back-to-back, the essays complement and illuminate each other, making this that rare type of book, a compilation that is more than the sum of its parts.

The essays from periodicals don't always match "Catastrophe into Art" in verve and wit; the former piece was presumably written at Barnes' own pace, and its brilliant exuberance evokes a happy and successful young novelist on a creative roll. But that is to be too picky; as with all the best criticism, one comes away from these essays hungry for exposure to the works discussed, whether with enthusiasm or with reservations. The only significant frustration is the illustrations: there are only one or two per artist, and they are all details, never full representations. The selections by Bonnard and Vuillard, in particular, don't do justice to the artists' range; with Bonnard, indeed, I wondered what the fuss was about, until I searched for his pictures on the Internet, which is certainly your friend in supplementing reading of this book.

Perhaps copyright limitations led to the paucity of good illustrations, and they might also explain the profusion of portraits by Fantin-Latour, not just in the chapter on Fantin-Latour, but in those on other artists as well. They're interesting paintings, but typically shed no light on the accompanying texts.

Only a couple of the pieces seemed to me weak, when taken as wholes. One is the analysis of Degas, which is basically a single-minded assault on charges of the artist's alleged misogyny. In his art, Barnes states, "it seems to me that Degas plainly loved women." He goes on:

This snideness is untypical of Barnes, and so different in tone from the measured and humane one of the other pieces that one wonders whether he was, himself, going through a bad patch personally when he wrote it. The quality of Degas's work is not in dispute, and nor is his appreciation of female beauty. But appreciation does not preclude envy, and a perverse envy of female beauty - as a sort of unattainable otherness - can be a factor in misogyny. But above all, there is Degas's own statement that "Women can never forgive me; they feel I am disarming them." If Degas did love women, in the general sense, it seems odd that they should have disliked him in return.

The other piece that doesn't completely come off is the final chapter, an epigrammatic sequence of paragraphs relating to Barnes' friendship with British semi-abstract artist Howard Hodgkin. The style resembles Alan Bennett's diaries, but the format doesn't work for Barnes as it does for Bennett. Bennett's natural style is pithy, succinct and personal, where Barnes's is expansive, detailed and detached; Barnes's attempts at aphoristic pungency too often leave the reader scratching their head rather than feeling it blasted by insight. ("Art is made from the tension of love and fear"... Er, if you say so, Julian.)

But as with his other non-fiction books, this one generally shows Barnes at his best, erudite but accessible, and full of informative detail arranged in such a way as not to tire the reader. Flaubert, one of Barnes's idols, wrote, "Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity," but Barnes disagrees, and I disagree with him: all great art, in whatever form, deserves analysis, which cannot create appreciation, but can certainly deepen it.