num_pages: 276
description: '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... 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.'Julian Barnes began writing about art with a chapter on Gricault's The Raft of the Medusa in his 1989 novel A History of the World in 10 Chapters. Since then he has written a series of remarkable essays  chiefly about French artists for a variety of journals and magazines. Gathering them for this book he realised that he had unwittingly been retracing the story of how art made its way from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism.
language: English
title: Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art
publisher: Jonathan Cape