Keeping an Eye Open. Essays on Art: Julian Barnes

The updated edition of Julian Barnes’ best-loved writing on art, with seven new exquisite illustrated essays

‘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 Gericault’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, which trace the story of how art made its way from ...