Tim Hilton
Art for Books’ Sake
Cézanne: A Life
By Alex Danchev
Profile Books 490pp £30
The founders of modern art often led exceptional lives and surely deserve memorable biographies, but there haven’t been many such good books, and I wonder why not? The first reason must be that triumphs in art do not easily translate into eloquent words. We appreciate with our eyes, not our pens. Paul Cézanne presents writers with an especial problem. More than with most artists, his canvases make us pause and reconsider. A visual poet of stillness, he calms the impulse to applaud, while the business of life goes on elsewhere, at a different pace. Thus the responses to his best painting tend to slow or even halt the biographer’s narrative.
Another reason for the lack of artists’ biographies is that significant painters have been well served by the museum system. The last half century has been a great age of retrospective exhibitions. Scholarly catalogues have accompanied the shows, with separate works individually described by more than one writer. Events in
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
Twitter Feed
When @djbduncan notices the text for a literary jigsaw puzzle had been written by a former colleague, his head spins. A wild surmise. Are jigsaws REF-able?
Dennis Duncan - The W Factor
Dennis Duncan: The W Factor
literaryreview.co.uk
In an effort to scold drinkers, Victorian temperance societies furiously marked every drinking establishment with a red X on city maps. It was a spectacular case of propaganda backfiring.
@foxtosser explores the history of drink maps
Edward Brooke-Hitching - From Beer Street to Gin Lane
Edward Brooke-Hitching: From Beer Street to Gin Lane - Drink Maps in Victorian Britain by Kris Butler
literaryreview.co.uk
How did a workers’ insurance agent who died of tuberculosis at the age of forty become a global literary icon?
@MortenHoiJensen on Kafka's metamorphosis
Morten Høi Jensen - Paranoid Humanoid
Morten Høi Jensen: Paranoid Humanoid - Metamorphoses: In Search of Franz Kafka by Karolina Watroba; Kafka: Making o...
literaryreview.co.uk