Thomas Marks
Painting with Words
Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art
By Julian Barnes
Jonathan Cape 276pp £16.99 order from our bookshop
Artists often shy away from speaking about their work, or shrink from what others have to say about it. Sometimes that’s because their fluency with, say, a paintbrush or chisel isn’t matched by a corresponding verbal facility; but more frequently it’s a calculated choice, based on the feeling that words have a way of leaching art of what makes it most powerful or inscrutable. Braque once claimed, ‘The only thing that matters in art is what cannot be explained’, while Degas pronounced that ‘words are not necessary: you say humph, hé, ha, and everything has been said’.
A lot of writing about art only reinforces the notion that one would be better off looking more closely at paintings or sculptures than in setting aside time to read about them. Connoisseurial art history, where it is still practised, tends to be so keenly focused on getting its facts straight that it forgets how those facts might be used as
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