![]() … And since there is so little wind, Bonnard leaves never fall from Bonnard trees.” … Those dappled woods are like wallpaper - though, since this is Bonnard wallpaper, it is wallpaper almost as alive as nature. He playfully characterizes Pierre Bonnard as “the painter of the Great Indoors, even when he’s painting the Great Outdoors. ![]() Offering smart and surprising responses to masterpieces and slighter works, unburdened by artspeak or pedantry, Barnes displays the virtues of an informed enthusiast armed with narrative instincts. Julian Barnes, the accomplished novelist and short story writer (“Arthur & George,” “Pulse”), tells us that a “great painting compels the spectator into verbal response, despite our awareness that any such articulations will be mere echoes of what others have already put more cogently and more knowledgeably.”īarnes subverts his own proposition with his first book-length foray into art criticism - a collection of 17 essays focusing chiefly on 19th- and early-20th-century French painters (the path from Romanticism to Realism to Modernism, from Géricault to Magritte, rounded out with two contemporary Brits, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin, and American sculptor Claes Oldenburg). ![]()
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