The Next Big Thing: Art Doesn't Love You

In chapter 4 of The Next Big Thing, Herz considers, and then rejects, a visit to the National Gallery to look at the Claudes and Turners - 'aware that art was indifferent to whatever requirements he might bring to the matter'. Art had proved 'fallacious' for his doomed brother Freddy, 'as if it were preferable to be the equivalent of a playground bully, a ruffian, rather than the suffering aesthete he had been in his former life'.

This isn't, however, for Brookner a late-life repudiation of her former calling. Even as a teacher she would (as we see below) tell her students, brilliantly and subversively, 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you':

By nature a shy and reserved figure, Brookner had a great flair for self-analysis. She also understood her students and their motivations with keen psychological insight – she encouraged the viewer to articulate his own feelings, as well as a vision based on his own character. The work of a particular artist, say, David, had to be analysed within the larger framework of historical circumstances; yet subjectivity could not be avoided. In the case of David, she saw the revolutionary hope of creating a world of higher morality and virtue dashed as the artist anticipated the Romantic ideal by relinquishing intellectual control. Most crucially, Brookner believed that art had to be emotionally alive, and she advocated Baudelaire's 'impeccable naïveté,' which she termed the 'ability to see the world always afresh, either in its tragedy or in its hope.'

Her advice was invaluable. Nearly every sentence she uttered is engraved in my memory. My fellow student Cornelia Grassi remembers the last thing Brookner said to her before our written exams: 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you.' As Baudelaire recognised, it provides temporary solace, at best.

Olivier Berggruen, Artforum, May 2016