The Brooknerian

Regular visitors to this blog will know of my devotion to Anita Brookner's interviews. Five are available on the web - the Paris Review interview, the 1990s Independent interview , and three from the 2000s (the Observer , the Independent again, and the last interview in 2009 in the Telegraph ). In printed form there are the Olga Kenyon and the John Haffenden interviews, both from the 1980s. The Haffenden exchange remains to my mind the best Anita Brookner interview. You will conceive of my delight at discovering several fresh interviews on the Guardian / Observer archive website . I propose to cover these over the coming days. We start with a piece in the Guardian on 27 May 1981, 'Finding the art of fiction', published to coincide with the publication of Brookner's first novel A Start in Life . As well as giving in remarkably finished form her later familiar responses to questions about her motivations for writing ('Socially she has always had the sensation o...

If Brookner in her novels tells us how to live, in her art criticism she teaches us to see and distinguish and value. I enjoyed my visit to the Wallace Collection , but I suspect I may be among the viewers she identifies here: Greuze's pictures have an immediate appeal - to the sentimental and untutored, of whom, fortunately, there are still many. ( Greuze , Conclusion) Her reaction to the uneven oeuvre of Jean-Baptiste Greuze, perhaps rather more than to that of Jacques-Louis David, subject of her other major study, gives insight into her taste. She dislikes much of Greuze's work, but singles out a handful of works for our appreciation and instruction: The painter who could respond so openly to the civilized charm of the Marquise de Bezons, who could remember the exact stance of a bashful country girl, who could paint Wille and Sophie Arnould and the luminous infant Bertin* is one who deserves a permanent place not only in histories of art but in the affections of those w...

...exhibited in the Salon of 1800 was the last Jeune fille qui pleure la mort de son oiseau (Louvre) which is not so much a study in double meaning as a fascinating piece of mannerism. The heavy hair has acquired a serpentine life of its own and twines in and out of the knotted drapery. The hands are boneless and affected, the head very large in proportion to the body. The effect is increased by the tired soiled colours... Brookner, Greuze , ch. 7 This is not to say that Brookner's own style ever became affected, coagulated - but that she knew the dangers awaiting an artist over the long term. Greuze painted what his audience and presumably he liked to see, and thereby lost objectivity, thereby grew unable to see his own shortcomings. Brookner certainly had her detractors , though her supporters outnumbered them. And no one was probably as sceptical as Brookner herself - never quite enamoured of the idea of being a writer of fiction, and, while maintaining the integrity of a...

Richardson's novels, far-fetched and of poor quality in any language... Anita Brookner, Greuze , ch. 2 Brookner's chief beef with Samuel Richardson is a well-worn one: his didacticism: 'one was expected to read his novels in the virtuous anticipation of being instructed'. She condemns his 'almost professional assurance that virtue will triumph'; such uplift is 'spurious'. And she has her suspicions that many of his readers would have gained 'more than a little excitement' from the more lurid aspects of his fiction. I don't often disagree with Anita Brookner (I probably wouldn't be writing this if I did). I agree with her as far as Richardson's first novel, Pamela , is concerned, a dull and ridiculous book if ever there was one, and I haven't read his last, Sir Charles Grandison (who has, other than Jane Austen?), but I tend to think of Clarissa as one of the greatest novels in any language - absorbing, immersive, and not ...

It was all too obvious to the spectator that this was another allegory of lost innocence, but it appeared, to Mme Roland, among others, a remarkably decent work. It is certainly, for a subject of this type, a very painterly one. The luscious tender flesh, still painted with Rubens shadows of grey and blue, is now on the verge of decadence; the plump hands are becoming mannered. The dress, roughly painted with stiff loaded brush-strokes, sets off the melting Greuzian softness of the head, and the colours of the accessories (pink roses, green leaves, dark grey-blue sky) overflatter the tender passages. Yet in spite of all this the girl seems to have been painted as a study, i.e. objectively, and the stillness of the figure, a quality rare in Greuze, almost triumphs over the double entendre . Anita Brookner on Greuze's La Cruche Cassée (Louvre) in Greuze  (1971), ch. 7 Brookner struggles with Greuze. She struggles to like him and struggles to praise him. She isn't much of a ...

I found the following on Twitter. I've no idea where it originates, but it's good. Good advice too. I like the 'triumphantly'.

The mid-eighteenth fashion for sensibility - sensibilité , as Brookner calls it - will be familiar to English students like myself, bringing back memories of being force-fed Richardson's Pamela , Henry Mackenzie's The Man of Feeling and, with more enjoyment, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey . Sensibility soon became a sort of cult, ripe for send-up by Jane Austen, but at its start it was less a rejection of than a complement to Enlightenment reason, as well as being a rehearsal for Romanticism. Brookner's focus in  Greuze: The Rise and Fall of an Eighteenth-Century Phenomenon (1972) is largely art-historical; she places sensibility more precisely 'between the more important and recognizable styles of Rococo and Neoclassicism'. At the same time she traces in some detail the movement's origins in the religious conflicts of the previous century and the earlier eighteenth. Traditional piety, thrown into disrepute, left a gap, a gap filled by the likes of...