The Brooknerian

Anita Brookner was never one for easy hyperbole, only for that which was earned and justified by time. One wonders what she would have made of 2020. No doubt she would have reserved judgement. Her essays and reviews are often at their most piquant when considering something from which she withholds praise. I've been reading 'Descent into the Untestable', a review in Soundings of a book of 1980 on regression in the arts from the eighteenth into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Analysis of large movements, notions such as the Enlightenment and Romanticism, will be familiar to readers of Brookner. In Providence (1982), Kitty Maule and her students mount lofty seductive arguments: Existentialism as a late manifestation of Romanticism - and the like. But Dr Brookner herself would caution her own pupils: Art doesn't love you and cannot console you. Here she argues for the limitations of art. 'Artistic traditions are self-generating and at best reflexive. One cannot...

As ever, Brookner scholar Dr Peta Mayer offers insightful comment (see Liverpool University Press blog here ). Her reading (misreading?) of a photograph of a smoking Brookner in a Wildean pose is particularly tangy. I myself have spied in Brookner's images wily references and analogues. Were the photographers in on such jokes, one wonders? The National Portrait Gallery holds another Lucy Anne Dickens ( here ), possibly taken at the same sitting as the Wilde shot. (The chair is the same, though not the sweater.) The chair to the side, the body in profile, the sidelong glance... the lamp... What bells ring in the subversive Brooknerian mind? Step forward, Madame Récamier...

She had, she said, offers of marriage, but none she could accept. Whom could she entrust her life to? And how could she be married while at the same time living the life she wanted to live? How could she be married while also being an art historian? She told one interviewer she never seriously thought the puzzle was solvable. At some point, she said, a wariness sets in, an understanding of other people’s motives – of men’s motives, the agendas of men. She didn’t want to be someone else’s prop. She said she never came close to marrying, because she never wanted to be married to the men who asked her. But she would have liked companionship and she would have liked children. Six sons, she said. One of her favourite pictures was David’s Oath of the Horatii in the Louvre, an image of three heroic brothers willing to sacrifice themselves for the good of Rome. Her parents wanted her to marry. When she didn’t marry, they wanted her to nurse them. If she had married she wouldn’t have be...

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 parti...

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...

We had some fun a little while back with Mme Récamier - reclining on her couch, turning to the viewer, and with that lamp. Now let us reconsider Mme Moitessier 's equally famous pose:

Now, with age, comes a new tranquillity ... a new bravery. Mme. David and her daughter are charmless women and no attempt is made to rearrange them, to work an act of artistic leger-de-main with their shawls and their sleeves and their head dresses, as would have been managed by Ingres ... to convey depths of hidden fascination. David's great gift to the portraiture of women is to show them not as they would wish to be shown as temple prostitutes, but rather as sturdy, confident creatures, no less competent but far less vain than men. Mme. David, still dressed in the satin shift, false curls and feathers she wore to court, reveals no hidden depths of erotic experience. She has no illusions about her appearance and neither has the spectator ... This revision of the concept of the female portrait, this fully frontal confidence and honesty, this refusal to embroider or even to arrange, must be counted as one of the aging David's most vital achievements. Brookner, Jacques-Louis...

Among the nymphs, with their fixed gaze and dowdily coiffed hair, can be seen the last avatar of Mme. Récamier… Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 13, 'Exile' David, Mars disarmed by Venus Brussels So in her novels, Brookner would present us with later versions of earlier characters. Emma Roberts is Claire Pitt; Paul Sturgis is George Bland. And Julius Herz? 'He's me, really. You were longing to say that, weren't you? And I thought I was making him up.' ( 2002 interview ) See also  The Brookner Room .

The child-bride, incredibly alone, does not charm; secure in her beauty, she is as bewildered by her isolation as we are. The accessories of the cruelly revealing studio are pared down to a lamp, painted by David’s newest pupil, Ingres, and the famous studio bed made by Jacob. Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 10, 'Recovery' Consideration of this famous David painting, its pose, its colours, its lamp, perhaps sheds a little playful much-needed light on the oddest and most mysterious of Brookner photographs (part of a series of portraits not of novelists but of art historians). Or perhaps not.

David, View from the Luxembourg Louvre There are direct physical resemblances to [Géricault’s] style: the grey sky, the dull sunshine of an early autumn afternoon, a predominance of grey and beige and cream, with only a red poppy in the green grass to give the positive accents. All these elements, although faithfully recorded, are used as vectors of heavy-heartedness. There is also a psychological resemblance to Géricault, for despite its rational pattern the picture conveys emptiness and wistfulness, and therefore approximates to Géricault’s ability to convey states of mind which can be experienced through the painted image. It is the only unpopulated picture David ever executed: a group of winnowers in the middle distance is almost scratched out. A tiny figure is outlined against the beautiful shaky fence. In the path on the left a woman glides past with a water pot on her head. It has the calm and the unreason of certain dreams. Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 9, ...

Jacques-Louis David, Portrait of Jacobus Blauw National Gallery David’s portraits of the mid-1790s – M. and Mme. Sériziat, Mlle. Tallard, M. Blauw, M. Meyer – certainly bear witness to a pause for moral reflection. Their simplicity of approach, their appreciation of the integrity of the sitter, their uncharacteristic lack of tension, possibly Mme. Sériziat’s posy of flowers, may be intimately bound up with this brief attempt by David to discover a new code of conduct. Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 9, 'Reversal' [Haffenden:] What is your criterion for judging what is most valuable in a work of art?   [Brookner:] That's very difficult to answer. I think it would be radiance, a power beyond the image: vision. The National Gallery has just bought a portrait by David called M. Blauw , and I think I'll find it there: it's only a portrait of a man with a quill pen, but it is so articulate and has such integrity. Haffenden interview, Novelists in Int...

Jacques-Louis David, Three Ladies of Ghent , Louvre ...this wordless domestic drama of will and submission, of determined age and fading youth, is so potent in its implications that one feels almost uneasy in its presence. The three figures occupy all their space, both physically and metaphorically; there is no room for them to move. The daughters are riven for ever to their mother's side. The primitive format is strikingly appropriate to the block-like permanence with which these ladies confront the spectator. It is a marvellous and marvellously disturbing portrait, the justification, and indeed the vindication, of the Brussels style. Anita Brookner, Jacques-Louis David , Ch. 13, 'Exile' David spent his old age in Belgium. It was a kind of afterlife. His work during those ten years was, Brookner tells us, 'prolific but obsessional'. He did new things; he also played to his strengths. The Three Ladies of Ghent 'must do duty for David's final maste...

I still call it, in deference to Auden, the Musée des Beaux-Arts, though it goes under several other names now (including Bozar , regrettably). David, Mars Disarmed by Venus , 1824 (In foreground) Godecharle, Charity , after 1795 David, Portrait of a Young Boy David, Death of Marat , 1793 Ingres, Virgil Reading the Aeneid to Augustus Navez, La Famille de Hemptinne, 1816 (One of my favourite paintings, this. Such an image of fidelity! How noble they look! How good-hearted!)

L’univers brooknérien : I picked up this phrase in my Francophile youth, deciphering the blurbs of Anita Brookner translations in the bookshops of Paris, those rambling Left Bank warehouse-like stores with their tattered yellow frontages. Nowadays my Brooknerian universe is more specialised. I'm going to Brussels tomorrow, to see several Jacques-Louis David paintings, and I may also pay a visit to Ghent, where I hope to take soundings from the distressed gentleman below.

...we have it on record that in order to get himself into the appropriate mood of tragic solemnity, [Jacques-Louis] David was obliged to read a few refreshing chapters of Richardson's Clarissa Harlowe ... 'Diderot', The Genius of the Future Clarissa - the book that e-readers were made for. I read it one year - it took me most of the year - and it is a wild read. Clarissa and Lovelace are two sides of a coin, and both as mad as one another. But Samuel Richardson, in pioneering the psychological novel as opposed to the merely comic, is the literary ancestor of Henry James and therefore of Anita Brookner. The full enquiry, the full investigation - not that any will ever probably be fuller than Richardson's.

Anita Brookner was as likely to criticise my hairstyle as she was my essays on Baudelaire and French Romanticism. As my tutor at the Courtauld Institute of Art, she would hold her classes in a cramped attic study at the top of the building, in those days housed at 20 Portman Square.  'Oh, Katie, we must do something about that fringe,' she would say, offering me one of her untipped Woodbine cigarettes and balancing a small tin on her knee as an ashtray. She wasn’t joking: her own hair was always perfectly coiffed, making her head seem disproportionately large above her tiny, slender frame. She would sometimes be spotted in the grotty student basement canteen at lunchtime, nibbling on sliced-up apple or breaking a Kit Kat into tiny pieces.  Elegantly dressed in camel Burberry sweaters and skirts long before Kate Moss made them cool, Brookner was a formidable teacher who made her students question everything at those intimate, informal lessons. She would throw in perso...

I come now to a treat for Brooknerians. I have a copy of a pamphlet, Brookner's 'Jacques-Louis David: A Personal Interpretation' (London, 1974): it is the text of a lecture given by Dr Brookner. 'Lecture on Aspects of Art, Henriette Hertz Trust, of the British Academy', reads the title page. I bought it some years ago at a Gerrards Cross book fair for £25. The lecture was read on 30 January 1974: it seems to be a condensation of Brookner's study of the painter – whom I also rate highly, and whenever I’m in Brussels I always like to look at the Davids. And one thinks of was-it- Providence ? – that make-or-break lecture Kitty Maule must make before an august assembly. Was this that lecture? Probably not. The date’s too late. By 1974 Brookner was an established art historian. The pamphlet is dedicated to Anthony Blunt, not yet unmasked, and is part of a lecture series that includes 'Some Uses and Misuses of the Terms Baroque and Rococo as applied to Archit...

A selection of Brooknerian paintings: Boucher, The Rising of the Sun , The Setting of the Sun . Who can forget that moment in A Family Romance when Jane Manning plunges from the heat of London in 1976 into the entrance hall of the Wallace Collection and, drowning in coolness and blueness, gazes up at the great Bouchers? Delaroche, Execution of Lady Jane Grey . Claire Pitt and a friend visit this painting in Undue Influence , a curious novel, costive and backward-looking (when it was published, it was the last of the yearly Brookners, and one might have been forgiven for thinking it her swansong). Delacroix, Jacob and the Angel . Herz, in The Next Big Thing , visits Paris and the church of St-Sulpice solely in order to see this painting again. I was in Paris when the novel came out. I remember buying it in the W. H. Smith's in rue de Rivoli; taking it back to my hotel to read; and then, a pure Brooknerian, setting out the next morning for St-Sulpice. Titian, Bacchus ...