The Brooknerian

In a much earlier post I lamented the unavailability of Anita Brookner's contribution to the 100 Great Paintings series (BBC, 1981). During the time I was away from the blog, the BBC reshowed the episode, and it has now found its way to YouTube:

The critic Andrew Graham-Dixon (see here ) remembers: When I first studied the history of art, at the Courtauld Institute in London, one of my tutors was the formidable Anita Brookner. Her special subject was French painting of the Romantic period, but it was her approach to art in general that I found enlightening, and eye-opening. I remember one of her instructions in particular: 'Always remember, when you're looking at a painting, that every last detail is important: nothing is there by accident.' She said this so often, that I came to think of it as her motto. I recently saw Graham-Dixon lecture on his latest subject, a fresh interpretation of Vermeer. Andrew Graham-Dixon at the event I attended Afterword : Her finest art-critical motto was surely 'Art doesn't love you and cannot console you' (see earlier post here ). I have often considered it as an alternative motto for this blog.

Boulanger's Répétition du 'Joueur de flûte' et de la 'Femme de Diomède' chez le prince Napoléon , Musée d’Orsay, is one of those vast canvases in vogue in the middle years of the century before last, a loose baggy monster of the kind that is still found lurking in most art museums, or rather in their archives. There used to be a Hans Makart on display in Hamburg that was truly colossal. It depicted the entry of an emperor into a medieval town – or something like that. In the Burlington , in 1962, we find a young Anita Brookner commenting thus: There was, for me, a great reward in seeing precisely the kind of picture against which, we are always told, Manet reacted, although we rarely have an idea of what it looked like. This was  La Répétition du 'Joueur de Flûte' dans la maison romaine du prince Napoleon , dated 1861, by Gustave Boulanger, the French Alma-Tadema and, within its limits, not half bad. I particularly liked the attention meted out to the ti...

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...

Among several scuppered plans was a visit to see the Titian exhibition at the National Gallery, now closed. Seven late masterworks were included, reunited for the first time since they sat in Titian's studio in the second half of the sixteenth century. Paintings would take years, returned to after long absences. 'According to eye witnesses,' writes Martin Gayford, lucky enough to see the show, in this week's Spectator , 'Titian would begin a work, then lean it against the wall. Some time later he would scrutinise what he had done as if it were a "mortal enemy", add a touch or two, set it aside again to dry - and so on until he was satisfied ... there is a controversy about whether some of his late works ... were finished or not.' Brooknerians will know Titian from the much earlier Bacchus and Ariadne , part of the National Gallery's permanent collection. In The Next Big Thing Julius Herz, one of Brookner's later and most debilitated protagon...

A measure of the addictiveness of an author is the quantity of legendary material that surrounds her. Dickens does not inspire the Dickensian life, nor Trollope the Trollopian. One doesn't long to be subject to a Bildungsroman , living in a world where everyone has a funny name*; nor to be a provincial clergyman or a British parliamentarian. But one follows yearningly the course set out by Brookner, odd and unique as it may prove. She is uncompromising: this is the life, and it is the only life to live. To Germany again, for she perversely visited small towns and cities in France and Germany, the more obscure the better. To Karlsruhe, to the Staatliche Kunsthalle, where I saw a Hans Baldung Grien exhibition... ...along with favourites from the permanent collection: this Temptation of St Anthony by Joos van Craesbeeck... ...and this Jan Sanders van Hemessen, Loose Living : The St Anthony , one of the most arresting paintings, is hidden away and uncelebrated. You ca...

I was writing this book during the last year or so before Britain's deluded, masochistic departure from the European Union. Julian Barnes, 'Author's Note', The Man in the Red Coat (2019) Not a few critics of The Man in the Red Coat have made good use of Barnes's afterword, in which he makes tentative links between the Parisian  fin de siècle world that is the book's topic and the troubled politics and discourses of today. Altogether, The Man in the Red Coat is something of a disappointment. Its art and literary criticism are second to none, and it is richly illustrated, but it is confusing book, with meanderings that mimic W. G. Sebald but without his unpredictability. I found it smelt a little too much of the lamp. I fear the red-coated Pozzi, whose Sargent portrait Dr Pozzi at Home , inspired Barnes's book, may simply not be very fascinating as a subject. Ah, but when was Julian Barnes writing? That's what perversely interests me. Was...

Why don't women paint? November 1979 in the TLS (and reprinted as an archive item in this week's issue) sees Anita Brookner taking on Germaine Greer. Greer had written a book about the women painters lost to history; Dr Brookner, then known only as an art historian, was reviewing it. Dr Greer did not win me to her cause because there are even more numerous male painters of obscurity and mischance awaiting the art historian's attention, and obscurity, in any case, is sometimes temporary but more often deserved. Dr Brookner goes on to suggest her own answers to the 'durable enigma of why women write but do not on the whole paint'. These include, unsurprisingly, education and economics. More contentious, perhaps, is the following: There is the question of stamina: painting is a hefty profession, wafted about with fairly sickening smells, and these do not combine easily with other pursuits. More intriguing is Brookner's concluding comparison between writing a...

Brookner was perhaps always a sceptic. Art doesn't love you and can't console you, she would tell her art history students; and Blanche in A Misalliance has similar doubts as to art's transcendence. What do all her visits to the National Gallery yield but 'fantasies of a high order'? (Ch. 6) Likewise with writing. For a time in the 1980s, after the Booker win, Anita Brookner was lionised. But publication of A Misalliance inaugurated a period of reassessment: Brookner was a one-trick pony; Brookner had nothing new to offer; Brookner's bloodless fiction sounded the death-knell for English literature: that kind of thing. But this was a second career, and this should never be forgotten. She wasn't starting out. She was simply trying her hand. She was playing. She could afford to do as she pleased. She made no claims for her fiction; in fact she often downplayed its significance. She probably knew her fantasies were actually of a high order. But she also kne...

James Lees-Milne, sharp, catty, camp, Edwardian-born gentleman of letters, one-time Country Houses Secretary at the fledgling National Trust, sported in his later years a slightly risible halo-style 'do'. When, in June 1986, he goes with an old chum to the Royal Society of Literature to listen to Anita Brookner's lecture on the Brothers Goncourt, he finds himself distracted by her hair: 'like a bird's-nest, but tidy,' says he. He calls her 'a funny little woman, sharp, delicate features, slight of build, soft-spoken'. Her lecture is excellent, and inspires him to read the Goncourts' novels. But, he tells his friend, afterwards he remembers little of what she said (perhaps because he was thinking rather too much about her riah). It often surprises me (but it probably shouldn't) how infrequently Brookner's name crops up in the diaries and letters of her contemporaries. A couple of mentions in the Roy Strong journals, but practically noth...

January 1962 finds Miss Brookner viewing the work of Réquichot in the rue de Miromesnil. His main invention, she sees, is a sort of 3D collage box: animals, birds and flowers cut from glossy magazines. The spectator 'gazes back through the glass as into an aquarium': This is basically the Victorian scrap-book or screen re-thought and equally absorbing on a winter's afternoon with a slight temperature. Not perhaps the highest art, she concludes. But she foresees for the fellow a bright future in window-dressing: All rather ridiculous but, to quote Henry James, 'the French spirit is able to throw a sort of grace even over a swindle of this general order'.

I owe my start in life as a writer to Benedict Nicolson, who was editor of the Burlington Magazine from the end of the War until his death in 1978. Anita Brookner, 'Benedict Nicolson', Independent Magazine , 10 September 1994 Hearing that Anita Brookner, an all but unknown graduate student, was to be living in Paris, Nicolson 'mentioned that [she] might like to send him reviews of the major exhibitions'. It was, Brookner recalls, an amazing act of generosity. She looked forward to her monthly assignment, making herself known to dealers and collectors, tackling the 'dreadful Salon d'Automne with something like enthusiasm'. Her biggest cheque was for £19. My copy of the Burlington Magazine dates from May 1962 and finds Brookner, then in her thirties, in London. (She seems to have migrated regularly between the Two Cities, rather like Emma in Leaving Home .) At the Hazlitt Gallery she is predictably delighted and beguiled by an exhibition call...

Henry James rated highly the work of John Singer Sargent, and towards the end of his life was depicted by him in the famous, appropriately magisterial painting (above) that hangs in the National Portrait Gallery, London. Some decades previously in an 1887 essay, republished in 1893 in the collection Picture and Text , James had written a substantial appreciation of the artist. Words such as 'splendid', 'brilliant' and 'masterpiece' abound. Of the 'superb'  Dr Pozzi at Home (below), for example, James writes: This gentleman stands up in his brilliant red dressing-gown with the prestance of a princely Vandyck. Brian Sewell once complained of how a reference of Anita Brookner's to the 'threadbare' religious imagery of Caspar David Friedrich had forever ruined for him the work of the painter. Likewise we might look differently at Dr Pozzi after reading John Updike's assessment of the painting, quoted by Brookner in her review...

...an arresting image from the National Portrait Gallery of a dressmaker pinning the skirt of an impassive client who resembled Fanny Bauer (black hair, dark eyes, prominent crimson mouth, and bad-tempered expression)... Anita Brookner, The Next Big Thing , ch. 9 Brookner in her late work - when, as it were, a decent time had passed since her retirement from the Courtauld - returned in something like earnest to her earlier calling*. There were the books of criticism,  Soundings and Romanticism and Its Discontents . And there were novels like The Next Big Thing , with its numerous art references. Here Herz is looking through his collection of old art postcards. But I confess I can't identify the image of a dressmaker and her impassive client. Can anyone help? * though Julian Barnes believes art criticism and novel writing occupied quite separate parts of her mind. He speaks of how she would light up and be transformed when asked over dinner her views on, say, the painter B...

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...

She raised the window and leaned out, trying in vain to catch the smell of turned earth, to sense an emergent spring, but it was too early in the year: the air was sour, lightless. Anita Brookner, Fraud , ch. 10 In the recent Backlisted podcast  Andy Miller spoke persuasively of Brookner's narrative technique, likening it to the work of a painter: Brookner gradually fills her canvas, a touch here, a touch there - focusing for a time on a particular area, perhaps returning to it later, and so on. This is seen very much in Fraud , chapter 10: a dream returns Anna and her creator to the story of Mrs Durrant's disastrous second marriage. We might have thought that part of the story done and dusted, but there is still much to be learnt: Brookner is rarely what might be called a chronological writer. The chapter is painterly in another sense. The depiction of January, and, relatedly, of Anna's desiccated emotions ('In middle life, she knew, the feelings wit...

New to Anita Brookner? Let me suggest a route into and through what a critic (unfavourably but memorably) once called the long dark corridor of her fiction . Start with a late-period novel. Brookner's fiction divides roughly but usefully into three phases: the 1980s, the 1990s and the 2000s. The early work is inconsistent but often brilliant; the middle period is more settled, more even. In Brookner's last works we see a return to the unpredictability she started with, now allied to a greater assuredness of form and style. Start with The Next Big Thing ( Making Things Better ) (2002). Also try The Bay of Angels (2001) and The Rules of Engagement (2003). Scarier than the scariest horror story. Next try the essential early Brookner: Look at Me (1983). A remarkable and quite extreme laying out of the Brookner manifesto. The final chapters contain some of the bleakest and most unsettling passages in the whole of English literature. Temper this with the novel of the followi...

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 ...

In January 1978, just a few years before she (stealthily) began to write novels, we find Anita Brookner at the Royal Academy, looking at pictures by Courbet ('The Last of the Old Masters', Soundings ). ...that world of pungent women, of euphoric half-drunk men ... Rumpled sleazy girls, exhibiting their cheap mittens and their white stockings to the shocked spectator ... Regis Courbet snoozing after dinner in his malodorous but convivial kitchen, trout the size of carp, yards of female hair, sniggering all-male parties, damp-fleshed nudes, an amazing tendency for everyone to fall asleep ... La Tour de Peilz, that silent pretty village where it seems to be always dusk ... That portrait of Berlioz, as watchful, as distanced as might have been his doctor father at the bedside of a dying man ... the hooked trout with agonized human eyes; a sad and lonely picture of apples with a pewter tankard; a coldly red sunset over Lake Geneva... The novelistic nature of Brookner's descri...