{"product_id":"9781101874783","title":"Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art","description":"\u003cp\u003eAn extraordinary collection—hawk-eyed and understanding—from the Man Booker Prize–winning, best-selling author of \u003ci\u003eThe Sense of an Ending \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eLevels of Life\u003c\/i\u003e.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eAs Julian Barnes notes: “Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting . . . But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThis is the exact dynamic that informs his new book. In his 1989 novel \u003ci\u003eA History of the World in 10½ Chapters,\u003c\/i\u003e Barnes had a chapter on Géricault’s \u003ci\u003eThe Raft of the Medusa,\u003c\/i\u003e and since then he has written about many great masters of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, including Delacroix, Manet, Fantin-Latour, Cézanne, Degas, Redon, Bonnard, Vuillard, Vallotton, Braque, Magritte, Oldenburg, Lucian Freud and Howard Hodgkin. The seventeen essays gathered here help trace the arc from Romanticism to Realism and into Modernism; they are adroit, insightful and, above all, a true pleasure to read.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47035310375152,"sku":"9781101874783","price":30.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0737\/7593\/9824\/files\/9781101874783_p0.jpg?v=1763689612","url":"https:\/\/shop-qa.barnesandnoble.com\/products\/9781101874783","provider":"Barnes \u0026 Noble (DEV)","version":"1.0","type":"link"}