Keeping an Eye Open by Julian Barnes

Author:Julian Barnes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Vintage Publishing

Redon’s own problem – and it is the more interesting one – lies in the answer to the following question: How far does an artist’s individuality develop as the result of pursuing and refining the strengths of his or her talent, and how much from avoiding the weaknesses? You would think both, of course – yet Braque will have something to say on the matter (and bring in the countervailing example of Picasso, who had no obvious weaknesses, only a sackful of competing strengths – which may itself work as a weakness). With Redon, the weakness, of which he was well aware, was both particular and basic. In À soi-même he describes his artistic education, recalls the ‘tremblings and fever’ incited by his first view of Delacroix, and the ‘fervour’ he felt at his initial contact with the work of Millet, Corot and Moreau. He continues:

When, afterwards, I went to Paris to direct my work towards a more complete study of the live model, it was too late, fortunately: the fold had been made.

This is true: he never drew the human body as well as he drew a tree. There is no figure drawing to match Pollarded Tree, no portrait to match the Tree with Blue Sky of 1883, with its triangular, semi-abstract trunk and floating mist of foreground foliage. He was also much better at rocks, and many of his early-period women have a chunkily carved quality to them: his Angel in Chains would have a hard time becoming aerodynamic even without its chains. When he took to portrait painting in later life, he fell back on stylisation: many of his women tend towards the same decorative aquilinity, and their main interest often lies elsewhere: for instance, in the pastel of Madame de Domecy, the way the flower background invades the sitter, petalling her blouse and perhaps even her jacket.

‘Fortunately’ is the key word in Redon’s statement. He means, presumably, that his art escaped the dead hand of the painting schools, and would have been hindered, if not actively trampled, by some enforced back-to-basics. Naturally, and rightly, he made a combative virtue of the lacuna in his art education:

I am quite willing to admit that modelling is essential in our art, but on condition that its only aim is beauty. Outside of that this famous modelling is nothingness.

Put this view beside another of his quotes from Bresdin the Flue-man – ‘Colour is life itself, it abolishes line under its radiance’ – and you have the makings of his later art. It glows and sizzles with colour; it creates its form by overlappings and coalescings; it tends to act centrifugally rather than centripetally. It is an art of luscious high-mindedness and iridescent monumentality. It aims to uplift and inspire, and when it doesn’t it can seem clunkingly pious, if not actively potty. Are there any takers for Monk Reading (Alsace)?

If Redon no longer attracts Tolstoyan or Goncourtian antipathy, he still provokes some oddities of judgement. David Gascoyne asserted in Surrealism

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