JULIAN BARNES: ANYONE IN THE ARTS IN THE SECOND HALF OF THE 20th CENTURY HAD TO TAKE ON MODERNISM TO UNDERSTAND IT

Barnes. J.  ‘Life turned into something else’ from Keeping an eye open: Essays on art.  To be published May 2015.  Jonathan Cape.

This is a brief summary of the article by Julian Barnes that was published in the Guardian newspaper on 2 May 2015: ‘Life turned into something else’.  The article is taken from the book by Barnes to be published by Jonathan Cape in May 2015: ‘Keeping an eye open: Essays on art’. 

‘Life turned into something else’

Barnes writes about his introduction to art, and 20^th Century art in particular.  His parents were neutral in their attitude to art and to any interest that their son may find in it.  The arts were respected in the family home: both parents were teachers.  Three paintings were on the walls of the home: two country scenes in western France and a female nude.  Barnes writes that he found the nude ‘completely unerotic’: he wondered whether art was meant to be puritanical.

Barnes was not influenced by the arts and instead as a young teenager preferred ‘sports and comics’ and regarded literature as nothing more than a subject to pass an exam on.

In 1964 Barnes was in Paris between school and university and he became familiar with the Musee Gustave Moreau near the Gare St.Lazaire.  Moreau’s work was a challenge to Barnes who found it exotic, odd and mysterious.  Barnes admired Moreau, and he believes that this was because he had found his works of his own volition.  He also admired Moreau because of its ‘transformative nature’: art used ‘some charismatic, secret process’ to ‘turn life into something else’ – something ‘stronger, more intense and, preferably, weirder’. 

He was attracted to some painters of the past, and he was attracted to most modern painters.  He admired the way in which modern painters transformed ‘dull reality’ into ‘cubes and slicing, into visceral whirls, intense sploshings, brainy grids and enigmatic constructions’. 

Barnes could see from pre-modernist painters that ‘realism was a kind of default setting for art’.  And Barnes states that after some time he could see that ‘realism .. could be just as truthful, and even just as strange’ as the ‘adventure of modernism’. 

Barnes also learned that it was normal to grow out of certain painters, that there were some that you remained indifferent to, and others that suddenly came to your attention after knowing about them for many years. 

And he came to see that not all modernism was equally wonderful.  He came to value the fact that built-in obsolescence in modernism ‘made it more rather than less interesting’.

 In 1964 Barnes rejoiced in the fact that several of the great modernists were still alive: Picasso, Dali, Magritte, Miro, Giacometti, Calder and Kokoschka.  Later, as Barnes became a writer, he came to value the fact that his early life had overlapped with these artists, and with, for example, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound and Stravinsky. 

Barnes considers that anyone in the arts in the second half of the 20^th Century ‘had to take on modernism to understand it, digest it, work out why and how it had changed things, and to decide where that left you’.