A Certain Slant of Light

A rare edition of What I Quit Reading. Last week I was struggling with Sebastian Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art, but decided that might be because the first part was about two artists I’m not familiar with, Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. So I went on to part two, which is about Degas (I love Degas!) and Manet (Smee’s other book Paris in Ruins made me interested in Manet!)... and unfortunately I didn’t particularly care for this section either. It lacks the firm grounding in the wider historical milieu and social world of the Impressionists that made Paris in Ruins so absorbing. So onward and upward to other books.

What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My break from the Newberies lasted about two seconds, and then I was back in the saddle with Lesa Cline-Ransome’s One Big Open Sky, which is written in verse (ever since Out of the Dust, Newbery books written in verse have frightened me), and printed in eight-point font, which is not the author’s fault but MY EYES.

However, despite these unpropitious first impressions, I enjoyed the book as a whole. Like Out of the Dust, it’s historical fiction about a family in a hard time. In this case, Lettie’s Black family is migrating from Mississippi to Nebraska in 1879, looking for a new start. A covered wagon story with all the covered wagon trials (is someone going to get cholera?) plus the extra concern that white men might attack their caravan, but overall more successful than Out of the Dust at portraying hardship without slipping into misery porn.

I also read Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me, which is about Bringley’s decade as a security guard in the Met after his brother Tom’s death.

There is a very moving passage about going to a museum with his mother soon after Tom’s death, and finding his mother standing in front of a painting of a Pieta, Mary holding the body of her dead son. Throughout the book Bringley insists on the importance of an emotional connection to art, the primacy of the personal above learning facts by rote - primacy in the literal sense that this is what comes first: why would we care to learn facts about Degas if his ballerinas weren’t so beautiful?

But, as with Paris in Ruins, sometimes learning more about an artist’s life can make you want to revisit their art - to feel that there is more to be seen in it than you have seen heretofore…

Anyway he’s not in any sense arguing against learning facts, just arguing that to really experience a work of art you have to bring not just your intellect and your facts but your whole self, your emotions; to allow yourself to be moved.

What I’m Reading Now

D. E. Stevenson’s Mrs. Tim Gets a Job, which is like a warm bath. Right after World War II, Mrs. Tim’s husband has been posted to Egypt and her children are both in boarding school. At loose ends, she takes a job helping to run a hotel in Scotland. On the train to the hotel, she meets a man who is baffled because his fiancee has just broken off their engagement after years of correspondence over the war. And then at the hotel, Mrs. Tim meets a girl who just broke up with her fiance, because she is simply so exhausted after years of looking after an invalid aunt that she feels she can never make a good wife…

What I Plan to Read Next

Eight Newberies left. The next one on deck is Ralph Hubbard’s Queer Person.

troisoiseaux was reading Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, which is about the effects of the 1871 Franco-Prussian War on the baby impressionist movement. Of course I had to read it, as I am tragically incapable of resisting anything about the impressionists, and in this case it worked in my favor, because this book is fantastic.

This book balances a lot of different strands. It situates the impressionists within the wider political and cultural milieu of France, while also touching on how France’s relationship with the rest of Europe shaped that milieu. Most dramatically in the form of the Franco-Prussian War, of course, but Smee’s description of Manet’s fascination with Spanish art, particularly Goya, is also illuminating. In the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, Manet tried to make Goya-style lithographs of the horrors he’d seen, but the misery was still too raw.

In fact, Smee notes, most of the impressionists never engaged artistically with the war at all, partly in reaction against the Academy’s elevation of heroic history paintings in general and its insistence on heroic history paintings of the Franco-Prussian War. Instead, they focused on the ephemeral, the evanescent, the shifting light of daily life as an antidote to a demoralizing political reality and a deeply disillusioning experience of war in which pretty much all the political forces in France came out looking bad.

Napoleon III? The idiot who started the war. (People tend to forget this, possibly because the Prussians trounced France so thoroughly, but France did start the war.) The Communards? Completely out of touch with the political reality outside of Paris*, also had the unfortunate habit of lynching people who looked maybe kind of spy-like. The monarchists? Bad on principle, also lost their chance at monarchy when their numbskull candidate for king tried to insist on a return to the white Bourbon flag. The forces of the republic? Lost the war, massacred the Communards, but somehow they’re here to stay.

(*The Communards complete failure to grasp that much of rural France remained a bastion of Catholic royalists started me on a train of thought about how so-called “popular revolutions” are often revolutions that are popular only in the capital city, which then imposes its will on the truculent countryside which is, numerically, often 70% or more of the population of the country, and often wants nothing to do with the revolution supposedly enacted “for the people.” Popular revolution as urban imperialism?)

The book also describes the social milieu of the impressionists, where political divisions are ferocious sometimes to the point of firing squads, and yet Berthe Morisot (daughter of moderate constitutional monarchists) can be courted both by reactionary Puvis de Chavannes and republican Eugene Manet, brother to painter Edouard Manet (who probably would have been courting Berthe herself except awkwardly he was already married). They all meet peaceably at the Morisots’ salons and chat about painting.

Although various impressionists bob in and out of the book, Berthe and Edouard are the focal points. (Smee refers to them by their first names, which gives the book an novelistic flair.) These are not my top impressionists, but I came out of the book with a greater appreciation of their work, because as well as being a good social and military historian with a fine eye for the subtle shifts in relationships between individuals, Smee is also a perceptive art critic who can help you see new depths in paintings you have previously not fully appreciated. I’ve struggled with Morisot’s work in particular, but I’d love to return to her work to view it through this new lens.

This brings me to the one flaw in the book: not enough art reproductions! Presumably the publisher’s fault rather than Smee’s, but I do wonder who thought it would be a good idea to put in, for instance, a photograph of the balloonist Nadar rather than another example of Morisot’s work. Not that I wasn’t fascinated by the use of hot air balloons to get mail out of Paris, and carrier pigeons to bring back replies in the form of film negatives containing tiny, tiny pictures of thousands of letters that then had to be blown up and transcribed! I just didn’t think a portrait of Nadar was the best use of the limited picture space.

Overall, though, loved it. Highly recommended if you’re interested in either the impressionists or French history. I’m going to read Smee’s The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art next. I’m really most interested in Manet and Degas, but I love a good feud so perhaps that will carry me through the 20th century artists too.