Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art, Janet McClean (ed.), Thames and Hudson, 2014, 232 pp. £19.95 (hardback)

Bento’s Sketchbook, John Berger, Verso, 2015, 167 pp. £12.99 (paperback)

The tangling of fiction with the visual arts has a long and illustrious history. At least since Homer’s description of Achilles’s shield in the Iliad, writers have been conjuring up real or imagined art objects. Auden’s gallery of images in his ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ or Keats’s Grecian Urn can rival any solid work of art for tangibility. Carel Fabritius’s ‘The Goldfinch’ and ‘Mese di Marzo’ by Francesco del Cossa each have recent wordy reimaginings courtesy of Donna Tartt and Ali Smith. This summer, the Guggenheim is hosting ‘Storylines’, a website, app and audio tour bringing together writers with works from their collection. The collisions between words and pictures are various but they mostly coalesce around the idea that the visual artist and the fiction writer are both acutely observant. They look with care and insight. These books participate in a long conversation about how – and how far – it is possible or desirable to make the visual verbal.

Keeping an Eye Open collects Julian Barnes’s writing on art. This mostly consists of essays and reviews but begins with a chapter from A History of the World in 10 1⁄2 Chapters, making the collisions between painting, criticism and fiction unignorably prominent. Throughout, he gathers opinions on writing about art, most of which more-or-less echo Flaubert’s belief that: ‘Explaining one artistic form by means of another is a monstrosity.’ (p. 259). Barnes seems to agree; ‘these paintings speak to my eye, my heart and my mind’ he says ‘but not to that part of my mind which articulates’ (p. 271). And yet this book consists of nearly 300 rich and illuminating pages of exactly this type of writing and it concludes with a homage to Howard Hodgkin as ‘a writer’s painter’; his work appeals to those who revel in ‘telling stories, to describing, imagining, explaining’ (p. 259). At times, this book feels like a demonstration of the productive frictions created when two different but similar art forms come into contact.

In his essay on Félix Vallotton, Barnes describes a creative writing work- shop in which the narratives within Vallotton’s The Lie (1897) are teased out. ‘One of my students had handed in a story based around a mysterious lie, and so I found myself describing the Vallotton to my class’, Barnes says. As he sees it, ‘the woman is the liar, a fact confirmed by the smiling complacency of the man’s expression and the way his left foot is cocked with the jauntiness of the unaware’ (p. 175). This writerly ‘reading’ of the painting doesn’t seem beside the point, though it might be slightly tangential; it draws out the painting’s rich, and potentially contradictory, currents of meaning. Finding and telling the story becomes another way of looking.

Professional critics too often miss the point, Barnes implies; they have cameo appearances in this book, mostly to provide examples of ‘the swift disengagement of first eye, and then the brain’ (p. 120). What Barnes proposes instead is ‘perhapsiness’, a quality which he finds in David Sylvester’s writing on Degas (p. 208); by this he seems to mean a gentler, less assertive and more observant way of encountering art. An engaged and thoughtful ‘teasing out’ of meaning that seems to have something in common with the sort of imaginative storytelling his own essays meander through.

As its title announces, Lines of Vision: Irish Writers on Art is all about the collision between words and pictures. It is made up of fifty-six written responses to images, mostly paintings, chosen by their authors from the collections at the National Gallery of Ireland. These pieces, usually only a page or two in length, take the form of poetry, fiction, memoir, art criticism and biographical sketch – often these approaches intertwine or overlap. Implicitly, then, it tests the limits and possibilities of different types of writing about art.

These short pieces prove to be an exposing form, especially for prose fiction. A few seem tenuously connected to the image they accompany (Alex Barclay’s ‘Determination’), others are a little saccharine for my taste (Patricia Scanlan’s ‘The Anniversary’), or seem to draw a hint from the picture without fully engaging with it (Paula Meehan’s ‘Artist’s Studio, Abbey Road’). But this volume also includes a number of insightful, and perhaps uniquely writerly, meditations on art.

Seamus Heaney’s poem, ‘Banks of a Canal’ gracefully responds to Gustave Caillebotte’s Banks of a Canal Near Naples and merges the rhythms of its verse with a simple but illuminating description of the painting, deftly mingling language with image: ‘Say ‘canal’ and there’s that final vowel/ Tow- ing silence with it, slowing time/ To a walking pace, a path, a whitewashed gleam/ Of dwellings at the skyline.’ On facing pages, both poem and painting are richer for their proximity. Colm Tóibín’s biographical sketch, ‘John B. Yeats’, reflects on Yeats’s portrait of Rosa Butt and unfolds the artist’s life with a novelistic nose for telling details and turning points. This rooting out of possible stories has something of Barnes’s ‘perhapsiness’ about it. Tóibín uses the painting to reflect on the life and vice versa and, in doing so, melds art criticism, biography and fictional instinct.

The first picture in Lines of Vision is a frontispiece photograph, ‘Interior view, National Gallery of Ireland, c. 1929’, which shows a doorway, walls of paintings stretching out of view, and an empty attendant’s chair. It feels like an invitation inside and reminds us that this book is a celebration and cumulative portrait of a particular place. In the process, it becomes both gallery and (very unconventional) guide.

As John Berger’s field-defining book and TV series, Ways of Seeing (1972) suggests, ‘the majority take it as axiomatic that the museums are full of holy relics which refer to a mystery which excludes them’. In his essay ‘Valéry Proust Museum’, Theodor Adorno explains his dislike of galleries by telling us that ‘[t]he German word ‘museal’ [‘museumlike’], has unpleasant overtones. It describes objects to which the observer no longer has a vital relationship and which, are in the process of dying […] Museums and mausoleums are connected by more than phonetic association. Muse- ums are like the family sepulchres of works of art’. These books suggest active and imaginative looking as an antidote to Adorno’s mausoleum-like galleries and suggest this sort of writing as one way to reconnect viewer with viewed.

Bento’s Sketchbook is, like many in Berger’s body of work, genre-defying. It is made up of a series of sketches – in both the drawn and the written connotations of that word – and premised on the idea of reconstructing Benedict de Spinoza’s lost sketchbook. ‘I simply wanted’ he writes ‘to re-read some of his words, some of his startling propositions as a philosopher, whilst at the same time being able to look at things he had observed with his own eyes’ (p. 5). From this starting point, the book drifts between memoir, art appreciation, philosophy, and almost-fiction as Bento and Berger ‘become less distinct.’ (p. 6)

These elements come together a lot more fluidly than seems likely, in part because of Berger’s use of sketchiness as an aesthetic as well as an argumentative tool. In this book, sketching – in words and pictures – is a way of looking carefully at things, which, Berger says, demand to be drawn. If Berger is an observant writer, he expects the same attentiveness from his readers. The book begins with a present-tense, second-person ‘You lose your sense of time when drawing’ (p. 7), immersing the reader in the task of drawing irises. He concludes one chapter with the conversational instruction to ‘Look again at the etching by Kollwitz’ (p. 44). We are encouraged in an observant kind of reading which sends us ping-ponging between text and image.

Influenced by his reading of Spinoza, Berger makes his drawings – which he calls ‘sketch maps of an encounter’ (p. 10) – into tangible signs of the connection between body and mind. Quoting Antonio Damasio, he tells us that ‘conscious minds arise from establishing a relationship between the organism and an object-to-be-known.’ (p.150). Drawing makes this process visible. This is a deeply physiological approach to looking at the world, and at art, which calls for more than passive attention. In his Introduction to Keeping an Eye Open, Barnes remembers the first time he found himself ‘consciously looking at pictures, rather than being passively and obediently in their presence’ (p. 4). This ‘looking’ which is anything but passive is part of what these books are about.

This interaction doesn’t only work in one direction. In his 1984 essay, ‘Ways of Witnessing’, Berger reflected that ‘I often think that even when I was writing on art, it was really a way of telling stories’. Looking closely at art becomes a mode of storytelling, not an appendage to it or an after-thought. Each of these books plays on this and – with eyes open and brain engaged – engages in telling stories about art because as Berger puts it in Bento’s Notebook ‘Looking brings closer’ (p. 111).