It was Camille Corot’s landscapes that drew from Paul Valéry the confession that ‘we should apologise for daring to speak about art’. Perhaps it was the incomparable purity of Corot’s light, captured by painting outdoors in the Forest of Fontainebleau, which made a poet feel inadequate about rendering it in prose. But any honest writer about any kind of fine art will share Valéry’s sense of clumsiness at the futility of translating vision into text.
Nevertheless, we try. Why? Partly, I suspect, from enthusiasm’s overspill: the urge, not necessarily egotistical, to share insight born of accumulated knowledge, but also released by what Duchamp (meaning it unflatteringly) described as the ‘retinal shudder’: the visceral response that takes place in the material presence of the work itself. Walter Benjamin was wrong. The aura of a work of art ‘in the age of mechanical reproduction’ has only become more unreproducible with digital ubiquitousness. So even with the ancient task of ekphrasis – thick description – as its calling, non-academic art writing still has useful work to do.
It positions itself somewhere between the monstrous heaviness of catalogue essays, their ball and chain of theoretical solemnity clanking along behind the work itself, and the necessarily summary captions on the wall. The most memorable art writing is often the most personal; a transmission from the moment of fresh encounter. My late lamented friend Robert Hughes was incomparably brilliant at delivering those quick, rich exclamations, and was (as were we all) horrified and depressed when Time magazine decided it could do without art criticism altogether.
I began writing art criticism for the TLS (a new editorial departure launched by its then editor John Gross) in the 1970s; principally but not always about Dutch painting. The challenge then, as it has remained – through the years of writing reviews for the New Yorker – was how to be invitational and instructional at the same time; to deliver an impression of what awaited the beholder but also to supply the modicum of knowledge and questioning that would make for a richer gallery experience. Some of the pieces here add to that mix, visits with contemporary artists themselves. Artists can be notoriously laconic about their work, as they have every right to be. I spent one of the most tortuous hours of my life trying, at the Hay Festival, to extract from Howard Hodgkin (whom I had known for years) any kind of insight about his painting, an excruciating ordeal some of the audience enjoyed as a priceless moment in the theatre of cruelty, the verbose critic undone by the obdurate silence of the master. But just as many – especially the women artists featured in the pieces that follow, who gave me the time of day – can be thrillingly eloquent about their art and how they came to conceive and execute it. It’s their creative hospitality that gets critics, especially this one, off the hook of Valéry’s embarrassment.