Canadian_Art_2016_S_

148 CANADIAN A RT • SPRING 2016

When I’m writing about a picture, I kind of imagine the reader beside

me. We’re both looking. Maybe because I’ve been looking at pictures

for as many decades as I have, I’ve got more points of comparison,

and I’m less anxious in front of it, and I’m chatting. I hope that some-

one who [reads my art criticism], someone who hasn’t read about

pictures before, or who reads me simply because they like my novels,

will be enthused to look at paintings with more straightforwardness,

less self-consciousness and more individuality. Because there’s no point

pretending to a reaction. There’s no point bowing to what you are

told is the best picture. I’m trying to free the reader up to think,

Whatever you think is okay, as long as it’s an authentic feeling. As long

as you’ve thought about it and come to a conclusion, that’s alright.

Some pictures are boring to some people, even though they’re inter-

ested in other art. You can’t and won’t like everything. We all have

our prejudices.

I’m slightly against the blockbuster show. Most people will go to

a large exhibition once. That’s the reality. If you have 300 works, then

you’d have to spend five hours there, without any fuelling, in order

to spend one minute with each work. So in that way it’s kind of non-

sense. And then of course, because these shows are so big, they have

to be funded and therefore have to be heavily advertised and slightly

vulgarized. Since the economic downturn, museums are getting less

money, so they tend to run shows for a longer time. It obviously

depends on the curator and the show, but why does every show have

to have a thesis? I like very much the idea of the small show about a

particular picture or a particular topic, and I would like to see more

shows that put artists together.

If I could direct people’s tastes, I would say, Don’t be frightened.

Don’t think there’s a proper response to this painting that you have to

find out first before you can enjoy it. I think slabs of information, fed

into people while they’re looking at a picture for the first time, make

them able to talk about it at dinner the next night, but don’t actually

help that moment of aesthetic interaction. There are some contempo-

rary painters who don’t want anything on the wall, just the pictures

themselves. I quite approve of that. Leave us alone with pictures. ■

As told to David Balzer

Julian Barnes is a Man Booker Prize– winning novelist and critic. Two recent

books are Keeping an Eye Open, a collection of his writing on art, and the

novel The Noise of Time. He will be in Toronto on May 31 for an exclusive

speaking engagement as part of the Canadian Art Encounters series.

For more details and to purchase a ticket, go to canadianart.ca/events.

ALONE WITH PICTURES

by Julian Barnes

BACKSTORY

Edouard Vuillard Portrait

de Pierre Bonnard 19 3 0 – 35

Distemper on canvas

1.14 x 1.46 m COLLECTION

MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE DE LA VILLE

DE PARIS © MUSÉE D’ART

MODERNE/ROGER-VIOLLET

Backstory_spr-16_10TS.indd 148 02/04/16 12:23 PM