The subject of the least characteristic essay in this engrossing collection of meditations on painters, painters’ lives, painting and reactions to painting is René Magritte — whose best work David Sylvester rather rashly claimed induces ‘the sort of awe felt in the presence of an eclipse’. Julian Barnes discusses what he calls the artist’s doctrine (doctrine?) of ‘elective affinities’, which proposes the antipodes of Lautréamont’s ‘chance encounter on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella’. Thus in the painting of that name a birdcage is filled not with a random safety razor or knuckleduster but with a giant egg. Barnes then introduces an acquaintance who ‘can’t drive past a field of sheep without muttering Dinner… he claims to be merely hungry rather than Magrittean’.
This is a tactful means of pointing to the commonplace meagreness of what Barnes calls the painter’s ‘night-time aperçu’: he doesn’t quite go so far as to say that ideas, conceits and analyses are better left to writers.
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