Keeping an eye open : essays on art

"As Julian Barnes explains: "Flaubert believed that ... great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting ... But it is a rare picture which stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged." This is the exact dynamic that informs his...