Perspectives
Art Novels -- Guide Books or Garbage?
a n d r e w l a m b i rt h l o o k s at h o l i d a y r e a d i n g f o r a rt l o v e r s
Photo r Sarah Drury
S
ome of the first books I read about
art – read, not just looked at – were
novels. Among them were Somer-
set Maugham’s fictionalised version of
Gauguin in the South Seas, The Moon and
Sixpence, Howard Spring’s romantic bohe-
mian painter in Shabby Tiger, the glorious
adventures of the highly probable old
artist-rogue Gulley Jimson in The Horse’s
Mouth by Joyce Carey, and the vigorous yet
clumsy autobiographical novels of John
Bratby. The fact that the common currency
of these books was fiction and not
(predominantly) fact does not disturb
me. I’m all for myths about artists so long
as they point the General Public, and
particularly the younger and more impres-
sionable members thereof, in the right
direction. There is a lot less wrong with
romanticising the artist than there is with
commodifying the art. Shallow endorse-
ments of the cult of celebrity (see Masterpiece,
reviewed below) do not benefit anyone,
except perhaps the author. Art is a serious
business, and there is a great deal of rubbish
written about it. As Anthony Burgess said:
‘Art is rare and sacred and hard work and
54 The Art Book volume 13 issue 3 august 2006 r 2006 the authors. journal compilation r 2006 bpl/aah
there ought to be a wall of fire around it’. I
couldn’t agree more, but for those who
wish to approach, there still need to be
guide books, and novels are often used as
such. Moreover, they can do a good job.
There are many more good novelists
around than there are good art writers . . .
That said, there are inevitably poor
efforts and ‘rattling good yarns’ among
every mixed pile of new publications. The
Painted Chook by Jane Graham (d16.95, hb,
147 pp., Book Guild Publishing, Sussex,
ISBN 1-8577-973-2) is one of the oddest
books I have ever had to read. It consists
of a rather dreary series of art history
lectures, full of sociological cant and
etiolated theory, interspersed with excru-
ciating dialogue. Three young people in
their 30s – a lazy accountant, a freelance
editor and art teacher, and a security guard
– meet up on an old cattle station in the
Australian outback. They talk. The book
purports to be a ‘dialogue with a differ-
ence’. Who it is aimed at remains a
mystery: I cannot imagine that anyone
would read it for enjoyment or instruction.
Whatever it is, it certainly isn’t a novel,
though it is partly a heavy-handed fable. It
even has a bibliography. The only good
thing about it is that it is short.
In The Dark by Beryl Stafford Williams
(d7.99, pb, 304 pp., Gomer Press, Ceredi-
gion, Wales, ISBN 1-84323-502-1) claims
to be a historical novel, but is really a
children’s adventure yarn set in wartime
Wales, published to commemorate the
sixtieth anniversary of the end of the
Second World War. The story deals with
the secret hiding place of masterpieces
sent from the National Gallery in London
when they were evacuated from the capital
as the bombs were falling. Treasured
paintings (including The Arnolfini Wedding,
which has a walk-on part in the book)
were hidden in disused caves and quarries
on the edge of Snowdonia. (Kenneth
Clark, in volume two of his autobiography,
The Other Half, deals with the factual reality
of the subject.) This fictional account is
clumsily written, with no ear for the music
of language or its rhythms. It is ironic that
a story so ostensibly involved with art
should be so lacking in art. A promising
subject condescendingly handled and ren-
dered remorselessly dull.
The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant
(d6.99, pb, 422 pp., Virago, London, ISBN
1-84408-035-8) exists on another level of
achievement altogether. This is a real novel
with a proper breadth of realisation and
true imaginative power. Set at the height
of the Florentine Renaissance, it is a richly
caparisoned historical narrative as well
as an intriguing study of the plight of
a woman painter at a time when such
freedom for a female was forbidden. The
authoritative tone of the novel is at once
established with a brilliant opening detail-
ing the death of a Sister Lucrezia. The
rest of the book then explains who this
unknown, anonymous nun was. It is
entertaining, moving, compelling, a de-
light to read – everything a good novel
should be, and it carries a fair few insights
into the artistic condition as well. Its
subtitle is ‘Love and Death in Florence’,
and that is the ostensible subject. Im-
maculately researched and convincingly
told, the story follows the fortunes of
Alessandra Cecchi, the daughter of a
wealthy cloth merchant, who draws ser-
iously and is always in trouble of one sort

or another. Her father returns from a trip
to Northern Europe with a young painter
in tow, whom he has commissioned to
decorate the family chapel. Alessandra’s
relationship with this strange young man
– who stands for Art, as well as something
of the philosophy of the times, and who is
never actually named – is the principal
theme of the book.
Real historical figures influence the
behaviour of the Cecchi family, in particu-
lar the mad monk Savonarola, and his
infamous Bonfire of the Vanities. Michel-
angelo makes an off-stage appearance,
and Botticelli’s illustrations for The Divine
Comedy of Dante have a small part, but the
main fictional characters, though utterly
plausible, have no actual counterparts. This
makes the book at once more than a
straight historical novel, allowing the
author the kind of perceptions the reader
might consider modern or contemporary.
Yet all this is done without in any way da-
maging the exquisite fabric of the Renais-
sance narrative; it does not jar. Beautifully
paced and structured, the book draws
the reader on. Love and death and cruelty,
self-mutilation, a famous father discovered
rather late, and various fresco cycles, paint-
ed with different degrees of skill. Dunant is
good on the details of Renaissance paint-
ing – the pigments, the charcoal, the dog-
eared manuscript of Cennini’s treatise –
but the art content does not overshadow
the human drama. Rather it counterpoints
and enhances it tellingly. In fact, it is so
seamless, it would be invidious to select a
passage to quote. This is an excellent
novel, very well written, and impossible to
recommend too highly. If you haven’t read
it yet, I urge you to do so.
The Underpainter by Jane Urquhart
(d6.99, Bloomsbury, London, 279 pp.,
ISBN 0 7475 3521 3) is a very different kind
of book. An ageing American painter is
working on a new series of pictures that
reprise his past and the people who have
affected him. It is 1969, Austin Fraser is 75
years old, and all his life he has avoided
love. Another love story then? Yes, in a
way, but approached from a very different
angle, and rather chilling in its implica-
tions and resonances. Not obviously life-
enhancing like The Birth of Venus, altogether
more astringent. Fraser recalls the events
of his childhood with a strange mother,
his friends George the china painter and
the real-life painters Robert Henri, Abbot
Thayer and Rockwell Kent, and later with
his Canadian waitress mistress, Sara. The
r 2006 the authors. journal compilation r 2006 bpl/aah volume 13 issue 3 august 2006 The Art Book 55
past is buried and must be exhumed; the
past is then re-buried in Fraser’s paint-
ings, interred beneath layers of careful
overpainting. Physical reality veiled.
There are dozens of passages in this
extremely good book that cry out to be
quoted. Here’s a description of Rockwell
Kent:
He was a man obsessed by dangerous land-
scapes, by women, and the north. He stopped
travelling only long enough to begin painting;
he stopped talking only long enough to start
writing; he stopped womanizing only long
enough to attempt to repair his disintegrating
marriage. His brain, like his painting, was
controlled by polar forces.
Or this, about the dangers of drawing in
the street:
Even a person totally uninterested in art will
approach another who is making a drawing, as
if this strange activity of attempting to repro-
duce the perceived world is one which needs to
be supervised, monitored.
Or this:
Sara was searching the map of my character for
the place where my heart was hidden, but I was
so busy guarding the site I failed to notice there
were no weapons in the hands of the woman
who approached it.
This is a thoughtful and deeply felt book,
a poetic novel which shows considerable
understanding of the creative tempera-
ment. Urquhart is good on the voyeurism
of the painter (‘the visual bandit in me’),
and the punishing self-obsession of the
artist, the constant and destructive inward
looking. Fraser cannot believe that his
work is popular: can no one see that these
are paintings of grief ? He describes one
of his white paintings as ‘a rectangle of
sorrow’ – with only the slightest trace left
of the imagery that has started them off –
the crucial underpainting. The whole
process is an exercise in disguise, and it
quite obviously works, for he is rich and
famous, though miserable. What is there
to look forward to? As he muses: ‘all this
tidying up, this assembling and catalo-
guing, this burying under layers of paint
seems like a preparation for my own
death’. The eventual self-knowledge that
is revealed is painful, and the wisdom of
this writer is of the kind that cuts lastingly.
I did have one quibble. I thought the title,
although saying something profound
about the predicament of the artist under
examination, struck slightly the wrong
note. It could be called ‘The China Collec-
tion’ and lose the connotations (or echoes)
Perspectives
of undertaker and assistant painter, which
are perhaps distracting. Nonetheless, it is
such a rare and thought-provoking book
that I hesitate to criticise anything about it:
a novel I already want to re-read.
The best books under discussion here
are those that say something valuable
about the lives, interior and exterior, of
artists, and that also work as novels in
their own right. Both The Birth of Venus and
The Underpainter are very distinguished
works of fiction, and can be read on a
variety of levels, but principally for en-
tertainment and enlightenment. Unhap-
pily, Masterpiece by Miranda Glover (d15,
hb, 377 pp., Bantam Press, London, ISBN
0593 05409 1) does not fall within this
category. Glover knows the art world (she
used to edit that staple of the Sunday
painter, Artist’s & Illustrator’s Magazine), and
she has had her eyes glued to its most re-
cent media manifestations. What she does
not seem to know are artists. Unless, as
has been my contention for some years,
the current crop of savvy individuals who
go by the name of artists are in fact some-
thing else entirely. Pop stars or film-makers
or perhaps just celebrities. For this is a
novel about celebrity, and it is as vacuous
and tiresome as its central character, the
so-called artist, 31-year-old Esther Glass.
What I cannot understand is, if you
decide to write a ‘chick lit’ fame and
fornication novel about that sexy new
subject (hah!) the art world, why you then
kill stone dead any slight animation it
might possess by going on for so long. Is
it the same theory that seems to govern
those endless blockbuster exhibitions the
museum world sees fit to put before us?
Got to give the public its money’s worth?
Misguided, to put it mildly. Glover is good
at hitting the right buttons for today’s
obsessions, but the book is not well
written, though perhaps the sloppy clichéd
writing is supposed to emulate the art that
is written about. I can only hope this kind
of thing is tongue in cheek (but whose
cheek?): ‘The unfamilar sound of his name
scattered through my being like shingle
thrown up a beach by the seventh wave,
before settling like sand in the pit of me.’
At times, the book reads like a barely
disguised roman-a-clef with Billy Smith as
Dirty Damian and our Trace taking the
leading role (as ever), but then it subsides
into escapist drivel. It is long-winded and
laboured, and that’s being polite.
The plot, such as it is, revolves around
a piece of performance art by Glass which
Perspectives
involves reinterpreting seven of the
world’s great paintings of women. These
are Holbein’s Christina of Denmark, Manet’s
Olympia, Ingres’ Madame de Senonnes, Ra-
phael’s Madonna of the Pinks, Whistler’s
Symphony in Flesh Colour and Pink: Portrait of
Mrs Frances Leyland, Leonardo’s Isabella
d’Este and Klimt’s Judith and Holofernes II.
These are reproduced in a colour insert in
the book, with the addition of Leonardo’s
Mona Lisa, for the eminently practical
Architecture and Design
‘Looking through the Reichstag Cupola’.
Photographer: Kuehler. r Bundesbildstelle, Berlin.
THE TRANSPARENT STATE.
ARCHITECTURE AND POLITICS
IN POSTWAR GERMANY
deborah ascher barnstone
Routledge 2005 d32.50 $52.00 (P)
292 pp. 86 mono illus
isbn 0-415-70019-1 (p)
D
eborah Ascher Barnstone demon-
strates in this volume that ‘trans-
parency’ has been a much-used
term in post-war Germany, both to denote
its desirability as an attribute of a modern
democratic state, and in the sense of the
literal transparency of materials used in
modern architecture. She offers a critical
evaluation of the ways this term has been
56 The Art Book volume 13 issue 3 august 2006 r 2006 the authors. journal compilation r 2006 bpl/aah
reason that you can’t have an insert of an
odd number of pages. The best passages in
the novel are the bits of art history
attached to these paintings, which Glass
researches. She then attaches them to the
far less interesting episodes of her auto-
biography, and her career as an ‘artist’. As
she says ‘I had made my art for fun, as a
kind of displacement therapy . . .’ And it
never rises above that, being in the end
entirely displaced by Esther’s rediscovery
used, distinguishing between its use as
metaphor in relation to the discourse of
politics and architecture, and as analogy
in relation to architectural objects. As she
puts it in her introductory chapter on
‘Transparency ideology’:
transparency began as a metaphor for a desired
condition but became an analogy for democracy
in Germany as it was embodied in architectural
projects over the last 50 years.
In view of the complexity of developments
in German political structures since 1945,
Ascher Barnstone is certainly right to
devote two substantial chapters to out-
lining these. She synthesises a large body
of source material for a readership who
may not be fully familiar with the transi-
tions arising from Germany’s division into
allied Zones in the immediate aftermath
of a child she had as a teenager and getting
pregnant with another. If every age gets
the art it deserves, then doubtless we get
the art novels we deserve too. I hope
Miranda Glover makes a great deal of
money out of this book, so she won’t have
to write a sequel.
andrew lambirth
Curator, writer and critic, London
Part II of this assessment of current art fiction
will follow in the next issue.
of the defeat of the Third Reich, through
the further east/west division along the
‘Iron Curtain’ from 1949, and the politics
of reunification since 1989. Ascher
Barnstone also draws on her extensive
knowledge of twentieth-century German
architectural history to put post-war devel-
opments into a wider historical context.
In the chapter ‘Transparency in German
architecture before and after the War’ she
introduces her readers to the ideas of key
pre-war figures such as Bruno Taut, the
architects and designers associated with
the Bauhaus, and important but perhaps
less familiar names such as Arthur Korn
and Konrad Werner Schultze. These early
chapters offer a detailed introduction to
the three case studies that follow. Since
much of this material may be unfamiliar
to a non-specialist audience, and readers
may not be German-speakers, it might
have been helpful if a glossary of
German terms had been included, or a con-
sistent editorial policy on italicising and
translating German words and phrases
adopted.
In order to explore and expand on the
critical issues she has introduced, Ascher
Barnstone has taken as case studies three
government building projects that were
commissioned and designed at important
moments in Germany’s post-war history,
drawing on examination and analysis of
a wide range of writings and drawings.
The first of these is Hans Schwippert’s
1949 commission for the Bundeshaus in the
newly designated capital of the Federal
Republic in Bonn. This is followed by an
account of the new Bonn Bundeshaus,
designed by Günter Behnisch and finally