Volume 40, Number 8 · April 22, 1993
The Mystery of a Masterpiece
By Julian Barnes
Manet: The Execution of Maximilian, Paintings, Politics and Censorship
by Juliet Wilson-Bareau, with essays by John House, by Douglas Johnson
National Gallery Publications, London/Princeton University Press, 128 pp., $35.00
How long do we spend with a good painting? Ten seconds, thirty? Two whole minutes? Then how long with each good painting in the sort of three-hundred-item show that is the current way of displaying a major artist? Two minutes with each exhibit adds up to ten hours. Hands up those who spent ten hours at the Matisse, the Magritte, the Degas. I know I didn't. Of course we pick-'n'-mix, the eye pre-selecting what appeals (or what it knows); but even a spectator with nifty gallery skills, who understands the correlation between personal blood-sugar levels and aesthetic delight, who can work the open spaces and is unafraid to follow a painter's chronology backward, who declines to waste eye-time on catalogs and title-craning, who is tall enough to gain an unimpeded view and muscular enough to ward off the shoulder-charges of art fans lassooed to their headsets—even such a spectator can come to the end of a big show with a truculent feeling of what might have been.
Review, 3227 words
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