Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague

by Christopher Neve

A remarkable, heartfelt, beautifully written analysis of the late work of major artists which author Max Porter has called “completely and utterly marvelous.” In 2020, as the spread of COVID-19 caused pandemonium worldwide,a painter and writer returned to a childhood home to reflect upon the transcendence of nature and the work of the artists he most admires. It seems to Christopher Neve that in their final works―their late style―that they have something remarkable in common. This has more to do with intuition and memory than with rationality or reason. Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague is an anthology of these reflections. In this personal and moving account, nineteen short essays on artists are interspersed with recollections of the cataclysmic global progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the seasons in Neve’s isolated house and garden. From Paul Cézanne and Michelangelo to Rembrandt and Gwen John, Neve dwells on artists’ late ideas, memories, risks, and places in the context of time and mortality. As much art history as a discussion of great art in the context of the “dance of death,” Neve also writes about Pierre Bonnard, Giorgio Morandi, Nicolas Poussin, Chaim Soutine, and many others. Immortal Thoughts is a summary of a lifetime’s contemplation of art. 29 color illustrations

Genres: Art

160 pages, Hardcover

Published May 16, 2023

Reviews

[Mike Clarke · Rating 4 out of 5]

Shadowlands: a book coming out of the pandemic, juxtaposing the great plague with the final iterations of artists and how endgames change the work in some cases beyond all recognition.

What started as serendipity - a book sent to me in error for a completely different title and almost not picked up - became an urgent read, because Christopher Neve, in his sparse, expert prose brings these painters to life in death . In its slim, almost etiolated form, barely 140pp including references it is more sweeping in scope than many a monograph three or four times its length.

Some of the subjects - Cézanne, Titian, Rembrandt, Gwen John - are familiar old friends. Others, such as Bonnard, Poussin and Daumier, I was learning about as new. My favourite is Chaïm Soutine, a painter who, after spending rather too long trying to modernise Old Masters, found his particular vision in pain, and he had plenty of that to draw on. (If you’ve never seen Children Playing at Champigny, completed in his last months of life whilst on the run from the Nazis in occupied France and suffering from the stomach ulcers that would kill him shortly, do seek it out.)

A short anthem to the hour glass running low.

[Harry Twyford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and profound, Christopher Neve has an innate grasp of understanding artists and the act of painting.

[Sembray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thanks to Hachette for sending me a proof copy in exchange for an honest review, which you can find below.

One of the most significant aspects of art is how it reflects the circumstances of its creation and the state of the artist at the time of its birth. This forms the backbone of this poignant and intriguing book. Neve draws enlightening parallels between the late styles of various artists and the experiences of himself and wider society during the COVID pandemic. The artists covered range from established greats such as Rembrandt and Velázquez to less familiar faces worthy of wider attention, including Gwen John and Honoré Daumier, as well as some of my personal favourites like Titian and Frans Hals. Imagined conversations and eloquent descriptions are combined with perceptive analysis of artwork to create vivid and lifelike representations of some of the most interesting artists ever to pick up a paintbrush. These examples are then combined with the author's depictions of the lockdown of 2020 and his own connections with nature and art, as well as the widespread suffering experienced across the globe. The link between the proximity of death and the creation of dazzling works of art, as well as the re-emergence of the natural world in the absence of humanity, lend the book a thoughtful emotional impact.

On the whole, this book provides a compelling tribute to the emergence of great beauty and art from challenging times. The fact that these individuals could overcome circumstances ranging from old age and destitution to ill health and of course disease to transcend artistic boundaries and create such monumental and often innovative works is strangely inspiring. While not a positive read by any means, this is a beautifully written book and a fantastic testament to the power of art to shine a light through the darkest of situations.

[Katy Wheatley · Rating 3 out of 5]

I read and loved Unquiet Landscape by Christopher Neve so was very excited to read this. This is a series of imagined snapshots of artists. Neve, in his Seventies himself, is drawn to imagine their later lives and their last paintings. Each essay is sandwiched by Neve's own writing about living through the COVID lockdowns and the pandemic.

I don't think I knew enough about the artists and the paintings to make the best of this. There are a series of small colour plates of the paintings in question to give you a flavour of what Neve talks about. My issues were that I wasn't very fond of any of the painters he chose to write about with the exception of Gwen John. And Neve clearly knows so much about them it's a bit like reading a letter sent between two people you know very vaguely who are on much greater terms of intimacy with each other.

The bits I liked best were the descriptions of the Pandemic for him.

[Mike Futcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

"… his one idea is to die painting, always with the sense that what he has sought all his life is at last almost within reach" (pg. 12)

An unexpected delight, Christopher Neve's Immortal Thoughts caught my eye in a bookstore purely by chance – a demonstration of what beautiful book design can accomplish. I bought it on this whim, but despite enjoying some art books in the past, I'm still very much a novice on the topic and, flicking through its pages, Neve's art book looked dauntingly high-brow. Happily, however, the rich and composed design is mirrored in the content itself. Immortal Thoughts is quite a beautiful book inside and out.

Taking as its subtitle 'Late Style in a Time of Plague', Immortal Thoughts is a sequence of short essays on various master painters, with a particular focus on their 'late style', i.e. the approach they took to their work in their final years, as they felt death encroach and "the constraints of patronage, sharp eyesight and public approval" were left behind (pg. 7). Many of these painters will be unknown to the general reader, which provides a stumbling block, but Neve is never academic in his approach. His essays aim to capture the creative sensations of the paintings and the lifeforce of their painters, and Neve's writing on this is so exceptional it allows you to get completely swept along.

The reader is not swept along effortlessly, but this may well be a good thing. Two writers recurred to me as I read Immortal Thoughts: William Bolitho and Cyril Connolly, two ornate and erudite commentators whose writing, now unfashionable and long out of print, I have had the great fortune to experience. In my review of Connolly's The Unquiet Grave elsewhere on this website, I wrote that he "expects (not arrogantly, but as a result of having standards) that readers will seek to attain the plain he is writing on, rather than spoon-feeding" them information. Neve takes a similar approach, which is remarkable in this day and age (Bolitho and Connolly wrote in the 1920s and 1940s, respectively). It may well be that art books are the only sphere where such unashamed erudition has been allowed to survive, its niche appeal perhaps helping it to avoid the gaze of the culture wars and the incessant corporate push towards dumbing-down.

It's perhaps because of this trend that I disliked Neve's one flaw in Immortal Thoughts, the one wilful sullying of his own commendable purity. The essays in the book are linked by a series of vignettes in which Neve gives his impressions on the then-developing Covid pandemic (the 'Time of Plague' of the book's subtitle). The writing in these parts is lesser than in the main essays (including some overly florid nature-writing delivered in fragmented sentences), but that is not where the problem lies. The problem is that Neve's impressions of the Covid era are of the most credulous and hyper-partisan tone, with bodies piling higher than an apocalyptic movie, newborn children starving to death in untended cribs and, behind it all, that beastly "despotic" president inciting a "seditious mob" to storm the Capitol (pp105, 132). The book – ironically printed in China – is careless with its words in such passages and completely uncritical in accepting the sensationalized media narrative. It's a glaring and unsettling contrast to Neve's thoughtful and nuanced criticism of art in his main essays. Such foolishness provokes an eye-roll rather than offence, but considering the book's Covid "plague" framing can be said to be a play for posterity, there is perhaps an obligation to be more responsible.

It is not, thankfully, a fatal flaw, and Immortal Thoughts proves to settle in your mind as a magnificent and stately piece of art in itself. The writing is remarkable, composed and intuitive, and when Neve name-checks Hemingway's A Moveable Feast as an inspiration at book's end (pg. 135), the association is not an embarrassment to him. Some individual passages in Immortal Thoughts carry a great force, such as the description of the agèd Michelangelo in great pain, "and this after a life of bodies, drawing bodies more rounded, mightier, more beautiful, more youthful" (pg. 34), or the entire essay on Rouault (pp112-17), which is as ambitious and successful a piece of writing as I've seen published in recent years.

I would recommend Neve's book on such moments of grandeur alone, to anyone thirsting for great writing. But what is even more remarkable is that Neve captures in words the same sensation that a painting can evoke, that sense of "the miraculous accuracy of the paint… [which] causes you to hear the tenor bell and the clatter of pigeons flying suddenly up" from the canvas (pg. 129). When the afore-mentioned Hemingway successfully recreated such an effect for his story 'Big Two-Hearted River', it was rightly called a masterpiece. One wonders if we can readily apply the same term to Neve's book.

[Jack Cowap · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book is really a collection of essays, ostensibly about the late style of artists over the centuries. It’s not strictly art history, often veering into historical fiction with scenes of artists on their deathbeds or approaching their end. These can be interesting, but really lacked the kind of insight I was hoping for.

Much of the rest is general musings about the philosophy of and approaches to art that are hard to follow if you’re unfamiliar with the artists in question and never really resolve into satisfying observations. Maybe it’s the inherent mysterious or spiritual nature of the subject matter, but I felt the prose lent on the kinds of overly abstracted language that turns people off discussions about visual arts.

I think it’s both a blessing and a curse that the final essay is easily the strongest. It brings biographical fact to life with its imagined snapshots of the artist’s process, while distilling complex ideas about art and aging into concrete, comprehensible observations. It leaves you on a high, but feeling that the book could have been so much more.

[Henry Ward · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I was studying painting at Winchester, at the beginning of the 1990s, I borrowed from the library Neve’s beautiful account of British landscape painting, “Unquiet Landscape” and it had a profound affect on me. The book was out of print for years and was then recently republished. I finally acquired a copy and also bought one for my daughter, then studying painting at Bath.

This recent book is similarly compelling. I really enjoyed the short chapters on late works by a variety of painters, interspersed with accounts of the pandemic (the “plague”) and Neve’s poetic musings on his isolated rural location. At times the writing can feel over indulgent in its poetic approach but the succinct passages work well. It’s a book you could have on the go for a while, dipping in and reading each chapter as a piece in its own right.

[David Cutler · Rating 3 out of 5]

A disappointment though I would strongly recommend his earlier excellent Unquiet Landscape. I am interested in the idea of Late Style but Neve has pretty much nothing to say about it. The short essays imagining the life of an artist nearing their death is sometimes interesting, for instance Constable but of variable quality and I didn't really enjoy the attempts to read their minds. And the interleaved thoughts on the pandemic, admittedly with the benefit of hindsight, can feel quite hysterical. Having said that he has a good writing style and the book is at least short.

[Henry Crabtree · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5

[Lia · Rating 2 out of 5]

It was okay, most of the time it helped me fall asleep, so it took a while for me to finish this book.

[Patrick Boey · Rating 4 out of 5]

Neve dissects the late works of some of the world's most renowned artists. A thoroughly enjoyable art history book. While some might find the Covid vignettes out of place, they do add a unique lens to the 'narrative'. I did read it on holiday in Paris, often in galleries gazing at the described paintings - if you're in the vicinity of collections of Monet, Rembrandt, da Vinci, etc, I thoroughly recommend consuming in this way. 4 stars!

[Alexander Rudofsky · Rating 2 out of 5]

Quite profound meditations on some great artists, interspersed with very mid-wit/frankly embarrassing COVID rants. Two sides of the cow put out to pasture I suppose.