Ilse’s Reviews > Keeping an Eye Open: Essays on Art > Status Update
Ilse
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Bonnard is the painter of the Great Indoors, even when he is painting the Great Outdoors. One London critic,infuriated by such dense luxuriance, described the gardens glimpsed through Bonnard's windows as 'over-planted'. At last, a painter brought before the tribunal of Gardener's Question Time ('And whiles we're about it,that Douanier Rousseau's feller's bin plantin' too many of them giant succulents on his patch').
— Jun 07, 2026 10:06AM
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Ilse
is on page 202 of 276
Braque was like some hilltop castle that Picasso was constantly besieging. He bombards it&each time the smoke clears,the castle is as solid as ever. Thwarted,he declares the site of no strategic interest anyway.Braque,he says, merely has 'charm'; he has gone back to 'French painting', becoming the 'Vuillard of Cubism'.He tells him his pictures are 'well hung.' Braque replies that Picasso's ceramics are 'well cooked'.
— Jun 16, 2026 03:23AM
Ilse
is on page 195 of 276
Colour was regarded as suspect by classical Cubism: it was 'anecdotical', it blurted, it carried too much information, it distracted from the pursuit of form. So it had to be whipped into line - literally: that old French battle between colour and line was now taking a new turn. By 1910-1911 you could have any colour you liked, so long as it was grey, brown or beige.
— Jun 12, 2026 04:12AM
Ilse
is on page 106 of 276
Cézanne was well read in the classics; and also proved that it is possible, if rare, to be a Balzacian, a Stendhalian and a Flaubertian all at the same time. Monet called him 'a Flaubert of painting': certainly, Cézanne had the monkishness required; also the belief that the artist behind the art should remain obscure. Though he was also - unlike Flaubert - rather prudish and proper when it came to women.(1/2)
— May 22, 2026 03:05AM
Ilse
is on page 105 of 276
Zola needed his literary success to be expressed in material terms: big house, fine food, social advancement, bourgeois respectability, whereas the better known Cézanne became, the more he avoided the world. In his later years, the painter was living in a quarry, seeing as few people as possible, and reading Flaubert. In the modern world, one of St Antony's temptations would be that of artistic success.
— May 20, 2026 02:50AM
Ilse
is on page 8 of 276
Flaubert believed it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another & 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 we are very far from reaching that state.We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions.It is a rare picture which stuns,or argues, us into silence.
— Jan 21, 2026 08:47AM
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Jun 08, 2026 09:43AM
Great stuff Ilse. I have works on Picasso and Matisse to begin soon. I request an 8 day week :)
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Murray wrote: "Great stuff Ilse. I have works on Picasso and Matisse to begin soon. I request an 8 day week :)"Murray, I know the feeling, days and weeks being too short to read everything you wish :) - what are you planning to read on Picasso and Matisse (on the latter, a big Taschen book is waiting here to be read, hopefully soon...)
I don't care for his impersonation of one of the gardening experts on 'gardener's question time', grrghhh! Such an excellent radio programme, i've learnt a lot from it over the years
Jan-Maat wrote: "I don't care for his impersonation of one of the gardening experts on 'gardener's question time', grrghhh! Such an excellent radio programme, i've learnt a lot from it over the years"😇😄 I sense the passionate gardener in you popping up here :-)! It reminded me of the 'too many notes' scene in 'Amadeus'.
From the most recent book I've read from Barnes, if I recall correctly, he discovered the joys of gardening only later in life - he seemed to grumble more about the art critic than the programme here? He likely learnt a lot from that programme as well, his garden being described as 'beautiful' by interviewers (and imagine, he lives/d in a house with ' a superb photograph of George Sand taken by Nadar in 1862' on the wall ;)!). I cannot remember other pointers to gardening in what I've read by him but apparently he wrote a mordant story on the garden as a battlefield in a marriage ('Gardeners' world'):
What have you done with the blackberry?”
“What blackberry?”
This made him more tense. Their garden was hardly that big.
“The one along the back wall.”
“Oh, that briar.”
“That briar was a blackberry with blackberries on it. I brought you two and personally fed them into your mouth.”
“I’m planning something along that wall. Maybe a Russian vine, but that’s a bit cowardly. I was thinking a clematis.”
“You dug up my blackberry.’
“Your blackberry?” She was always at her coolest when she knew, and knew that he knew, that she’d done something without consultation.
Gardening, like any housework, can turn into a minefield at home - it needs to be approached with delicacy :)
Ilse wrote: "Jan-Maat wrote: "I don't care for his impersonation of one of the gardening experts on 'gardener's question time', grrghhh! Such an excellent radio programme, i've learnt a lot from it over the yea...""Gardener's world" is a uk gardening tv programme, generally the perils to a relationship were not a focus of the show.
Yes, you are right, daily life is just one minefield after another...sigh