How to Look at a Painting

Which of us, in the presence of a painting, has not felt that we lack the keys to decipher it? We feel an emotional response, but the work still seems to evade our understanding. Francoise Barbe-Gall combines a nuanced understanding of the way viewers respond to paintings with a rich knowledge of their context and circumstances of their creation. The result is like a tour of an extraordinary museum in the company of a gentle yet authoritative guide. A fascinating range of works are grouped in six thought-provoking chapters that examine our different responses to the ways in which paintings define reality. The author takes as her point of departure the impressions that we all feel when confronted by a canvas and takes us on a voyage of discovery fired by her own passionate enthusiasm for the subject. What is the painting's relationship with the real world? Has the artist idealized nature, or distorted it? Did they want to shock the viewer, or provide consolation? With a clear approach and straightforward yet subtle analysis, the meaning of each work slowly becomes clear. From Raphael's penetrating character study of Castiglione, through Hopper's cinematic take on the wee small hours of the morning, Barbe-Gall begins by covering a number of ostensibly realistic works, made from the stuff of everyday life. Going in quite the other direction, she then looks at the way paintings can express moments of heightened reality, from the perfection of Boticelli's Primavera to the arresting glance of Vermeer's Girl with the Pearl Earring. She discusses paintings that distort the visible world (Parmigianino's Madonna with an improbably long neck, Dali's melting clocks) and those that sow confusion to make us pay closer attention to the real world (Cezanne's depiction of a forest glade, a mysterious fifteenth century altarpiece). Questions of history, style, iconography and composition are dealt in context of the paintings she discusses. Lavishly illustrated and featuring thirty-six fascinating works from Raphael to Rothko, Breughel to Bacon, this is also a magnificent art book.

In a painting in which everything has become rounded and mangled, the

rectangle of the mirror stands out. By resisting the general sense of wear and

degradation, its very shape implies the adoption of a particular stance, which

it clearly signals by reproducing a reflection that bears no relation to external

reality. Having been spirited away, Dyer’s face is reflected here in what

seems to be a magnifying glass. But this man who expands in all directions

has no chance of seeing himself from the side, even from the corner of his

eye. And in any case he no longer has an eye. The intense blue of the

background confirms the disharmony between what we can see of the model

and what he can see of himself. The mirror does not lie. It is more like

another painting than a mirror, producing an alternative image, not a

reflection. The dream of a portrait. Or the battered portrait of a dream.

It is almost like one of those profiles that one sees on medallions painted

against a pure blue sky: the serene and emblematic image of humanity as

conceived at the time of the Renaissance. The resemblance isn’t close:

something disastrous seems to have happened in the meantime. Not much,

really, but a disaster none the less.

A halo of light forms a circle on the ground. The regularity of the shape exposes

it all as something staged, the careful calibration of a projector. Beyond the

area that it circumscribes the space remains ill defined, its limits vague. It

has something of an arena about it, or a circus ring, a place appropriate to a

story that keeps on going round and round until all its participants are

exhausted. The darkness isolates it from the rest of the world. In his

dizziness, can this man really ignore the fact that it is the earth itself that is

turning beneath his feet? It is a fairly derisory world from this point of view.

Here is a man reduced to shreds on this planet of ours. And the sky retains its

icy composure.