Anita Brookner (1928–2016)

OBITUARY Obituary: Anita Brookner (1928–2016) THE DEATH OF Anita Brookner on 10th March brought forth an unsurprisingly extensive response. She had, as a novelist, reached a wider audience than most art historians can command, but one was pleased to find, in the more formal tributes and in blogs, recollections of students who had experienced her teaching at the Courtauld Institute between 1964 and 1988. Among her catchphrases in those days was the admonitory ‘It should not be forgotten that . .’. Ironically, so distinctive was her teaching style, that there was little danger of us forgetting it. Some of her evident determination to excel as a teacher may have stemmed from the boredom she had experienced during her BA History course at King’s College, London, where she enrolled shortly after the conclusion of the Second World War. Although she came out of it with a first in 1949, the chief attraction, we are told, was the proximity of King’s to the National Gallery. Her next move was to register for an MA at the Courtauld under Anthony Blunt. Her report on the painter Jean-Baptiste Greuze was commuted to a Ph.D., and a French government scholarship enabled her to pursue Greuze on his home ground, backed also, she tells us, by Jean Adhémar of the Bibliothèque Nationale, and his wife, Hélène, at the Louvre. To a friend, the author Julian Barnes, she recalled that the happiest time of her life had been travelling round twenty-six French provincial art galleries ‘by bus in a fog’. Her thesis, which includes a pioneering account of the cult of sensibility, is, by contrast, a marvel of lucidity. The choice of Greuze was a strategic one, placed as he was on the cusp between what was still in those days referred to as ‘Rococo painting’ and the development of a more severe Neo-classicism. The fact that his modern moral subjects grated on twentieth- century sensibilities dictated the requisite historical detachment. The thesis was boiled down to two articles for The Burlington Magazine in the June and July issues of 1956, before being tweaked again for publication in book form in 1972. After the doctorate, there followed a decade of highly productive art-historical dog’s bodying. A typescript Iconography of Cecil Rhodes (1956), a copy of which can be found in London University Library, Senate House, was commissioned by the Rhodes Trustees, and will have helped to keep the wolf from the door if nothing else. The year before, she had cut her journalistic teeth at the Burlington, lamenting, in her first book review, ‘the increasing stylelessness of writings on art history’. It was a declaration of intent, and her reports on exhibitions in France, Belgium and London and numerous book and exhibition reviews gave her ample scope to display her powers of description. The reports are never mealy-mouthed and cover everything from Paleolithic to Pop. At the same time she was earning money VI. The novelist (my neighbour Anita Brookner), by R.B. Kitaj. 1993. Canvas, 102 by as a translator both from French and Italian. In his foreword to 51 cm. (© R.B. Kitaj Estate, courtesy Marlborough Fine Art) the 1959 exhibition catalogue accompanying the Arts Council’s Romantic Movement, Kenneth Clark thanked her for her ‘untiring services’ as a translator. That was the year in which she began of them was magical. The Brookner voice, happily preserved her teaching career, as a visiting lecturer at Reading University. in an interview with Sue MacGregor, was somewhat fruity and It is possible that the lectures we heard at the Courtauld in patrician, but without the strangulated vowels of her Courtauld the mid-1960s had already been trialled at Reading. The effect contemporary, Brian Sewell. The vigorous professionalism of her 460 june 2016 • clviii • the burlington magazine CARING FOR KING'S PICTURES & OBITUARY.indd 460 22/05/2016 17:55 LETTER delivery, as if from a trained actress, was an object lesson for the full-blown nineteenth-century revisionism, what she dismissively timorous neophyte. She knew how to draw her students out, and called ‘the trend towards the documentation of bad art and its when necessary administer a timely kick up the pants. I still have hinterland’. Her Francocentricity still linked her to the old school, a letter from her that ends with a capitalised ‘GET MOVING’. and it has been claimed that the series, published as The Genius The tone of her lectures is best preserved in her short and of the Future (1971), is in the end a story of rendez-vous manqués unpretentious 1967 volume on Watteau, published by Hamlyn. between select literary luminaries and already canonical painters. She was not above such popularising endeavours. It had been She would have acknowledged the truth of this. Nevertheless, preceded by a similar slim volume on Ingres (1965), and she these sparkling essays pleasurably parade Brookner’s hard-won provided the voiceover for several of Edwin Mullins’s televised familiarity with her authors’ largely novelistic œuvres, as well as ‘Great Paintings’ (1981–82). Brookner left to her friend Michael bringing to light a number of ‘brief encounters’ between pen Levey the task of summarising the art of eighteenth-century and brush. They charted a much needed byway to the stultifying France. Her own survey, as purveyed to her students, can now march to modernism that was the standard fare of teaching on the only be reconstituted from scattered articles and reviews. When nineteenth century in England at the time. Some of the essays dealing with a century that witnessed a major artistic turn- were reworked for Romanticism and its Discontents (2000). With around, she managed the trick of keeping a foot in both camps, Alfred de Musset and Théophile Gautier now thrown into the as she boasted to the staunchly rococophile Levey in an open mix, the emphasis here was on art as a solution to the existential letter published in this Magazine in May 1967. Her personal problem in a godless age. vindication of Jacques-Louis David as a great painter with a flawed Critical opprobrium may have been par for the course in personality, eventually saw the light of day in her monograph on academic life, but in 1987, a year before her final retirement from him published in 1980. After a somewhat diffuse introduction, this the Courtauld, Brookner was shocked to learn that she had been resolves itself into a finely sustained interweaving of biography, used as a stooge by Anthony Blunt and Peter Wright of MI5. political history and artistic interpretation. Brookner’s refusal to In his memoir, Spycatcher (1987), Wright claimed that she had condone David’s revolutionary activities, as well as her apolitical unwittingly carried information from one of Blunt’s ex-couriers, reading of the Oath of the Horatii, irked some left-leaning ‘new’ the art historian Phoebe Pool, as part of an immunity deal with the art historians. She did not crumble under attack, defending her security services. Following Blunt’s exposure, she had remained position in a review of Thomas Crow’s Painters and Public Life in loyal to him, to the extent of voting in a University of London Eighteenth-Century France, which appeared in the Times Literary convocation in 1980 against the removal of his professorship, Supplement (29th November 1985). but this struck her as an act of treachery on a personal level. In By that time, she was well launched on her career as a novelist. the long term, however, her deep sense of indebtedness to Blunt The transition from art history to fiction had been anticipated in appears to have outlived any rancour that this revelation caused. her chief contribution to what Robert Rosenblum has described I cannot help recalling Brookner’s statement that, for the as art history’s effort to give the nineteenth century back to itself. brothers Goncourt, the only good woman was a dead woman, This was her series of essays on French art criticism, first conceived around whom they could weave their nostalgic web. Perhaps, as a lecture series for the Courtauld, and then delivered as the Slade happily, space has not allowed for a more effusive tribute of Lectures at Cambridge in 1967–68. Brookner never converted to this kind. philip ward-jackson Letter: Lewis Hind and the Rokeby ‘Venus’ madam, Barbara Pezzini’s excellent article on the sale of the ‘fine Holbein, avery fine one’ that might be for sale. The query is Rokeby Venus (May 2016, pp.358–67) is revealing for the role passed on from Hind’s wife who was in America at the time and played by Charles Lewis Hind in the negotiations. It has always ‘she mentioned Lord Radnor’. This must refer to the Longford seemed too much of a coincidence that Hind visited Rokeby Castle Erasmus (on loan to the National Gallery, London, L658). Hall around the time the picture came on the market. Pezzini We do not know if an approach was made – but if it was, it was now reveals an important intermediary. At the same time she clearly rejected. It is nevertheless interesting that Mrs Hind was usefully summarises Hind’s career (note 49) and hints that Grub acting as a scout. In the book itself there is no mention of other Street did not support the living to which he aspired – hence his dealings like this. association with dealers such as Agnew’s. At the turn of the century Williamson and Hind were both In later years Hind certainly did try to search out pictures for publishing on Velázquez, and it must be supposed that they met private clients.

Load more