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Christopher Neve's classic book is a journey into the imagination
through the English landscape. How is it that artists, by thinking
in paint, have come to regard the landscape as representing states
of mind? 'Painting', says Neve, 'is a process of finding out, and
landscape can be its thesis.' What he is writing is not precisely
art history: it is about pictures, about landscape and about
thought. Over the years, he was able to have discussions with many
of the thirty or so artists he focuses on, the inspiration for the
book having come from his talks with Ben Nicholson; and he has
immersed himself in their work, their countryside, their ideas.
Because he is a painter himself, and an expert on 20th-century art,
Neve is well equipped for such a journey. Few writers have conveyed
more vividly the mixture of motives, emotions, unconscious forces
and contradictions which culminate in the creative act of painting.
Each of the thirteen chapters has a theme and explores its
significance for one or more of the artists. The problem of time,
for instance, is considered in relation to Paul Nash, God in
relation to David Jones, music to Ivon Hitchens, hysteria to Edward
Burra, abstraction to Ben Nicholson, 'the spirit in the mass' to
David Bomberg. There are also chapters about painters' ideas on
specific types of country: about Eric Ravilious and the chalk
landscape, Joan Eardley and the sea, and Cedric Morris and the
garden.
A remarkable, heartfelt, beautifully written analysis of the late
work of 19 major artists that Max Porter describes as ‘completely
and utterly marvellous’. ‘Painting … exists and exults in
immortal thoughts’ William Blake In 2020, as the spread of
Covid-19 causes pandemonium worldwide, an elderly artist returns to
his childhood home to watch the transcendent beauty of the seasons
and reflect on the final work of the artists he most admires. It
seems to him that in their final art 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 and comes
from trying to write about painting itself. 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 short accounts of the cataclysmic global
progress of the disease in poignant contrast to the beauty of the
seasons in the isolated house and garden, narrative strands that
are closely intertwined. From Cézanne's last watercolours to
Michelangelo’s final five drawings, Rembrandt and suffering to
Gwen John and absence, Christopher Neve dwells on artists’ late
ideas, memory, risk, handling and places, in the terrible context
of Time and mortality. As much art history as a discussion of great
art in the context of the Dance of Death, Neve writes with renewed
passion about Bonnard, Michelangelo, Morandi, Poussin, Soutine and
many others in his distinctive style.
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