Christopher Neve

"… 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.… (mais)

As a working landscape painter, this is undoubtedly the best book on the process of painting I have ever read. Neve focuses on the processes at work in the mind of the painter, not the technicalities of painting. Concentrating on the mid-20thC English 'New Romantics' he illuminates the relationship between the painter and the natural world in a way which is stimulating and inspirational if at times difficult. His analysis is based on a personal knowledge of and dialogues with the painters as well as their work. A book which repays re-reading many times; it is a crime that it is not available in paperback for every art student! If you have a loaf of bread, Wilde says, sell half and buy lilies. If you have something worth real money, shove it on ebay and buy this book.

Neve covers the work of the following artists: Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious, F.L.Griggs, Stanley Spencer, Cedric Morris, Walter Sickert, William Townsend, Joan Eardley, Robin Tanner, Graham Sutherland, David Jones, Winifred and Ben Nicholson, L.S.Lowry, Edward Burra, Ivon Hitchens, Mary Potter and David Bomberg. He does not necessarily give most weight to the best-known.

The only thing this book lacks is sufficient illustrations. Each artist is illustrated, but many of the pictures are black and white. See The Green Fuse: Pastoral Vision in English Art 1820-2000 for a work setting several of these artists in their historical context; the text isn't as extraordinary but the pictures are better!… (mais)