Still — and I’d hesitate to confess this to Connie, though I think she knows — I’ve always felt a little at a loss with art, as if a piece of me is missing, or was never there. I can appreciate draughtsmanship and deft choice of colour, I understand the social and historical context, but despite all my best efforts my responses seem to me fundamentally shallow. I don’t quite know what to say or, indeed, feel. In portraiture I look for people that I recognise — ‘Look, it’s Uncle Tony’ — or for the faces of film stars. The Madame Tussaud’s school of art appreciation. In realist works I look for detail; ‘Look at the eyelashes!’ I say, in idiotic admiration at the fineness of the brush. ‘Look at the reflection in his eye!’ In abstract art I look for colour — ‘I love the blue’ — as if the works of Rothko and Mondrian were little more than immense paint charts. I understand the superficial thrill of seeing the object in the flesh, so to speak; the sightseeing approach that lumps together the Grand Canyon, the Taj Mahal and the Sistine Chapel as items to tick off. I understand rarity and uniqueness, the ‘how much?’ school of criticism.
And of course I can see beauty. In my work, I see it all the time: the symmetrical cleavage of a fertilised frog egg, the stained stem cells of a zebrafish embryo or an electron micrograph of
My wife and son have few such insecurities. Certainly they weren’t on display in the Italian gallery of the Louvre, where Albie and Connie were playing that game of seeing who could stare at a painting the longest. In this case it was a fresco by Botticelli, cracked and faded and a lovely thing, but was there really so much to see? I waited while they drank it all in, the brush strokes, the interplay of light and dark, all the things I’d missed. Eventually there was movement, and we strolled on past endless varieties of crucifixions and nativities, assorted martyrs whipped or pierced with arrows, a nonchalant saint with a sword embedded in his head, a scene of Mary — it’s usually Mary — recoiling from an angel that had left a vapour trail behind him. ‘Braccesco, apparently,’ I said. ‘Jet-powered angel!’ as if it meant something, and we moved on.
We passed a terrific battle scene by someone called Uccello, soldiers clustered together into a black porcupine, the cracks and tears on the canvas adding to its grandeur in a strange kind of way. Then in the grand central corridor my eye was drawn to a portrait of a bearded man whose face, on closer inspection, was composed of apples, mushrooms, grapes, a pumpkin, his nose a fat ripe pear. ‘
‘Kitsch,’ said Albie, presenting with his eyes the award for Most Banal Remark Ever Made in an Art Gallery. Perhaps this was why those museum audio-guides had become so popular; a reassuring voice in your ear, telling you what to think and feel.
We moved on. There was a lovely fuzzy da Vinci, as if seen through smeary spectacles, of two women cooing over baby Jesus, but this didn’t seem to interest Connie and Albie, and I couldn’t help but notice that the more famous and familiar a work of art, the less time they spent looking at it. Certainly they had no interest in the
