Hardcover
9.1 x 6.3 inches.
179 pages.
ISBN: 1568985185
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Hustvedt’s focus in these essays is on the works of such masters as Goya, Richter, Vermeer, Joan Mitchell, and Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin. Her concern is with the very act of looking and the limitless rewards to be gleaned from sustained, careful attention. Unlike film and books, which progress over time, "Painting is there all at once," she writes, "it is only with patience and repeated viewings that elusive meanings present themselves. Through her own personal experiences, Hustvedt is able to reveal things until now hidden in plain sight: an egg-like detail in Vermeer's Woman with a Pearl Necklace and the many hidden self-portraits in Goya's series of drawings, Los Caprichos, as well as in his infamous painting The Third of May. Most importantly, these essays exhibit the passion, thrill, and sheer pleasure of bewilderment a work of art can produce.

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"[Hustvedt's] selection is personal as well as shrewd [having] given these paintings a lingering attention, often over many years, that's almost erotic in its intensity....For all of her command of the subject, Hustvedt writes not as an art historian but as an unusually sensitive and informed amateur who trains her receptive gaze on a handful of works by each artist and explores what she sees, complementing her observations with relevant bits of biographical and historical context. Her fidelity to the eye will come as a relief to anyone sick of the kibbitzing -- chirping audioguides, fatuous wall labels -- that distracts the viewer from the silent place where paintings live. Not that the book lacks intellectual depth or sophistication -- her analysis of the peculiar grandeur of Chardin's modest still lifes is fresh and subtle, and her synopsis of Richter's sprawling oeuvre is concise without being reductive....Hustvedt's surrender to the images, her willingness to listen to paintings rather than talking over them that makes MYSTERIES OF THE RECTANGLE special -- that and the graceful clarity of her writing, which is transparent without being colorless."
TIMEOUT NEW YORK, October 27, 2005

Every painting is always two paintings," writes novelist Siri Hustvedt in her new book of essays on art. There is "the one you see and the one you remember." Adopting a pose of languorous curiosity, Hustvedt approaches a series of works, from Vermeer's "Woman with a Pearl Necklace" to Goya's "Los Caprichos," and tracks their evolution from initial viewing through internal mulching and out the other side of perception. The result is a meditation on seeing that somehow avoids the pretensions and obviousness of such an exercise.

One reason why Hustvedt succeeds where so many have failed (with the notable exception of John Berger) is that she strikes the right tone. A contributor to Modern Painters magazine, she has been looking at art professionally for three decades now - in addition to writing novels, often about painters - but she wears this experience lightly. Her reactions tend to begin with the emotional and physical, then ricochet to the cerebral. Looking at Goya's "The Third of May" in the Prado, for example, she is shocked at how small it is. Another essay begins with the oddly disarming sentence, "Twenty years ago, at the Musee National d'art Moderne in Paris, I shook Joan Mitchell's hand."

Art historians might be somewhat annoyed with such a breezy approach, but it gently lowers the gate ropes and encourages readers to creep a little closer to the photographs of Gerard Richter and the paintings of Giorgio Morandi and study how mysterious and strange they are under second and third examinations. In this populist fashion, Hustvedt smuggles some keen insights onto the page. Of course "Woman with a Pearl Necklace" is an annunciation scene - but it hasn't always been viewed as such. Would that it were Hustvedt leading tours around the Met on Sunday mornings. One might actually want to stop and listen.
NEWSDAY, November 13, 2005

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