Review: “See What You’re Missing” appraises the visual instincts of Frida Kahlo, Rembrandt and many others to find what we might learn from them
Gompertz considers artists “expert lookers” who perceive the world more deeply and satisfyingly than the rest of us. His examples, which follow no explicit program or order, range from David Hockney to Wassily Kandinsky, Yayoi Kusama, Artemisia Gentileschi, Jennifer Packer and the 11th-century Chinese landscapist Guo Xi.
There are passages of charm. “They talk of people seeing the world through rose-tinted glasses,” Gompertz writes. Hockney’s lenses “are on a permanent St-Tropez setting, where everything is lit up by an explosion of bright colors in a rapturous celebration of life.” Agnes Martin was “a hunter in the jungle of her imagination: stalking, watching, sensing, readied.” I enjoyed Gompertz’s profiles of the one-of-a-kind sculptors El Anatsui and Eva Hesse.
On the whole, however, the analysis and turns of phrase are not particularly profound or satisfying. On Frida Kahlo and her work: “You can’t paint hurt without hurting.” How much, one wonders, are the reputations of “painful” pictures informed by biography? Gompertz does not say. If we adopt Rembrandt’s “lead,” he observes, we “take a long, hard look at ourselves and render what we see in a self-portrait.
“See What You’re Missing” belongs loosely to the “last line” genre; that is, any book, play or film in which the spirit of the work’s title is channeled into its concluding utterance or phrase. Gompertz ends most chapters in this vein, with an insistent reminder of his “looking and seeing” theme. Fra Angelico’s achievement? “There is no fixed reality, as this friar-painter demonstrated — it all depends on your perspective.” Regarding Gentileschi: “She removed the blinkers of assumption and presumption and showed us what we had been missing in all those classic stories — a female point of view.” Packer: “She has taught herself to see what is not there, and to show us that what is not present tells us as much about our world as what is.” A single throwaway line may be necessary.
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