Still Life With A Bridle

"Zbigniew Herbert is a great Polish poet and essayist of the 20th century. I love a lot of his work, and this essay collection is an old favourite. It’s one I’ve read many times and taught many times. He has a few qualities that are unusual in trying to bring a reader into contact with visual material. He doesn’t often describe, in detail, the paintings, although sometimes he does. The pictures are not reproduced in the book, so you don’t see them. But he comes at it through a combination of a wonderful documentation of what material life was like in the 17th century — what people sat on, what they ate, what their rooms were like, what the goods were that were traded and valued — and a propensity to make a strange myth out of what’s known of the biographical details of the lives of the individual painters. So you feel as if you’ve been told fairy tales, at the same time that you feel immersed in the economic history of the moment. That combination is wonderfully evocative for what the paintings themselves are like, although he’s relying on you to carry some images that you may have seen yourself and bring those to bear on the inquiry. I think it’s really a very unusual and beautiful book. When I’ve taught it to students they’ve been very excited about the way that you think you’re learning about one thing and gradually a picture is emerging in the back of your mind about something else. His control of the different levels of your engagement with the material is really amazing. I think he has a particular idea of what it is to be an artist, and he’s concerned not to separate the life of the artist from the life of the world. We shouldn’t think, well here’s this artist whose visual observations we have, and who was somehow separate from the world by virtue of his great talent — or even by virtue of the fact we still care about what he looked at. No, these people are immersed in their world, their observations are derived from the world around them. Herbert was in the Resistance in World War II and experienced the Communist overtaking of Poland. His life was completely shaped by large political forces, and he was very brave in his responses. I think he felt it was quite dangerous to let the idea of an artist stray from the world in which the artist lived. So he’s at pains not just to make us feel what that world was like, but to return the artist to his right relation with his times and with his life experience. Also, his experiences of Poland are always in the back of his mind, and you can read many of his parables about these artists as parables about his own times too."