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Laura Cumming Books

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“We see pictures in time and place. We cannot see them otherwise. They are fragments of our lives, moments of existence that may be as unremarkable as rain or as startling as a clap of thunder. Whatever we are that day, whatever is going on behind our eyes, or in the forests of our lives, is present in what we see. We see with everything that we are.”

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Book:Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death
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“I cannot get enough of Dutch art. You can turn to this other world -- and it is a picture world as no other, a whole society visualised through time and place, seasons and generations, moment by moment -- and live inside it in your thoughts. There is always more of it, and then inexhaustibly more. Every time I think I have seen my last Dutch painting another comes into view, in some old museum or faraway city. I once saw, in a hotel in Algiers, a Dutch still life of redcurrants glinting on a silver dish and was momentarily transported to a long-ago Delft day. Paintings can take you anywhere, but they are also a land in themselves, a society, a place to be.”

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Book:Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death
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“Fabritius is thirty-two, and I was the same age when I first wrote about his self-portrait. He and I remain the same age whenever we meet. He is dead, I am still alive, so the existential maths [sic] is now absurd. But a person in a portrait does not age, even if the painting does. The picture removes the person from time's harm and fixes them in the moment; and so it does for me. I never go to a gallery and think that these people are dead and gone, no matter how long ago they were depicted. The painting fuses the person in the moment and that moment somehow includes me, and you, and everyone to come. Here he is now, Carel Fabritius, and so he will remain; the artist appearing in and as his own painting.”

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Book:Thunderclap: A Memoir of Art and Life & Sudden Death
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