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Before Immortal Thoughts: Late Style in a Time of Plague, there was Unquiet Landscape: Places and Ideas in 20th Century English Painting. I picked up a copy secondhand, maybe because of the Ivon Hitchens artwork reproduced on the dust jacket. Unfamiliar at that time with many of the artists discussed inside, I responded to how proximal its writing seemed to painting, landscape, the life of an artist. Later I found the book again on my shelves, to read a chapter on a particular artist after seeing an exhibition or a painting in a gallery. In 2020 it was reprinted in paperback, 30 years after its first edition, now with a Paul Nash painting for its cover, its subtitle a more accurate “British painting.” The excited blurbs and online mentions told me this book was not my secret at all.

Also in 2020, during the UK’s Covid lockdown, Christopher Neve wrote Immortal Thoughts, not focused solely on British art, but a volume whose writing practiced the same intimacy with its subject, this time exploring the “late style” of a personal selection of European artists. The framework: the author, an elderly painter, retreats to a house where he lived as a child, to live out the pandemic. There, without libraries or museums (our author does not use the internet), he writes a series of essays about individual artists, drawing on old catalogues and biographies but mostly the presence of painters and paintings in memory. Neve also kept a loose diary, recording news reports about the pandemic and nature observations. Here, as I want to explore in this essay, an equivalence emerges between the handling of the artists he discusses and Neve’s own “late writing.”

Unlike in Unquiet Landscape, the only British artists who get essays here are Gwen John (the one female artist) and John Constable, although the book is partly a constellation of figures who influenced the Modern British painters of that earlier book and more widely, including its artist-author. So, as I first read this book in July, I visited the Soutine Kossoff  exhibition at Hastings Contemporary, pondering its juxtaposition of London-based Kossoff to his Belarus-born predecessor. Soutine is the dénouement of Neve’s book, which also has a chapter on Rembrandt, pivotal to both artists in the Hastings show. Neve’s chapter on Giorgio Morandi also prompted me to revisit his exhibition at London’s Estorick Collection, picking up a catalogue to their 2006 show, Morandi’s Legacy: Influences on British Art. Neve’s book joins a shelf of recent titles in the UK positing a close relationship of words and paint, including Celia Paul’s Letters to Gwen John and Max Porter’s The Death of Francis Bacon.

For all its vividness as a concept, embodied famously by Rembrandt, Titian and Johnny Cash, those who have considered late style must reflect how it involves not just “works [that] crown a lifetime of artistic endeavour” but “artistic lateness not as harmony and resolution but as intransigence, difficulty, and unresolved contradiction.” This was Edward Said, who died in 2003 leaving the manuscript of On Late Style unfinished. Neve absorbs both these possibilities into a definition on his opening page:

“Late style, that odd compound of thought beyond reason, when, in painting, the constraints of patronage, sharp eyesight, and public approval are left behind. Part death, part memory, part intuition. A way of working that transcends technique and sets no store by the ability to finish. A willingness to take risks, to chance the arm. The urgent need to leave behind terms of reference and get to the heart of the matter without breaking off to explain.”

Neve outlines various categories, including artists whose sudden deaths meant they did not realise what they were doing was their late style (like Velázquez) and, perhaps rarest of all, “those whose output petered out long before they died” (Gwen John, says Neve), whilst he also finds it impossible to ignore those glorious, long-lived, and hugely productive Old Masters.

Titian, says Neve, paints the terrifying Pope Paul III in 1546, but “fears nobody. He is not so much painting the Pope as laying bare, for his own reasons, what most interests him about his psychological situation.” This freedom manifests in his handling: Titian alters the position of the Pope’s right hand three times to “arrive at a partly botched solution that incorporates all three versions to it.” As per his definition of late style, Neve variously describes Titian as combining “nerves and unconscious memories,” “chance and intuition,” as he attains “a state that is unresolved, unfinished, yet hinting at a thrilling possible solution.” Neve then gets even more excited: “he is in some sort of trance and does not breathe the air we breathe or feel much consciousness of what he is doing.”

Titian was in his late 50’s. Neve’s effusive approval is one way to put into words the “unfinished” qualities of The Death of Actaeon in London’s The National Gallery, from about a decade later, although the precise balance of “intentionally unfinished” and “still to do” will always be argued. Meanwhile, in his essay on Rembrandt, Neve focuses on the familiar example of his self-portraits, as related to the artist’s shifting financial fortunes and relationships. Here there is a late style of spectatorship, too: Neve saw Rembrandt’s 1657 self-portrait in the National Gallery of Scotland almost daily as young man, admiring its technique, but writes here: “Only now, much later, do I think to ask what suffering lies behind that glance, and realize that the picture is of something out of sight.” In the book’s final essay on Soutine, Neve understands this “something” to be “risk,” defined as “the impulse to make visible something sensed but as yet unrealized which, in this crisis of confusion which is painting, will be a return to simplicity and order.”

All of this might suggest to a non-painter an inflated approach to writing about art, but Neve is practical. One common strategy is a straightforward invitation to imaginatively enter the artist’s life. He likes to begin “Now the two men go into the house in Rome…”or  “It is April 2nd, 1828, in Bordeaux” or “The old head is propped on a pillow” or “An old city the colour of soap …” This is how Neve works his way into writing, respectively, of a friendly, melancholy meeting between Poussin and Claude, the last days of Goya, a brooding near death sort-of inner monologue by Georges Rouault, and Giorgio Morandi’s studio, where based on the air, the vase, that unfinished canvas, it could be any time between 1910 and 1964.

I say “sort-of” because despite the text’s adoption of different identities, the narrative voice is always the same, that of the reflective author alone in his house. Biographical detail is also only the beginning. What Neve is after is to find how such details affect the seismograph of an artist’s mark-making. Take John Constable: after we learn of his grief at the death of his wife, Neve tells us the artist’s handling “becomes impatient,” as what seemed easy in youth is now more worked, the defining “tricks” of his early career no longer seem possible, or able to satisfy. I quote Neve’s summation at length because it is a version of what he hopes to distinguish in all the artists he writes about:

“There are clear signs from now on of brushing, scraping and wiping with a flexible knife over already existing paint. In the last work the handling overwhelms appearances and, mixing/throwing/overpainting/scraping/hinting/cancelling and restating, it makes an impatient bid for a state of mind. There is a dance of marks. Almost a need to scribble. Stirring white pigment into more white pigment, he leaves the eye and mind all but blinded.”

Then, in a chapter on Gwen John, Neve writes how he “arranged to meet but must have somehow mistaken the time or place. Either she was not there or you were not there, or perhaps it was the wrong year.” Neve refuses to use John’s name because it would invade her privacy, noting she carried no means of identification when found dead in Dieppe. Whilst this representation of a solitary, mystical John has been critiqued by critics and biographers including Alicia Foster and Maria Tamboukou, Neve uses it to inform rather than replace discussion of the paintings themselves. He has no interest in the other tendency when writing about this artist, which is to discuss her primarily through her relationships with lover Auguste Rodin and brother Augustus, although Neve does imagine Gwen commenting on her brother John: “He [Augustus] roars like a lion on her behalf … he has always inhibited her.”

Neve’s Gwen John paints portraits but finds the practicalities of arranging and organising sitters disrupt the “austere silence … quiet mind” she believes good work requires, as does the pressure to finish, then reluctantly exhibit and sell. A commission from an order of Dominican nuns to paint their founder, Marie Poussepin, who died in 1744, is ideal. John works simultaneously on seven different portraits distinguished by “a high key, exceedingly dry paint and a certain peculiar angularity to the pose. Something unexplained about the form.” Even this, in Neve’s account, disrupts rather than expounds her life’s quest for solitude. Before silence takes over completely, some final drawings comprise “small pencil marks on tiny pages, small experiments of great presence made of next to nothing. Things of consequence made almost out of absence. The strangeness. The strangeness.” None of Constable’s “handling overwhelms appearances,” then, but still a late style of marks moulded in sensibility and personality.

Sometimes I had disagreements with this book. The recent exhibition of Gwen John at Pallant House in Chichester, for example, emphasised a more robust artist, painting other churchgoers from her pew despite the priest’s condemnation, children in Brittany and Meudon, some definitely living nuns. More broadly, Neve’s theology of the mark can seem an aggrandising of technique, a mistaking of the preparatory. I wondered, too, about this Neve-like solitary author with ample time to write and consider, how the book makes that seem emblematic for the art writer. Why did I feel so resistant to that?

Such grumbles aside, Neve’s writing is as distinctive and interesting as when I first picked up Unquiet Landscape. Readers taken with its book-as-studiolo structure can move on to Giorgio Agamben’s so-titled essay collection, plus Brian Dillon’s Affinities, or track down writings on Morandi by Yves Bonnefoy and Philippe Jaccottet. I kept a mental list of artists I wanted Neve to write about: Hugo Van Der Goes, Zeuxis, or, from the cast of Unquiet, Eric Ravilious and Ivon Hitchens: “It is Autumn, wartime, you approach Terwick Mill in the rain …”

The dramatic end of this book surprised me. Neve’s catalogues of Covid news reports are interspersed throughout the essays on particular painters and are mostly neutral transcriptions — “Plague deaths continued to mount” — stripped bare of context to suggest both the strangeness of the pandemic in recent memory, whilst hinting it might be instead describing the Venetian plague that finally finished Titian. Neve’s descriptions of the nature in his garden are likewise at times little more than a lexicon of flower names. Suddenly, in the book’s final few chapters, something happens, the neutral seeming details of these interludes expand into a prose that combines idea and sensation, past and future, to produce a product strange and unexpected, a little arcane, grandiose, odd, unfamiliar.