Lively Portraits by an Ideal Guide

James Fenton is perhaps best known to American news-hounds as the front-runner for the vacant poet laureateship of England. Yet as a poet, journalist, theater critic, librettist (most recently adapting Salman Rushdie’s “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” for the operatic stage) and gentleman shrimp farmer, he is a man of many talents and near-infinite appetite.

There was a time last year when it seemed that the New York Review of Books had turned itself into a Schatzkammer, a treasure room, devoted to the essays of James Fenton. Now these essays on art and artists have been collected under the title of one, “Leonardo’s Nephew,” and display to a larger public this new color in Fenton’s palette.

Poetry is, after all, an act of sifting and guiding, and some of Fenton’s finest moments in these essays are poetry in prose clothing. A pair of essays devoted to Degas offer Fenton at his best, giving him the canvas to paint Degas the man and Degas the artist, the high priest of anti-Semitism and the archbishop of tutus. The medium Fenton chooses for these dual portraits is the diary of Harry Graf Kessler, a German art collector. In June 1907, Kessler was fortunate enough to dine twice in the cellar of the art dealer Ambroise Vollard, on one occasion with Degas, on another with Renoir, and sober enough to record his impressions soon after. From these bits of evidence, Fenton fashions a sad poem of this difficult old man:

” . . . on days when there was no model, he would draw one of his dancers, then turn the statuette by a few degrees and draw it again, so that he had two dancers; turn it again, and then there was a plausible threesome.

“He loved macaroni. Nobody explained to him that you don’t eat Dundee marmalade neat. The Jews and the Protestants were destroying France. He looked at his watch. There was a good watchmaker once in the rue du Helder, a good French watchmaker; they’d know what time it was. The dust came off the pastel. It spread up his fingers, everywhere. He didn’t button up his trousers properly. He didn’t ‘close the carriage doors.’ He could hardly see.”

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Some of Fenton’s subjects share his profile as a uomo universale. Among them are the architect-sculptor Gianlorenzo Bernini and painter Robert Rauschenberg who “had become a lighting designer [for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company], a choreographer, a performer even. He had taught himself to roller-skate and had created the performance piece Pelican . . . in which he skates so memorably with a reversed parachute fixed to his back.” Others are connected through a shared medium: Fenton devotes a paragraph in his essay on Jasper Johns to a discussion of the use of encaustic or burned wax by Johns and by the artists of the 4th century Egyptian Fayum portraits, the subject of another of his essays.

These connections are not perhaps the primary reasons for Fenton’s curiosity. But they illuminate the curious path that Fenton wanders as he investigates artists as individual as Verrocchio, Pierino da Vinci, Seurat, Maillol, Rauschenberg and Johns.

The wonderful transformation of his book is the way it makes Fenton’s path our path and turns him into an ideal cicerone, the ideal guide who not only distills monographs and volumes but also leads us into selected museums and galleries and certain private cellars and diaries of artists and collectors.

Sad to report, Fenton’s superior prose is undercut by the hasty photographic reproductions of a random selection of the artworks he refers to, printed in backhanded black and white, many of their details cropped and guttered. One would do well to treat the volume as an invitation to a voyage and, this Baedeker in hand, travel to the real thing.