Some years ago, a journalist friend, posted to Paris by his magazine, became in quick succession the father of two children. As soon as their eyes were able to focus properly, he would take them round the Louvre, tenderly pointing their infant retinas at some of the world’s greatest paintings. I don’t know if he also played classical music to them while they were in their mother’s womb, as some prospective parents do; but I have occasionally found myself wondering how those children will turn out: as potential directors of MoMA – or, perhaps, as adults with no visual sense at all, and a horror of art galleries.

My own parents never tried feeding me culture at an early (or any other) age; neither did they seek to dissuade me from it. They were both schoolteachers, and so the arts – or perhaps, more precisely, the idea of the arts – were respected in the house. There were proper books on the shelves; and there was even a piano in the sitting room – though at no point in my childhood was it actually played. My mother had been given it by her doting father when she was a young, capable and hopeful pianist. Her playing, however, came to a halt in her early 20s when she found herself faced with a difficult piece of Scriabin. She realised, as she repeatedly failed to master it, that she had reached a certain level, which she could never go beyond. She stopped playing, abruptly and finally. Even so, the piano could not be got rid of; it moved house with her, following her loyally into marriage, and maternity, and old age and widowhood. On its regularly dusted top was a pile of sheet music, including that Scriabin piece she had abandoned decades previously.

Illustration by Renaud Vigourt

As for art, there were three oil paintings in the house. Two were of country scenes in Finistère, painted by one of my father’s French assistants. They were, in a way, as misleading as the piano, since “Uncle Paul”, as he was known, hadn’t exactly painted them en plein air; rather, he had copied – and aggrandised – them from picture postcards. I still have the originals he worked from (one smeared with real paint) on my desk. The third picture, which hung in our hall, was somewhat more authentic. An oil of a female nude, in a gilt frame, it was probably an obscure 19th-century copy of an equally obscure original. My parents had bought it at an auction sale in the outer London suburb where we lived. I remember it mainly because I found it completely unerotic. This seemed very strange, because most other depictions of unclad women had an invigorating effect on me. Perhaps this was what art did: by being solemn, it took the excitement out of life.



There was further evidence that this might be art’s purpose and effect: the boring amateur dramatics my parents would take my brother and me to once a year; and the dreary discussion programmes about the arts they used to listen to on the wireless. By the age of 12 or 13, I was a healthy little philistine of the kind the British are so good at producing, keen on sports and comics. I couldn’t carry a tune, didn’t learn a musical instrument, never studied art at school, and never acted after my cameo (non-speaking) appearance as Third Wise Man at the age of about seven. Though I was introduced to literature as part of my schoolwork, and was beginning to see how it might have connections to real life, I thought of it mainly as a subject on which I would have to pass examinations.

The Unicorn (1885) by Gustave Moreau. Photograph: Getty

I was once taken by my parents to the Wallace Collection in London: more gilt frames, and more unerotic nudes. We stood for a while in front of one of the museum’s most famous pictures: The Laughing Cavalier by Frans Hals. I couldn’t for the life of me see what the man with the silly moustache was smirking at, or why it might be an interesting picture. I was probably taken to the National Gallery as well, but have no memory of the event. It wasn’t until the summer of 1964, when I was staying in Paris for a few weeks between school and university, that I started looking at pictures of my own volition. And though I must have gone to the Louvre, it was a large, dark, unfashionable museum that made the most impression on me – perhaps because there was no one else there, so I felt no emulative pressure to respond in a particular way. The Musée Gustave Moreau, near the Gare Saint-Lazare, had been left to the French state on the painter’s death in 1898, and – from its gloom and grubbiness – seemed to have been rather grudgingly kept up thereafter. Upstairs was Moreau’s huge, high barn of a studio, underheated by a chunky black stove which had probably been going since the artist’s time. Badly lit paintings were hung from floor to ceiling, while large wooden chests contained thin drawers you could pull out to examine hundreds of preliminary drawings. I had never knowingly seen a picture by Moreau before, and knew nothing about him (let alone that he was the only contemporary painter wholeheartedly admired by Flaubert). I was uncertain what to make of such work: exotic, bejewelled and darkly glittering, with an odd mixture of private and public symbolism, little of which I could unscramble. Perhaps it was this mysteriousness that attracted me; and perhaps I admired Moreau the more because nobody told me to do so. But it was certainly here that I remember myself for the first time consciously looking at pictures, rather than being passively and obediently in their presence.

And I also liked Moreau because he was so odd. At this early stage of my looking, I was attracted to art that was as transformative as possible: indeed, I thought that this was what art was. You took life and turned it, by some charismatic, secret process, into something else: related to life, but stronger, more intense and, preferably, weirder. Among the painters of the past, I was drawn to the likes of El Greco and Tintoretto for their liquid elongations of form, Bosch and Brueghel for their fantastical imaginings, Arcimboldo for his witty emblematic constructions. And among the painters of the 20th century – the modernists, anyway – I was pretty much thrilled by all of them, as long as they turned dull reality into cubes and slicings, into visceral whirls, intense sploshings, brainy grids and enigmatic constructions. Had I known Apollinaire as more than a (modernist, therefore admirable) poet, I would have approved his praise of cubism for being a noble and necessary reaction against contemporary frivolity. As for the wider, longer history of painting, of course I could see that Dürer and Memling and Mantegna were brilliant, but I tended to feel that realism was a kind of default setting for art.

This was a normal, and normally Romantic, approach. It took me a lot of looking before I understood that realism, far from being just the base camp for high-altitude adventure by others, could be just as truthful, and even just as strange – that it too involved choice, organisation and imagination, so in its own way might be equally transformative. I was also, slowly, to learn that there were painters whom you grew out of (such as the Pre-Raphaelites); painters you grew into (Chardin); painters towards whom you had a lifelong, sighing indifference (Greuze); painters you suddenly became aware of after years of unnoticing (Liotard, Hammershoi, Cassatt, Vallotton); painters assuredly great but to whom your response was always a bit negligent (Rubens); and painters who would, whatever age you were, remain persistently, indomitably great (Piero, Rembrandt, Degas). And then – perhaps the slowest advance of all – I permitted myself to believe, or rather see, that not all modernism was entirely wonderful. That some parts of it were better than others; that maybe Picasso could be vainglorious, Miró and Klee could be twee, Léger could be repetitive, and so on. I eventually came to realise that modernism had strengths and weaknesses and a built-in obsolescence, just like all other art movements. Which, as it happens, made it more rather than less interesting.

The Pretty Gardener by Paul Klee. Photograph: De Agostini Picture Library/Getty Images

But still, in 1964, I knew that it was “my” movement. And I felt lucky that some of the great modernists were still alive. Braque had died the previous year, but Picasso, the great competitor (in life as in art), was around; so was that suave bamboozler Dalí, as well as Magritte and Miró (and Giacometti and Calder and Kokoschka). As long as some of its exponents continued to practise, modernism could not yet be given over to the museums and the academics. This was true of the other arts as well: in 1964 TS Eliot and Ezra Pound were alive; so was Stravinsky, whom I once saw conduct half a concert at London’s Royal Festival Hall. This sense of my life (just) overlapping with theirs was important in a way I didn’t fully recognise at the time, because I had no notion as yet that I would become a writer. But anyone setting out to practise any of the arts in the second half of the 20th century had to take on modernism: to understand it, digest it, work out why and how it had changed things, and to decide where that left you, as a potential artist after modernism. You might (and should) choose to go your own way, but it was not an option simply to ignore the movement, to pretend that it had never happened. Besides, by the 60s, the next generation and more had been at work – there was postmodernism, and later post-postmodernism, and so on until eventually the labels ran out. A literary critic in New York was later to call me a “pre-postmodernist”, a moniker I am still working on.

Though I wasn’t aware of it back then, I see now that the way in which I processed – and enjoyed, and was thrilled by – modernism was less through literature than through art. The journey out of realism seemed easier to follow in paint than it was in print. In a museum you went from one gallery to the next, reading what appeared to be a clear narrative: from Courbet to Manet and Monet and Degas to Cézanne and then to Braque and Picasso – and you were there! With fiction, it all seemed more complicated and less linear, with more backtracking. If the first great European novel was Don Quixote, its strange happenings, tricksiness and narrative self-consciousness also made it modern, postmodern, magical realist – all things at once. Similarly, if the first great modernist novel was Ulysses, how come its best sections were the most realistic, the ones that most truly render ordinary life? I didn’t realise – couldn’t yet see – how in all the arts there are usually two things going on at the same time: the desire to make it new, and a continuing conversation with the past. All the great innovators look to previous innovators, to the ones who gave them permission to go and do otherwise, and painted homages to predecessors are a frequent trope.

Waiting (1882) by Edgar Degas. Photograph: De Agostini/Getty Images

At the same time, there is progress, often awkward, always required. In 2000 the Royal Academy put on an exhibition called 1900: Art at the Crossroads. It displayed, without preferential hanging or curatorial nudge, a cross section of what was being admired and bought as the previous century had turned, regardless of school, affiliation or subsequent critical judgment. Bouguereau and Lord Leighton were hung alongside Degas and Munch; inert academicism and tedious storytelling next to the airy freedoms of impressionism; diligent and didactic realism beside fervent expressionism; sleek porniness and naively unaware erotic musings next to the newest thick-brushed attempts to render the body truthfully. If such an exhibition had been organised in 1900, you could imagine visitors feeling baffled and affronted by the enormous aesthetic squabble in front of them. Here was the cacophonous, overlapping, irreconcilable actuality that would later be argued and flattened into art history, with virtue and vice attributed, victory and defeat calculated, false taste rebuked. By deliberately not seeking to instruct, this exhibition taught one thing clearly: the “noble necessity” of modernism.

Flaubert believed that it was impossible to explain one art form in terms of another, and that great paintings required no words of explanation. Braque thought the ideal state would be reached when we said nothing at all in front of a painting. But we are very far from reaching that state. We remain incorrigibly verbal creatures who love to explain things, to form opinions, to argue. Put us in front of a picture and we chatter, each in our different way. Proust, when going round an art gallery, liked to comment on who the people in the pictures reminded him of in real life; which might have been a deft way of avoiding the direct aesthetic confrontation. But it is a rare picture that stuns, or argues, us into silence. And if one does, it is only a short time before we want to explain and understand the very silence into which we have been plunged.

Woman’s Head by Pablo Picasso. Photograph: Succession Picasso/DACS, London 2015/Getty

In 2014, I went back to the Musée Gustave Moreau for the first time in half a century. It was much as memory had continued to picture it: cavernous, gloomy and densely hung. That old cast-iron stove had been pensioned off and reduced to decorative status; and I had forgotten that Moreau, when planning his house, had awarded himself not one but two gigantic studios, one on top of the other, linked by a circular cast-iron staircase. The Musée remains doggedly in the lower tier of Parisian tourist attractions. And in the meantime I had come across Degas’s opinion of the place. He had been planning a posthumous museum of his own, but a visit to the Rue de la Rochefoucauld dissuaded him. As he came out, he remarked, “How truly sinister … it might be a family vault … All those pictures crammed together look to me like a Thesaurus or a Gradus ad Parnassum.”

The Raft of the Medusa (Le Radeau de la Méduse), by Théodore Géricault (1791-1824)

This time, part of me was impressed by my younger self – that it hadn’t turned tail and fled. I tried to insist that my 50 years of extra looking now allowed me to appreciate Moreau better than I had at first. But I saw again in the same CinemaScope scale and dull-Technicolor hues; the same high-mindedness, thematic repetition, and the solemn purposefulness of the sexuality. (Moreau once said to Degas, “Are you really proposing to revive painting by means of the dance?” Degas replied, “And you – are you proposing to renovate it with jewellery?”) While I could admire some of the technique – especially Moreau’s innovation of adding blank-ink outlining and decoration over the painted surface – by the end of a couple of hours I was still trying and still failing. The Flaubert who admired Moreau was the Flaubert of Salammbô rather than of Madame Bovary. This was and remained bookish art: it came out of academic study, and has now become a worthy subject of academic study itself, without ever seeming to have gone through a middle period of being charged with life and fire and excitement. And whereas before I had found it interestingly odd, now I found it not odd enough.

I first began writing about art with a chapter on Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa in my novel A History of the World in 10½ Chapters (1989). Since then, I have never followed any particular plan. But the period from 1850 to 1920 continues to fascinate me, as a time of great truth-speaking combined with a fundamental reexamination of the forms of art. I think we still have a lot to learn from that time. And if I was right as a boy about the dullness of that nude we had at home, I was wrong in my deductions about art’s solemnity. Art doesn’t just capture and convey the excitement, the thrill of life. Sometimes, it does even more: it is that thrill.

• Keeping an Eye Open by Julian Barnes (Jonathan Cape, £16.99). To order a copy for £13.59, go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min. p&p of £1.99.