Eye Contact

This book does what few art books do. It locates the elevated and often esoteric world of art in the personal depths of the author’s life. Acclaimed poet and novelist William Benton lets us see what he sees with both candor and brilliance. As the critic Lilly Wei observed, “He tells us something about the paradoxes of love at the same time that he tells us about . . . art.” From Elizabeth Bishop, whose paintings he first brought to light, to Vermeer (real and fake), from El Greco to Joan Brown to an autobiographical concordance of the drawings of Georges Seurat, Eye Contact is in every sense a dazzling encounter.