If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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Clark is particularly strong on telling details, and his insights into Pissarro, in the first main chapter, are an added bonus. In chapter three Clark mobilises the materiality of the brushstroke against the notion of ‘the aesthetic as a moment of adequacy of form to content’. An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T.

Cézanne, a painter known for his still lifes and landscapes, is generally regarded as among the most significant modernists. Now, extending the analysis of The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing ( Clarke 2008), his exercise in extended close looking at Nicolas Poussin’s art, he discusses some paintings by Paul Cézanne. It is delightful to see that he introduces a new lexicon for the artist’s work, for example in the description of the “fulcrum" of the effect of the Getty’s Still Life in chapter two – a word that also describes the Card Players in chapter four, entitled Peasants – which is distinct from the “punctum”, used by the French philosopher Roland Barthes on photography.The monograph explores this originality of thinking, paving the way for the development of 20th century modern art movements, as the work of Cézanne inspired both Picasso and Matisse, the subject of the final chapter, Matisse in the Garden, which is an interesting addition to the book as it captures a specific sense of history associated with the first world war. These glimpses onto relations of production flicker only occasionally in If These Apples Should Fall. He experiences Cézanne’s paintings as the very embodiment of modernity – understood as an irresolvable contradiction, an ‘interminable to-and-fro’. And his The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and his Followers ( Clarke 1999) transformed our understanding of Impressionism. In these more-than-close readings, social and historical worlds open up tentatively: Faced with Cézanne’s Still Life with Apples, ca.

But (and this is the paradox that Clark wants to inhabit) Cézanne continues to speak to us all the same. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, and examines the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it; above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement. An electrifying account of looking intently to fathom Cézanne’s pictures: what makes their beauty still so uncanny, precarious, visionary. It is held to usher in a world of universals, at the opposite end of the spectrum from the concepts we need if our aim is to grasp the work of art’s particularity—concepts like ‘history,’ ‘ideology,’ and ‘production.The problem with not sticking to biographical content and trying to describe your muddled opinions on Cezanne's painting in words is the equivalent of trying to taste a Sunday roast by listening to it. In chapter three, Cézanne and the Outside World, Clark’s style crisply captures the beauty of his landscapes, for example when he turns to the canvas Montagne Sainte-Victoire seen from Chateau Noir (c1900-04) to say: “The mountain looks crystalline, made of a substance not quite opaque, not quite diaphanous; natural, obviously, but having many of the characteristics – the crumpled look, the piecemeal unevenness – of an object put together by hand. There are the tutorial imperatives: “Ask the question of Still Life with Apples, then”; “Compare the Orsay and Courtauld pictures again”; “Keep the ridiculous pool in sight. For the author, Paul Cézanne’s present tense instead resides in the moment of looking itself: “I want . Another is a watchful explication of the cardplayer paintings that originated as a catalogue essay, while “Cézanne’s Material,” on the still lifes, works through a series of journal entries Clark wrote in 2016, not unlike the technique of his 2008 book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing.