If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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Although I have read several other books on Cezanne, I had a hard time following the author’s arguments. In Clark’s hands, Cézanne’s practice is at once singular and a paradigm for an art history that lets in the world only when it needs to. the feeling of the world ‘occurring’ in this particular pattern of line and colour, and pushing both to behaviours that are more like conjuration than composition . Indeed, the apparent role of Pissarro as a mentor to Cézanne, who shaped his perception of nature, can be seen in the comparison between the pair of artists and Plato and Socrates, between French painting and Greek philosophy in the book’s first chapter, entitled Pissarro and Cézanne. If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society.

Such concentrated focus could be said to honor what the artist did and wanted, but this tact risks privatizing interpretation, hemming the work in to the lines and shapes of individual perception. Yet a page later, “because the embedded propositions in Cézanne are so simple and primordial, and so entirely dependent on ironic feats of matter—of paint—to breathe life and death back into them, putting them into words is exactly betraying ‘what they have to say’ about material existence. Clark’s two early books, The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848–1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the 1848 Revolution (both Clarke 1973a, b) inaugurated an extremely influential tradition of leftist art history. There is a Cézanne who cannot be captured by “‘history,’ ‘ideology,’ and ‘production,’” but he might not be the Cézanne of our present. Not unlike those of Sebald or Brecht (or Berlant), Clark’s gestures function as demonstrations of method foremost.An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T. Welcome to Art Lovers Movie Club, where you’ll find a selection of artists’ videos available exclusively online at artreview. D. candidate in the art history program at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and a fellow at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

My advice is when reading the book to skip any bits where you get stuck (at least at a first reading) but to look carefully at the comparisons he makes between different works (almost everything he refers to is illustrated in colour). Perhaps art need not be thought as the labile, vital force against history’s clumsy, bludgeoning mediation. Most of the chapters derive from texts written years ago, and all the pulsations of the present day—its politics, crises, and fashions—ring somewhere beyond the book’s ambit. This echoes a story charting how Cézanne grew up in a place where the academic teaching of art cultivated a sense of liberty in Schapiro’s writing.

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. In Cézanne’s Gravity, a book comparable to Clark’s in its summary gaze, Armstrong sought to redeem the artist in part through an interdisciplinary approach, where if Cézanne in his strangeness could be brought to bear on Einstein’s physics or Woolf’s fiction, he could be released from the teleological prison of modernist painting and gain newfound relevance. It’s unclear what experts on the artist might glean from these sustained poetics besides the pleasures of rhetorical figuration, or if the casual readers presumed by the phalanx of copies available for sale at the Tate Modern’s current Cézanne exhibition exist in practice. At the heart of Cézanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour.