If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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We will be happy to offer you a full refund, replacement or exchange on any items excluding custom prints, Goldfinger + Tate furniture, face coverings and pierced earrings. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. The first chapter, adapted from an exhibition review, tracks the frictions and sympathies during Cézanne and Pissarro’s studies together. 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.

These glimpses onto relations of production flicker only occasionally in If These Apples Should Fall. However, we should not be content with holding on to the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors,” he is quoted as saying in 1905 in the Tate Modern exhibition. Not unlike those of Sebald or Brecht (or Berlant), Clark’s gestures function as demonstrations of method foremost.In: Modernism: An Anthology of Sources and Documents, edited by Vassiliki Kolocotroni, Jane A Goldman and Olga Taxidou, published by Edinburgh University Press, 1998, page 396. Clark is spot on when he says comparisons of paintings have been “the staple of art writing for a century” as students of the discipline of art history can tell you.

When he is compelled in one moment to ask himself what “Cézanne’s art is ‘about,’” the author concedes that “if I do not at least sketch an answer, I shall have colluded in what seems to me the dreariest remainder of the early-twentieth-century myth of Cézanne: the myth of his paintings’ utter ineffability. So not an easy read but this approach has it’s rewards and you learn more than you would from a quick tour d’horizon ( it’s catching, this style) of Cezannes’s life and work.

Clark explores the relevance of writings of the German philosopher Karl Marx in connection with the painting, lending an appreciation of the value of commodities to understanding his oeuvre. 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. Paul Cézanne: The Library of Great Painters by Meyer Schapiro, published by Harry N Abrams, Inc, 1952, page 26. When later in the same chapter Clark affirms that “It is the Courtauld painting, I feel, that most fully deserves to live in the same space as the greatest of Cézanne’s still lifes,” it seems as if half the audience has by then left the room.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. The sugar bowl is both mundane and deeply weird, transmogrifying the otherwise organic fruits into a display of artificial entities. Clark himself invokes strangeness almost fifty times in If These Apples Should Fall (“the sheer strangeness of House and Tree”; “the strange whorls and openings of Still Life’s white tablecloth”). Art books have a special appeal: they are beautiful, collectable objects that are a pleasure to hold and be surrounded by. The New York Museum of Modern Art’s 2005 exhibition Pioneering Modern Painting: Cézanne and Pissarro 1865-1885 is a case in point, leading to an analysis of pairs of paintings.

Within the confines of the monographic treatment, Cézanne’s art demands a discursive itinerancy, one where Clark travels down every hermeneutic path the work sets forth. Any writing on him must approach the moving target of aesthetic experience with language’s distance.