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. Clark is particularly strong on telling details, and his insights into Pissarro, in the first main chapter, are an added bonus. If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present – book review The chapters in TJ Clark’s book on the French post-impressionist began life as lectures the art historian gave while teaching at university. In the first chapter, Clark delineates the importance of Cézanne’s working friendship with Pissarro in the early 1870, by unpacking the characterisation of the artist as “humble and colossal” and looking at how this signposted the way forward for French painting.

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. At the heart of Cézanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour. 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. If These Apples Should Fall doesn’t so much answer this scholarship or correct an art-historical course as it distends the scholar’s moments of study into an elaborated, loping encounter with the artist’s work. 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).The latest edition of the Yogyakarta biennial explores ‘Titen’, a Javanese word for the art (or science? Perhaps art need not be thought as the labile, vital force against history’s clumsy, bludgeoning mediation. 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. Some of these words (used by Fry and Clark alike) are ‘disquieting’, ‘unnerving’, ‘uncanny’ and ‘sinister’. Paul Cézanne: The Library of Great Painters by Meyer Schapiro, published by Harry N Abrams, Inc, 1952, page 26.

If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present suggests a contemporaneity, even a topicality, that never comes. He experiences Cézanne’s paintings as the very embodiment of modernity – understood as an irresolvable contradiction, an ‘interminable to-and-fro’. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others.

An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T. In her 2009 book on the artist, Susan Sidlauskas noted that “the body of scholarship on Cézanne is among the weightiest in art history.

We are in different political territory from the author who in the 1970s influentially wrote of the “concrete transactions . 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. But (and this is the paradox that Clark wants to inhabit) Cézanne continues to speak to us all the same.Misses but maybe gets closer to—in ways that throw up new possibilities of phrasing, new tempi, new kinds of rubato, new instrumentation. Sorry, but although this probably sounded slickly clever to whoever though of it first, I’m afraid it’s rubbish.

Strangeness secures Cézanne’s legacy as modernism as such: the angles that don’t match up in a still-life; the Provençal topography built from both dumb canvas and unbounded form; the “weird anima” and “mysterious shiftiness of the scene under our eyes,” as D. Together with artworks of Gauguin and Van Gogh, his work featured in Manet and the Post-Impressionists, the show organised by Fry at London’s Grafton Galleries in 1910. Any writing on him must approach the moving target of aesthetic experience with language’s distance. Sentence after sentence, Clark’s observations can be unforgettable, as when he spots the “tremendous synecdoche” of the “little underworld” beneath the table in the Musée d’Orsay’s Card Players, ca. 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.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.