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.

will be constantly, vitally, discontentedly present in the writing we do, as the reality our writing moves toward and always misses.The sugar bowl is both mundane and deeply weird, transmogrifying the otherwise organic fruits into a display of artificial entities. 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. The widely respected art historian has written his latest book on the painter, entitled If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present (2022).

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. 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. Perhaps art need not be thought as the labile, vital force against history’s clumsy, bludgeoning mediation. a writing,” Clark issues, “that finds ways to linger for a moment in the state induced, time and again, by a new Cézanne, or an old one encountered after long enough away . A penetrating analysis of the work of one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art by one of the world’s most respected art historians.As Schapiro noted in his text: “He was more than a teacher and friend to Cézanne; he was a second father. But as his book proceeds, Clark invokes this quality to articulate a broader skepticism toward art history’s historicism writ large.

If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. The accompanying catalogue perfectly sums up why Cézanne’s art matters for people: “Cézanne’s revolution lay not so much in what he painted, but in how he painted, by which we mean not just a process of applying medium to substrate, or formalist invention, but the way he transcribed his experience of looking at the world for others to share.Even if we were shown, for example, details of the paintings highlighted with arrows and other purely visual means, we would still need verbal explanations.