If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

Product Information

The book is full of fantastic colour reproductions which help immensely in keeping the text grounded and allow the reader to study the paintings sufficiently well to arrive at their own insights and tentative conclusions. Cézanne: Hillside in Provence, ca 1890–92, oil on canvas, 25 by 31¼ inches. Courtesy National Gallery, London Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England. A spread from T.J. Clark’s book, showing two paintings by Paul Cézanne: Left, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, ca. 1893–95, and right, Still Life with Peppermint Bottle, ca. 1893–95. Photo George Chinsee Nicholas Penny: "Geraniums and the River", in: London Review of Books, Vol. 8 No. 5, 20 March 1986, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v08/n05/nicholas-penny/geraniums-and-the-river [accessed 8 August 2022]

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. The result is a masterclass in art history Establishing himself with two volumes on nineteenth-century French art during the Second Republic, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois (1973), Timothy J. Clark took the 'social history of art' and refined it. His work rejected the idea of art as little more than the product of a broad context and offered closer, subtler readings, albeit with radical sympathies. The project aimed to explain the "links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes." [ 1] More work in this vein followed, most notably The Painting of Modern Life, concentrating on Impressionism and the Paris of Baron Haussmann's reconstructions, then further into modernism and its demise with Farewell to an Idea. T. J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), and Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018).He writes regularly for the London Review of Books. Poetry serves as an elegant framing device for a book that arrives at the defining moment of the early 20th century, the great war. The selection of The Waste Land by TS Eliot, who presented views that were classicist in literature, fits the narrative of a modern painter, born in Aix-En-Provence in southern France. For the artist’s crowning achievement, a series of works based on a monumental mountain, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire, stood for a particular sense of history; the south was associated with a new classicism. 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.” Another strength of this book is seen in the author’s ability to appraise established readings of Cézanne’s oeuvre. The publication critiques writings on the painter, from the essays of Clement Greenberg to the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The professor highlights two excellent texts on Cézanne, including those of Roger Fry and Meyer Schapiro, noted for their “plain style” in the second chapter. In chapter three, Clark presents some great historical context, for example a 1910 piece by Fry, describing The Bay of L’Estaque (c1880-82), which neatly captures the aesthetic value of his artwork in philosophical terms. Clark writes: “‘In a picture like L’Estaque’ –here is Roger Fry in 1910, discussing a painting now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art – ‘it is difficult to know whether one admires more the imaginative grasp which has built so clearly for the answering mind the splendid structure of the bay, or the intellectualised sensual power which has given to the shimmering atmosphere so definite a value.’” Yet while Clark shows admiration for Fry’s writing, for example on “the architectural plan” and “colour harmonies” of Cézanne’s composition in a 1910 piece, he appears to question the latter’s positive terms of value, and suggests a list of “implied contingent negatives” adds to the strength of Cézanne’s painting Trees and Houses. This offers a new layer of understanding to the work.It is the boldness of the book that is exhilarating, the author taking interpretive gambles … brims with memorable insights and aphorisms' At a crossroads in art history, Cézanne participated in the first impressionist exhibition in 1874. His first solo show, with Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1895, marked a transition for the artist as he cultivated a unique modern style. “The Louvre is the book from which we learn to read. 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. Cézanne captured the attention of the British art critic and painter Roger Fry. 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. The modernist writer Virginia Woolf gives a flavour of the importance of the show: “In or about December 1910, human character changed.” 1 The colour of his landscapes and still lifes adds up to being a tonic at the Tate exhibition. The effect is tangible in the lively conversation there. 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.” 2

The tone of Clark’s book is set with an epigraph from Ernst Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, and may be deemed provocative by some readers. Clark asserts Cézanne’s art “unthinkable […] apart from the grave dogged optimism of a long-vanished moment” (63). His work, The Basket of Apples“ hatesthe object called modernity […] But not for a moment does the painting ask us to believe that its set-up will stave off the reality of the 1890s. Everything in the painting is falling – and where it falls to is where we are” (10). The tone of Clark's book is set with an epigraph from Ernst Bloch's Geist der Utopie, and may be deemed provocative by some readers. Clark asserts Cézanne's art "unthinkable [...] apart from the grave dogged optimism of a long-vanished moment" (63). His work, The Basket of Apples " hates the object called modernity [...] But not for a moment does the painting ask us to believe that its set-up will stave off the reality of the 1890s. Everything in the painting is falling - and where it falls to is where we are" (10). With an apple I will astonish Paris,” saidPaul Cézanne(1839-1906). This line appears high on a wall of the EY Exhibition: Cézanne at Tate Modern. The vignette captures the brilliance of the French painter, who arrived in Paris in 1861, when he met the Danish-French impressionist Camille Pissarro at the Académie Suisse. Cézanne spent 30 years on the subject of “what it meant to be a modern painter”, according to the Tate exhibition’s introduction. Quite a feat given the academic tradition of neoclassical painting in France in his time. It is at this point the book goes off at a tangent. Clark's attention moves away from Cézanne's influence on the Garden to other artists. A selection of explicitly political pictures is mentioned, revolutionary works from Varvara Stepanova and Jörg Immendorff. So too, is Monet's own hedonism and Giotto with his "deep feeling for 'nature in its barrenness'" (194). It is the Italian artist and his Dream of Joachim in the Arena Chapel that Clark views as Matisse's "true inspiration - down even to the Cézanne-type house, since for me Joachim's dark mountain hut finally trumps the more obvious source" (195). Although this detour doesn't add much to our knowledge of Cézanne, it does provide an interesting insight into the author's thinking.

Tania Pérez Córdova: Generalization

But (and this is the paradox that Clark wants to inhabit) Cézanne continues to speak to us all the same. He is historically remote, but also our contemporary. And the basis on which we might understand him – or fail to – hasn’t changed: the experience of modernity. Cézanne’s work embodies knowledge of what it is to be modern, the book argues. This knowledge is mostly negative. It is a peculiar kind of not-knowing characterised by ambiguity and contradiction. Aptly, this book - like Cezanne - is a tapestry of maddening paradoxes; repeated touches that bring us nose-close to miraculous details, moments of (undercut) absolute thingness and then push us away into a homeless, metaphysical middle distance. Like Cezanne, Clark gives us not a simply digestible statement, but a dialectical process; his great strength (and indulgence) is that he tends not just to write about art, or write about looking at art, but to write about writing about looking at art. We are left mystified, fascinated, struggling to fit the numerous and luminous moments of deep painterly insight into a sensible whole which ever slips from grasp. What is it that marks Cezanne as the point of modernity’s emergence? Well, just that; the loss of certainty; “the loss of world” as Clark puts it; a point of view which is simultaneously embedded within and estranged from ‘nature’; grounded in solidity and locality but ultimately, lost, homeless. It is a success of the book that even this narrative - which has become familiar - once again reclaims it’s strangeness.