If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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But (and this is the paradox that Clark wants to inhabit) Cézanne continues to speak to us all the same. Even in his classic The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1985), each chapter dispensed with its thesis in the very first lines. 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 introduction even hazards some poetry written by a teenage Clark in the 1950s: “Look at the playing card fields and the tallest tree, raising its stubby hands / In prayer or surrender. 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.

Matisse here acts as a sensualist wingman for Cézanne, spinning the latter’s asocial strangeness into an Epicurean technique for enduring history itself. 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. If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present looks back on Cézanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. In the next chapter, Cézanne and the Outside World, there is a thoughtful passage on Trees and Houses (c1885–86) from the collection of the Musée de l’Orangerie in Paris: “Look at the triangle of sunlit wall between the eaves and the branch. The title Studio International is the property of the Studio International Foundation and, together with the content, are bound by copyright.Now, the National Gallery is hosting an exhibition dedicated to the history of making colour in western paintings, from the Middle Ages to the late 19th-century and beyond – a highlight is a fragment from Roger Hiorns’s crystalline Seizure (2008), where he transformed an abandoned London flat into a shimmering blue cave.

If These Apples Should Fall confirms that Clark should rarely be read for his “takeaways” or “arguments. 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.In this case, and for this reader, most definitely yes, although I lose him in places (he gets bogged down in the paradoxes involved in representing the visual world in a flat rectangle) and I could do with fewer Marxist references. He spent some three months visiting one of his examples, a still-life in the Getty Museum, LA, on an almost daily basis and keeping a diary of his reactions to it. 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. 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 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.

An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T. In contrast to the severe political programs of a revolutionary artist like Varvara Stepanova (and strangely, Jörg Immendorff), Matisse proves that “the charge of escapism, of emptiness, of mere aesthetic exercise” is indeed one of modernism’s most serious responsibilities, one that should “never go away.Seems to be a brilliant book, but parcel left outside at a next-door-but-three neighbour (despite "handed to resident" tag) in the pouring rain, and that neighbour has spent hours drying the book out! 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.