If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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The chapters focused on landscapes and the card playing peasants offer more rigorous and at times insightful observations: one of the many paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from a private collection, is offered as a touchstone, "its vision of nature is both among the most openly, naively physiognomic Cézanne ever did [...] The most like a body, the least like an organism. Dreamlike and machinelike" (114-115). However, there are a few long winded and abstract descriptions which do little to complement the paintings. Clark writes beautifully … [he] is still the most careful and perceptive of art critics writing today. Even when one diverges from Clark’s conclusions, one never feels in the presence of someone who does not look, think and write without the utmost attention and seriousness' 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.

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] In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.Ten years ago, art historian T. J. Clark, reviewing a show of Paul Cézanne’s Card Players series (from the early 1890s), announced that the French painter ‘cannot be written about any more’. It went on to be his most-cited (and most-criticised) remark. In his new book Clark explains what he meant. Cézanne, a painter known for his still lifes and landscapes, is generally regarded as among the most significant modernists. Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse revered him. Clement Greenberg declared him ‘the most copious source of what we know as modern art’. But, Clark argues, such judgements were driven by assumptions – an ‘overweening faith in Art’, a belief in art’s ‘access to Truth’ – that are alien to us today. Clark wants us to recognise this historical discontinuity, to give us a sense that to understand Cézanne is to grasp this discontinuity. Cézanne can be written about provided that we do not assimilate him to the present. It is at this point the book goes off at a tangent. Clark’s attention moves away from Cézanne’s influence on the Gardento 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 Joachimin 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. The chapters focused on landscapes and the card playing peasants offer more rigorous and at times insightful observations: one of the many paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from a private collection, is offered as a touchstone, “its vision of nature is both among the most openly, naively physiognomic Cézanne ever did […] The most like a body, the least like an organism. Dreamlike and machinelike” (114-115). However, there are a few long winded and abstract descriptions which do little to complement the paintings. Not long ago, Clark writes, ‘the very nature of modern art, and the nature of writing about art, ancient and modern, had seemed to turn on the Cézanne problem.’ This is hardly self-evident today (if it ever was): Cézanne is so ‘remote from the temper of our times’ that it is unclear whether he can even be ‘written about any more’. This, finally, is why Clark works so hard to make Cézanne matter; his value across time and culture can no longer be assumed. Of course, both contentions – everything turns on Cézanne, nothing does – are overstated. Here Clark seems charged by the urgent warning issued by Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1916) that serves as the book’s epigraph: ‘The apples of Cézanne are not fruit any longer, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they should fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.’ This threat to ‘all imaginable life’ speaks to the catastrophe of the First World War, which many Europeans – not only the Oswald Spenglers of the time but also art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg – did see as the end of all civilisation. Clark asks where we are now in relation to this fall (yet one more sense of ‘the present’ in his subtitle), with the implication that the most disastrous thing might be not to feel any loss at all, to be past caring about those odd apples.

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. 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. From this formalism Clark derives a curious political ethos he names “hedonism.” The author finds it in Matisse, by way of Cézanne, in the book’s final chapter. The younger artist’s Garden at Issy (The Studio in Clamart) and Studio, Quai Saint-Michel from the shattering year of 1917 prove the hedonistic value of placing “one’s trust in the realm of the senses,” of exhibiting “ruthless aesthetic concentration” in defense against modernity’s sundry horrors. 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.” Matisse here acts as asensualist wingman for Cézanne, spinning the latter’s asocial strangeness into an Epicurean technique for enduring history itself. Paul Cézanne, Scipio, 1866–68, oil on canvas, 42 1/8 x 32 5/8”.Of course, Clark knows the historical context extremely well. This is pivotal when it comes to establishing the sequence of works produced by Cézanne during his apprenticeship with Camille Pissarro in the 1870s, and he alludes to issues of class when thinking about the cult of the peasant or the gestural codes of bourgeois portraiture. But such appeals to facts beyond the frame are infrequent and do not resolve issues of pictorial interpretation. That is because Clark’s engagement with Cézanne is far closer to epistemology than to cultural history. Even the citations from Das Kapital do not relate to class struggle but to the bizarre ‘all-one-thingness’ of commodities in capitalism, the reality of which is a kind of fiction rooted in purely symbolic exchange. The quotation points to one of Clark’s chief insights about Cézanne’s art, in which mundane objects can appear at once familiar and impossibly strange, vivid and near but also ‘ on the other side of something’. It is not enough, he insists, to describe Cézanne as destabilising the world or throwing everything off kilter; it is the curious interplay of instability and ordinariness that demands explanation.