If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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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. 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). In the first chapter, we find Clark meditating on the feeling of homelessness conveyed by Cézanne’s landscapes. Chapter two interprets Cézanne’s treatment of proximity and distance as an attempt to come to terms with ‘the new form of the object-world’ – that is, the commodity form. In chapter three Clark mobilises the materiality of the brushstroke against the notion of ‘the aesthetic as a moment of adequacy of form to content’. Chapter four makes a case for the peculiarly modern (as opposed to reactionary or revolutionary) quality of Cézanne’s peasant card players. In the final chapter, Clark reflects on Matisse’s aestheticism, arguing that the autonomous artwork, while self-enclosed, registers social contradictions all the more acutely (Clark is channelling Adorno). 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. What drives If Apples Should Fall is less the task of scholarly exposition than the swelling momentum of interpretation itself.

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. “What I see are the apples,” says Clark. “And maybe they strike me as the picture’s fulcrum because they and the edge of the blue material are so much an image –an epitome –of containment, of firm holding, two shapes nicely settled. Cézanne has worked hard at nesting the apples in place.” What drives If These Apples Should Fall is less the task of scholarly exposition than the swelling momentum of interpretation itself... Clark’s observations can be unforgettable... 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' An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T. J. Clark, one of the world’s most respected art historians.

In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010. 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”. 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 Left: If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by TJ Clark. Right: Paul Cézanne. Dish of Apples, c1876-77. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. 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.

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] A gorgeous book! Clark's Picasso book was a breakthrough for him in my opinion. But his writings on Cezanne have been matched only by Meyer Shapiro. The best of these is an essay entitled Phenomenality and Materiality in Cezanne. It perfectly matches in caliber the classic statement by Meyer Shapiro's book on Cezanne from long ago.The Getty Museum’s Still Life with Apples(c. 1893-95) provides a focal point in the second chapter. This work is accompanied by a series of detailed and wandering notes by Clark, ruminating on the painting and various other still lives, sometimes running into trouble: “I followed the curves of the straw holder on the rum bottle for minutes – hours – on end. Even now I don’t know why” (69). 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.” Timothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England. Art books have a special appeal: they are beautiful, collectable objects that are a pleasure to hold and be surrounded by. But the world of art publishing has changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years

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. 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. It is the boldness of the book that is exhilarating, the author taking interpretive gambles … brims with memorable insights and aphorisms' 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. 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

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

I didn't always love Cezanne. As an undergraduate art history major at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, I listened dutifully, read the homework, and regurgitated what I had learned on exams, generally getting quite good marks. I understood WHY Cezanne was supposed to be so great. I just didn't get it. Then in 1975, I spent a semester studying in London, and spending a lot of time in museums. Didn't have money to do much of anything else. One day I was at the Courtauld Institute, hoping to get permission to use their library. Ixnay on that, so I went to wander in their galleries. The Courtauld, of course, owns, among other things, Cezanne's "Still Life with Plaster Cupid" (c. 1895). It was like being hit over the head with the proverbial two-by-four. I stood there with my jaw hanging down, just looking, being utterly overwhelmed. There was so much to get and all of it seemed to be assailing my senses at once. According to T. J. Clark’s new book, to understand Paul Cézanne is to grasp his discontinuity – and enduring modernity A very generous text. Clark invites us in on his reflexive meditations – a welcome relief from academic arguments that are almost paranoically designed to be bulletproof from first sentence to final footnote' 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' 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

Lauren Berlant once described ellipses as punctuation for sentences that “I don’t end because . . . I don’t know how to” or “I don’t end because . . . you know what I mean.” Clark teases both conditions in a book that runs something of an oblique victory lap around European modern art’s most bountiful reserve of interpretation. In her 2009 book on the artist, Susan Sidlauskas noted that “the body of scholarship on Cézanne is among the weightiest in art history.” 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. Clark writes that his book “gathers together efforts, made over decades, to come to terms with the strangeness as well as the beauty of Cézanne’s achievement.” Ever since Merleau-Ponty spoke of the “feeling of strangeness” as the “one emotion” possible for the artist, estrangement has become the privileged desideratum in Cézanne commentary. The late Peter Schjeldahl rued its absence when reviewing the Museum of Modern Art’s “Cézanne Drawing” exhibition last year: “Lost, to my mind, is the strangeness . . . that had to have affected Cézanne’s first viewers.” In 2018’s Cézanne’s Gravity, Carol Armstrong wanted to make the Aixois painter’s work “quite as strange as it deserves to be seen,” to erect an interpretative bulwark of sorts against “canon-critique from feminist and other quarters” as well as the challenge posed by “what may loosely be called a postmodernist sensibility.” Clark himself invokes strangeness almost fifty times in If These Apples Should Fall (“the sheer strangeness of House and Tree”; “the strange whorls and openings of Still Life’s white tablecloth”). 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. H. Lawrence wrote. Paul Cézanne, The House and Tree, 1874–75, oil on canvas, 25 5/8 x 21 1/4″.

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Describing Cézanne as the work’s “presiding deity” Clark discusses his place in the broader context of “modernist” art by looking at Henri Matisse’s painting The Garden at Issy(169). He argues that The Gardenis almost “a deliberate art-historical marker” employed by Matisse as “palliative to the rest of the picture’s vertigo – that the little house in the garden isCézanne. That is to say, a typical Cézanne moment” (187/189). Clark then compares The Gardenwith Cézanne’s Houses on the Hill(c. 1902-05). 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] Clark doesn’t change his mind, amusing though that might have been. But—and this is the really trippy part of If These Apples Should Fall—the possibility haunts unappeasably, and in so doing, it conveys things that sentences alone never could. I don’t think Clark finds the right words for Cézanne. He’s superb on the paintings’ emptiness, remoteness, lugubriousness, banality, and other negatives; he’s slightly but noticeably less good on their positives: their sensuousness, fabulousness, euphoria, lushness. He can’t compete with Cézanne’s perfect balancing act. Emptiness is permitted the last word as it is not in the paintings themselves, where last words don’t exist. But by struggling to find the right language for Cézanne, as Cézanne once struggled to find the right brushstrokes, Clark could almost be said to fail in the same fabulous manner as his protagonist. Even stranger: by mirroring the failure so exactly, he could almost be said to succeed. 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 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.