If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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One gets a little apprehensive when references to cave painting, world history and metaphysics start piling up towards the end of the book.

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. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. However, Clark distinguishes himself from his predecessors through his sheer insistence on Cézanne’s – and modernity’s – negativity. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, and examines the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it; above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement.And so follows Emily Dickinson’s “I died for Beauty—but was scarce,” reprinted in full as ersatz commentary. What drives If These Apples Should Fall is less the task of scholarly exposition than the swelling momentum of interpretation itself.

Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist who played a pivotal role in the development of modern art. When he is compelled in one moment to ask himself what “Cézanne’s art is ‘about,’” the author concedes that “if I do not at least sketch an answer, I shall have colluded in what seems to me the dreariest remainder of the early-twentieth-century myth of Cézanne: the myth of his paintings’ utter ineffability. Using Cezanne's name under which to publish his attempts at poetry is a bad start, and the book never really recovered its credibility afterwards.

Clark’s compromise for Still Life with Apples then leads to something like a malerisch phenomenology of commodity fetishism—one where “our objects have never been more ours,” yet entertain too many realities (pictorial, material, semiotic) to sit in real proximity to the subject. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it. One short essay might have been better, using the remaining pages to look at the paintings themselves. 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.

Indeed, Cézanne’s early works drew on paintings of Delacroix and Poussin, and novels of Flaubert and Zola. The author illustrates how Cézanne drew inspiration from Pissarro’s direct observation of nature with their two Louveciennes paintings. Clark explores the relevance of writings of the German philosopher Karl Marx in connection with the painting, lending an appreciation of the value of commodities to understanding his oeuvre.

Perhaps art need not be thought as the labile, vital force against history’s clumsy, bludgeoning mediation.