If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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Stalking his subject with a hawk’s eye, a philosopher’s mind and an open heart, Clark unfolds both the artist at work and his own evolving responses . Some of the book's themes do make sense, but one has to wade through so much drivel and spend some time filtering it out, that you feel cheated of your precious time by this author.

It is the floor of the earth / Emerging after the flood, with colours stacked in a small, neat pile to one side, / as if / Waiting to be used . He offers a respectful appraisal of his subject’s oeuvre from the outset: “The book that follows gathers together efforts, made over decades, to come to terms with the strangeness as well as the beauty of Cézanne’s achievement. Texts on the artist are often about themselves, and faced with the French paragon, Clark wields his usual rhetorical arsenal.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). Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s celebrated, hyperlocal Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture from 2003 gets labeled as “a fine piece of disenchanting art history” in a footnote. If we lost touch with his sense of life, they thought, we lost an essential element in our self-understanding. 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.

Clark is spot on when he says comparisons of paintings have been “the staple of art writing for a century” as students of the discipline of art history can tell you. Any writing on him must approach the moving target of aesthetic experience with language’s distance. However, Clark distinguishes himself from his predecessors through his sheer insistence on Cézanne’s – and modernity’s – negativity. Then the critics stepped forth and abstracted his good apple into Significant Form, and henceforth Cézanne was saved,” Lawrence grumbled in 1929. The sugar bowl is both mundane and deeply weird, transmogrifying the otherwise organic fruits into a display of artificial entities.Across the book’s five chapters – on Cézanne’s apprenticeship to Pissarro, his still lifes, his landscapes, the ‘card players’ paintings, and the legacy of his work in a canvas by Matisse – Clark errs on the side of modernity’s failure. 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. The first chapter, adapted from an exhibition review, tracks the frictions and sympathies during Cézanne and Pissarro’s studies together. So not an easy read but this approach has it’s rewards and you learn more than you would from a quick tour d’horizon ( it’s catching, this style) of Cezannes’s life and work. Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist who played a pivotal role in the development of modern art.