If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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In Cézanne’s Gravity, a book comparable to Clark’s in its summary gaze, Armstrong sought to redeem the artist in part through an interdisciplinary approach, where if Cézanne in his strangeness could be brought to bear on Einstein’s physics or Woolf’s fiction, he could be released from the teleological prison of modernist painting and gain newfound relevance.

The first chapter, adapted from an exhibition review, tracks the frictions and sympathies during Cézanne and Pissarro’s studies together.

a writing,” Clark issues, “that finds ways to linger for a moment in the state induced, time and again, by a new Cézanne, or an old one encountered after long enough away . 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.

This is an important reminder of how necessary it is to devote time to a painting - we are forced to devote time to books and music by the time it takes to read them or listen to a performance, but it is too easy to move quickly away from a painting. The problem with not sticking to biographical content and trying to describe your muddled opinions on Cezanne's painting in words is the equivalent of trying to taste a Sunday roast by listening to it. 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. 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.Now, extending the analysis of The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing ( Clarke 2008), his exercise in extended close looking at Nicolas Poussin’s art, he discusses some paintings by Paul Cézanne. 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.

On a positive note, his encyclopaedic knowledge of literature emerges, including writings of Dante, Shakespeare and Keats. 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. Another is a watchful explication of the cardplayer paintings that originated as a catalogue essay, while “Cézanne’s Material,” on the still lifes, works through a series of journal entries Clark wrote in 2016, not unlike the technique of his 2008 book, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing. Another strength of this book is seen in the author’s ability to appraise established readings of Cézanne’s oeuvre. 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 the first chapter, we find Clark meditating on the feeling of homelessness conveyed by Cézanne’s landscapes.