If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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In 1924, Tate became the first public museum in the United Kingdom to acquire Cezanne’s paintings, and they remain an important part of the collection. Here you will find options to view and activate subscriptions, manage institutional settings and access options, access usage statistics, and more. Indeed, Cézanne’s early works drew on paintings of Delacroix and Poussin, and novels of Flaubert and Zola.

The title Studio International is the property of the Studio International Foundation and, together with the content, are bound by copyright. 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 . There are the self-reflexive jerks backward: “maybe that opening paragraph moves too far too fast”; “‘touch’ in the sentence before last may be smuggling in too much animation. What ends up dropping out of the analysis is an appreciation of the utopian dimension, art’s promise of happiness, which should not be ignored for its period flavour. 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.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 . Chapter four makes a case for the peculiarly modern (as opposed to reactionary or revolutionary) quality of Cézanne’s peasant card players.

And as André Dombrowski has expressed, “the more formal aspects of Cézanne’s practice will always resist a full usurpation into an interpretation relying heavily on historical and contextual facts. 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. In the first chapter, we find Clark meditating on the feeling of homelessness conveyed by Cézanne’s landscapes.Then go back to look at the works themselves, perhaps in the current Cezanne blockbuster exhibition in London, and see whether your experience, too, has been expanded. 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.

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”).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. Greenberg put Cézanne’s ‘unfading modernity’ down to the ‘problematic quality of his art’; Roger Fry felt himself ‘reduced to negative terms’ when tasked to put words to his paintings.

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. Yet a page later, “because the embedded propositions in Cézanne are so simple and primordial, and so entirely dependent on ironic feats of matter—of paint—to breathe life and death back into them, putting them into words is exactly betraying ‘what they have to say’ about material existence.

Clark wants us to recognise this historical discontinuity, to give us a sense that to understand Cézanne is to grasp this discontinuity. We are in different political territory from the author who in the 1970s influentially wrote of the “concrete transactions . The author illustrates how Cézanne drew inspiration from Pissarro’s direct observation of nature with their two Louveciennes paintings.