If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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In: Cezanne, edited by Achim Borchardt-Hume, Gloria Groom, Caitlin Haskell and Natalia Sidlina, published by the Art Institute of Chicago, 2022, page 18. 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. His first solo show, with Ambroise Vollard in Paris in 1895, marked a transition for the artist as he cultivated a unique modern style. If you do not have a society account or have forgotten your username or password, please contact your society. We are in different political territory from the author who in the 1970s influentially wrote of the “concrete transactions .

J. Clark looks back on Cézanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying.

My advice is when reading the book to skip any bits where you get stuck (at least at a first reading) but to look carefully at the comparisons he makes between different works (almost everything he refers to is illustrated in colour). 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.

And the basis on which we might understand him – or fail to – hasn’t changed: the experience of modernity.You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.

Indeed, the apparent role of Pissarro as a mentor to Cézanne, who shaped his perception of nature, can be seen in the comparison between the pair of artists and Plato and Socrates, between French painting and Greek philosophy in the book’s first chapter, entitled Pissarro and Cézanne. 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. 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. 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.He is the author of The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984), Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999), and Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018).

Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist who played a pivotal role in the development of modern art. Cézanne spent 30 years on the subject of “what it meant to be a modern painter”, according to the Tate exhibition’s introduction. 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.

But as his book proceeds, Clark invokes this quality to articulate a broader skepticism toward art history’s historicism writ large. In chapter two, Cézanne’s Material, the fruits of this approach appear in the focus on the richly coloured painting Still Life with Apples (c1893-95) from the J Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles: he describes the array of objects as “composed and crystalline”. 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. J. Clark, reviewing a show of Paul Cézanne’s Card Players series (from the early 1890s), announced that the French painter ‘cannot be written about any more’.