If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present

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An electrifying account of looking intently to fathom Cézanne’s pictures: what makes their beauty still so uncanny, precarious, visionary. The selection of The Waste Land by TS Eliot, who presented views that were classicist in literature, fits the narrative of a modern painter, born in Aix-En-Provence in southern France. 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 .

As Schapiro noted in his text: “He was more than a teacher and friend to Cézanne; he was a second father. And so follows Emily Dickinson’s “I died for Beauty—but was scarce,” reprinted in full as ersatz commentary. Even if we were shown, for example, details of the paintings highlighted with arrows and other purely visual means, we would still need verbal explanations. Matisse here acts as a sensualist wingman for Cézanne, spinning the latter’s asocial strangeness into an Epicurean technique for enduring history itself.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. Perhaps art need not be thought as the labile, vital force against history’s clumsy, bludgeoning mediation. If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present suggests a contemporaneity, even a topicality, that never comes.

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). 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. 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 . Yet readers of Clark’s last volume, Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), will find a more heterogenous cohort of texts this time around.Yet his interest in impressionism, the antithesis of academic painting, and his friendship with Pissarro would be a decisive influence on his later works. Paul Cezanne (1839 – 1906) was a French artist who played a pivotal role in the development of modern art.