Establishing himself with two volumes on nineteenth-century French art during the Second Republic, Image of the People and The Absolute Bourgeois (1973), Timothy J. Clark took the 'social history of art' and refined it. His work rejected the idea of art as little more than the product of a broad context and offered closer, subtler readings, albeit with radical sympathies. The project aimed to explain the "links between artistic form, the available systems of visual representation, the current theories of art, other ideologies, social classes, and more general historical structures and processes." [ 1] More work in this vein followed, most notably The Painting of Modern Life, concentrating on Impressionism and the Paris of Baron Haussmann's reconstructions, then further into modernism and its demise with Farewell to an Idea. A penetrating analysis of the work of one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art by one of the world's most respected art historians.

I didn't always love Cezanne. As an undergraduate art history major at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, I listened dutifully, read the homework, and regurgitated what I had learned on exams, generally getting quite good marks. I understood WHY Cezanne was supposed to be so great. I just didn't get it. Then in 1975, I spent a semester studying in London, and spending a lot of time in museums. Didn't have money to do much of anything else. One day I was at the Courtauld Institute, hoping to get permission to use their library. Ixnay on that, so I went to wander in their galleries. The Courtauld, of course, owns, among other things, Cezanne's "Still Life with Plaster Cupid" (c. 1895). It was like being hit over the head with the proverbial two-by-four. I stood there with my jaw hanging down, just looking, being utterly overwhelmed. There was so much to get and all of it seemed to be assailing my senses at once. A great book ... deeply original ... it will inspire readers to rethink fundamentals ... [a] madly suggestive, wildly adventuresome book ' It is at this point the book goes off at a tangent. Clark's attention moves away from Cézanne's influence on the Garden to other artists. A selection of explicitly political pictures is mentioned, revolutionary works from Varvara Stepanova and Jörg Immendorff. So too, is Monet's own hedonism and Giotto with his "deep feeling for 'nature in its barrenness'" (194). It is the Italian artist and his Dream of Joachim in the Arena Chapel that Clark views as Matisse's "true inspiration - down even to the Cézanne-type house, since for me Joachim's dark mountain hut finally trumps the more obvious source" (195). Although this detour doesn't add much to our knowledge of Cézanne, it does provide an interesting insight into the author's thinking. Describing Cézanne as the work’s “presiding deity” Clark discusses his place in the broader context of “modernist” art by looking at Henri Matisse’s painting The Garden at Issy(169). He argues that The Gardenis almost “a deliberate art-historical marker” employed by Matisse as “palliative to the rest of the picture’s vertigo – that the little house in the garden isCézanne. That is to say, a typical Cézanne moment” (187/189). Clark then compares The Gardenwith Cézanne’s Houses on the Hill(c. 1902-05).The conclusion went straight to my heart, as Clark closes his discussion with a celebration of the "Mont Sainte-Victoire seen from Bibemus Quarry" (c.1895-1900) in the Cone Collection housed at the Baltimore Museum of Art. This is not only my favorite Cezanne, it is my favorite work of art in that museum. Or possibly most museums. I live near Baltimore and I get to see it pretty much any time I want. Left: If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present by TJ Clark. Right: Paul Cézanne. Dish of Apples, c1876-77. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles.

With an apple I will astonish Paris,” saidPaul Cézanne(1839-1906). This line appears high on a wall of the EY Exhibition: Cézanne at Tate Modern. The vignette captures the brilliance of the French painter, who arrived in Paris in 1861, when he met the Danish-French impressionist Camille Pissarro at the Académie Suisse. Cézanne spent 30 years on the subject of “what it meant to be a modern painter”, according to the Tate exhibition’s introduction. Quite a feat given the academic tradition of neoclassical painting in France in his time. Not long ago, Clark writes, ‘the very nature of modern art, and the nature of writing about art, ancient and modern, had seemed to turn on the Cézanne problem.’ This is hardly self-evident today (if it ever was): Cézanne is so ‘remote from the temper of our times’ that it is unclear whether he can even be ‘written about any more’. This, finally, is why Clark works so hard to make Cézanne matter; his value across time and culture can no longer be assumed. Of course, both contentions – everything turns on Cézanne, nothing does – are overstated. Here Clark seems charged by the urgent warning issued by Bloch in The Spirit of Utopia (1916) that serves as the book’s epigraph: ‘The apples of Cézanne are not fruit any longer, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they should fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.’ This threat to ‘all imaginable life’ speaks to the catastrophe of the First World War, which many Europeans – not only the Oswald Spenglers of the time but also art historians such as Heinrich Wölfflin and Aby Warburg – did see as the end of all civilisation. Clark asks where we are now in relation to this fall (yet one more sense of ‘the present’ in his subtitle), with the implication that the most disastrous thing might be not to feel any loss at all, to be past caring about those odd apples. Art books have a special appeal: they are beautiful, collectable objects that are a pleasure to hold and be surrounded by. But the world of art publishing has changed beyond recognition in the past 20 years In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud. Clark shifted his approach dramatically in The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (2006), which recorded his responses to just two paintings by Poussin, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake ( c.1648) and Landscape with a Calm (1650-51), when they were hung together at the Getty in Los Angeles for a few months in 2000. Although Clark has always adhered closely to the work of art, here his attention became almost obsessive. In effect, he placed his own reactions to Poussin ahead of the comments of contemporaries that had long provided the source material of his social-historical accounts. Many of his followers were dismayed by his apparent apostasy, but Clark was forthright about what drove him to it. Social art history had re-emerged in reaction to the dominance of formalist and iconographic protocols; at the time it was almost scandalous to relate an artwork to its cultural conditions. Now, as Clark pointed out, this procedure had become accepted, almost rote. Who didn’t believe that art was part and parcel of the world? If Clark lost some supporters with his phenomenological turn, he gained others for whom his experiment became a template: The Sight of Death launched a thousand seminar papers.

Fans of T. J. Clark will be fascinated by this latest stop on his sometimes unexpected intellectual journey' The chapters focused on landscapes and the card playing peasants offer more rigorous and at times insightful observations: one of the many paintings of Montagne Sainte-Victoire, from a private collection, is offered as a touchstone, “its vision of nature is both among the most openly, naively physiognomic Cézanne ever did […] The most like a body, the least like an organism. Dreamlike and machinelike” (114-115). However, there are a few long winded and abstract descriptions which do little to complement the paintings.