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If These Apples Should Fall: Cézanne and the Present
An illuminating analysis of the work of Paul Cézanne, one of the most influential painters in the history of modern art, by T. J. Clark, one of the world’s most respected art historians. For many artists and writers, the art of Paul Cézanne represents the key to modernity. His paintings were a touchstone for writers such as Samuel Beckett as much as for artists such as Henri Matisse. Rainer Maria Rilke revered him deeply, as did Pablo Picasso. They thought if they lost touch with his sense of life, they lost an essential element of their own self-understanding. In If These Apples Should Fall , celebrated art historian T. J. Clark looks back on Cézanne from our current moment when such judgments need justifying. What was it, he asks, that held Cézanne’s viewers spellbound? At the heart of Cézanne’s work lies a sense of a hopelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety beneath the splendid colors. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, examining the art of Camille Pissarro, Matisse, and others in relation to Cézanne’s. Above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement. 104 color illustrations
- GenresArtArt HistoryNonfiction
240 pages, Hardcover
Published September 20, 2022
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320 people want to read
About the author
T.J. Clark
35 books64 followersTimothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
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.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
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.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
December 8, 2023
“I see, by touches”.
Aptly, this book - like Cezanne - is a tapestry of maddening paradoxes; repeated touches that bring us nose-close to miraculous details, moments of (undercut) absolute thingness and then push us away into a homeless, metaphysical middle distance. Like Cezanne, Clark gives us not a simply digestible statement, but a dialectical process; his great strength (and indulgence) is that he tends not just to write about art, or write about looking at art, but to write about writing about looking at art. We are left mystified, fascinated, struggling to fit the numerous and luminous moments of deep painterly insight into a sensible whole which ever slips from grasp. What is it that marks Cezanne as the point of modernity’s emergence? Well, just that; the loss of certainty; “the loss of world” as Clark puts it; a point of view which is simultaneously embedded within and estranged from ‘nature’; grounded in solidity and locality but ultimately, lost, homeless. It is a success of the book that even this narrative - which has become familiar - once again reclaims it’s strangeness.
The book is full of fantastic colour reproductions which help immensely in keeping the text grounded and allow the reader to study the paintings sufficiently well to arrive at their own insights and tentative conclusions.
We may end up slightly befuddled, but keen to look again, and again. So Cezanne remains eternally active to us, not neatly tied up. This book will likewise, I expect, reward repeated visits.
Aptly, this book - like Cezanne - is a tapestry of maddening paradoxes; repeated touches that bring us nose-close to miraculous details, moments of (undercut) absolute thingness and then push us away into a homeless, metaphysical middle distance. Like Cezanne, Clark gives us not a simply digestible statement, but a dialectical process; his great strength (and indulgence) is that he tends not just to write about art, or write about looking at art, but to write about writing about looking at art. We are left mystified, fascinated, struggling to fit the numerous and luminous moments of deep painterly insight into a sensible whole which ever slips from grasp. What is it that marks Cezanne as the point of modernity’s emergence? Well, just that; the loss of certainty; “the loss of world” as Clark puts it; a point of view which is simultaneously embedded within and estranged from ‘nature’; grounded in solidity and locality but ultimately, lost, homeless. It is a success of the book that even this narrative - which has become familiar - once again reclaims it’s strangeness.
The book is full of fantastic colour reproductions which help immensely in keeping the text grounded and allow the reader to study the paintings sufficiently well to arrive at their own insights and tentative conclusions.
We may end up slightly befuddled, but keen to look again, and again. So Cezanne remains eternally active to us, not neatly tied up. This book will likewise, I expect, reward repeated visits.
July 23, 2025
Thanks to T.J. Clark, my knowledge of Cézanne is now complete.
November 24, 2022
Appreciations and observations on selected works and series by the great artist. Clark has a stream-of-consciousness style that moves from one insight to another and makes for pleasant reading while sometimes obscuring his points. Occasionally, he writes more about art criticism than he does art, but these passages are redeemed by his detailed analyses of the paintings, which get at the heart of Cézanne's genius.
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October 13, 2024Clark's writing is astounding, evocative, sometimes hard to grasp. My mom read this before I did, and in a discussion of Cézanne's landscapes, she put a question mark next to this passage and a note to ask me what it means:
Interminability and hesitation in Cézanne are thus not rooted in an epistemology of addition—though of course some such naive positivism is operative, at the level of ideological framing and self-understanding—but in an (equally naive) Hegelian prevarication, a waiting and hoping for the moment at which the addition of units turns quantity into quality (128–129).
I think this is the culmination of Clark's criticism of Roger Fry's interpretation of Cézanne as doing something in his painting akin to phenomenalism or subjective idealism, whereby the world is built up out of sense impressions. Here is the quote from Fry that Clark discusses:
Cézanne, inheriting from the Impressionists the general notion of accepting the purely visual patchwork of appearance, concentrated his imagination so intensely upon certain oppositions of tone and colour that he became able to build up and, as it were, re-create form from within; and at the same time that he re-created form he recreated it clothed with colour, light, and atmosphere all at once. It is this astonishing synthetic power that amazes me in the work (p. 125)
Clark agrees that Cézanne is doing something in his paintings about vision, but he's destabilizing it by messing with perspective and edges: "This is the Cézanne effect. The world has to be pictured as possessed by the eye, indeed 'totalized' by it; but always on the basis of exploding or garbled or utterly intractable data—data which speak to the impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide the sensuous material for it. The branch flickers between possible positions, possible identities. 'We know not where to have it. 'It seems impossible to grasp'. But it's there all the same" (p. 126).
And by following the phenomenalist logic to its conclusion, Cézanne gives us a glimpse of nothing less than what world-making is:
Cézanne's is the most radical project of nineteenth-century positivism. It stakes everything on the possibility of recreating the structure of experience out of that experience's units...But the very radicality of the project delivers it. Because this painting stakes everything on the notion of the unitary, the immediate, the bare minimum of sensation, the momentary-and-material 'ping'; because it goes on and on searching for ways to insist that here, in this dab, is the elementary particle out of which seeing is made; because it fetishizes the singular, it discovers the singular as exactly not the form of 'experience'. It shows us a way of world-making in which the very idea of a world—the very idea of totality or synthesis...is not drawn from some prior texture of unit sensations 'out there', and therefore potentially 'in here'. It follows that notions as seemingly basic as foreground and background may no longer apply...Maybe not even inside and outside. Nor experience and representation. Nor 'now' and 'then'. (p. 127)
My reading of this passage in Clark is that Cézanne's painting, instead of showing us how our view of the world is built up out of individual sensations, shows how it can't do that, how every attempt to do that breaks down. Clark is more explicit about this later in the chapter:
Cézanne is looking for a mark that would not be a further 'one' in a series, but a kind of 'zero', with the power to replace the dab after dab of addition by a sudden connectedness and unity—by a truly magical multiplier effect. There is no such mark, of course. Effects like this are beyond painting's grasp...The sequence is required to show that no feat of painterly energy, no moment of 'supreme spontaneity', no demonstration of 'intellectualized sensual power' can ever perform the aesthetic conjuring trick. Vividness, then, is the vividness of defeat. The vividness of procedure. *Even this* says the painting, cannot secure the 'Darstellung der Ideen'. You see why the 'even this' had to be so monstrously good (p. 129).
For a negative proof like the one Clark attributes to Cézanne, a proof that a phenomenalist reconstruction of the form of the world is not possible, he has to show the best possible case of painting doing that while it still fails.
Interminability and hesitation in Cézanne are thus not rooted in an epistemology of addition—though of course some such naive positivism is operative, at the level of ideological framing and self-understanding—but in an (equally naive) Hegelian prevarication, a waiting and hoping for the moment at which the addition of units turns quantity into quality (128–129).
I think this is the culmination of Clark's criticism of Roger Fry's interpretation of Cézanne as doing something in his painting akin to phenomenalism or subjective idealism, whereby the world is built up out of sense impressions. Here is the quote from Fry that Clark discusses:
Cézanne, inheriting from the Impressionists the general notion of accepting the purely visual patchwork of appearance, concentrated his imagination so intensely upon certain oppositions of tone and colour that he became able to build up and, as it were, re-create form from within; and at the same time that he re-created form he recreated it clothed with colour, light, and atmosphere all at once. It is this astonishing synthetic power that amazes me in the work (p. 125)
Clark agrees that Cézanne is doing something in his paintings about vision, but he's destabilizing it by messing with perspective and edges: "This is the Cézanne effect. The world has to be pictured as possessed by the eye, indeed 'totalized' by it; but always on the basis of exploding or garbled or utterly intractable data—data which speak to the impossibility of synthesis even as they seem to provide the sensuous material for it. The branch flickers between possible positions, possible identities. 'We know not where to have it. 'It seems impossible to grasp'. But it's there all the same" (p. 126).
And by following the phenomenalist logic to its conclusion, Cézanne gives us a glimpse of nothing less than what world-making is:
Cézanne's is the most radical project of nineteenth-century positivism. It stakes everything on the possibility of recreating the structure of experience out of that experience's units...But the very radicality of the project delivers it. Because this painting stakes everything on the notion of the unitary, the immediate, the bare minimum of sensation, the momentary-and-material 'ping'; because it goes on and on searching for ways to insist that here, in this dab, is the elementary particle out of which seeing is made; because it fetishizes the singular, it discovers the singular as exactly not the form of 'experience'. It shows us a way of world-making in which the very idea of a world—the very idea of totality or synthesis...is not drawn from some prior texture of unit sensations 'out there', and therefore potentially 'in here'. It follows that notions as seemingly basic as foreground and background may no longer apply...Maybe not even inside and outside. Nor experience and representation. Nor 'now' and 'then'. (p. 127)
My reading of this passage in Clark is that Cézanne's painting, instead of showing us how our view of the world is built up out of individual sensations, shows how it can't do that, how every attempt to do that breaks down. Clark is more explicit about this later in the chapter:
Cézanne is looking for a mark that would not be a further 'one' in a series, but a kind of 'zero', with the power to replace the dab after dab of addition by a sudden connectedness and unity—by a truly magical multiplier effect. There is no such mark, of course. Effects like this are beyond painting's grasp...The sequence is required to show that no feat of painterly energy, no moment of 'supreme spontaneity', no demonstration of 'intellectualized sensual power' can ever perform the aesthetic conjuring trick. Vividness, then, is the vividness of defeat. The vividness of procedure. *Even this* says the painting, cannot secure the 'Darstellung der Ideen'. You see why the 'even this' had to be so monstrously good (p. 129).
For a negative proof like the one Clark attributes to Cézanne, a proof that a phenomenalist reconstruction of the form of the world is not possible, he has to show the best possible case of painting doing that while it still fails.
February 14, 2023
In "If These Apples Should Fall: Cezanne and the Present," T.J. Clark brings it all from a life of scholarship and teaching in this sort of seminar-between-book-covers on the art of post-impressionist, Paul Cezanne (1839-1906).
First let me say I am an art historian, a modernist and a total fan-girl when it comes to Cezanne. I have both more motivation and practice in reading this kind of book. At the same time, Clark has written in a splendidly conversational voice, full of description and pointing my eyes and mind directly to the works in question.
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.
Thames & Hudson did a brilliant job designing and producing the book. The horizontal illustrations occupy the full width of the text block; vertical works are presented in similar proportions. Instead of being imprisoned in a section devoted to plates, the pictures are inserted into the text so that one gets the feeling of sitting in a lecture hall, slides going up on the screen and a voice explaining what I should be noticing in my ear. Moreover, every time Clark alludes to an image in the text, the figure number is provided so flipping to the page to study the reproduction is easy-peasy. In fact, I think I can say this is the best laid-out and illustrated book on an art subject I have read in years. Maybe ever. The quality of the reproductions is truly excellent as well.
The book describes an arc from Cezanne's friendship with the impressionist Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) to the work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) particularly in the years during World War I. Matisse had a beautiful Cezanne, "Three Bathers" (1879-82) that hung in his home and that was something of a lodestar for him in his own art. The 5 chapters plus conclusion allow Clark to start slowly, speak simply. Each builds on the premises elucidated before: Pissarro's significance, "Cezanne's Material (still lifes), "Cezanne and the Outside World" (landscape) and "Peasants" (figure studies and mostly the Card Players). Chapter 5, "Matisse in the Garden" is a great whacking climax that addresses that most foundational notion, what it means to be "modern."
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.
If you are at all interested in the art of Cezanne or the idea of modernism or what Matisse was doing in the mid-teens of the 20th century, there is no better book than this. The language is mostly clear, free of art historical jargon and arcane and unexplained references. Cezanne's oeuvre is presented in manageable sections without isolation his subjects away from each other. The pictures are beautiful. And Cezanne's paintings will never look the same to you again, especially not when you are looking at them in real time and space.
First let me say I am an art historian, a modernist and a total fan-girl when it comes to Cezanne. I have both more motivation and practice in reading this kind of book. At the same time, Clark has written in a splendidly conversational voice, full of description and pointing my eyes and mind directly to the works in question.
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.
Thames & Hudson did a brilliant job designing and producing the book. The horizontal illustrations occupy the full width of the text block; vertical works are presented in similar proportions. Instead of being imprisoned in a section devoted to plates, the pictures are inserted into the text so that one gets the feeling of sitting in a lecture hall, slides going up on the screen and a voice explaining what I should be noticing in my ear. Moreover, every time Clark alludes to an image in the text, the figure number is provided so flipping to the page to study the reproduction is easy-peasy. In fact, I think I can say this is the best laid-out and illustrated book on an art subject I have read in years. Maybe ever. The quality of the reproductions is truly excellent as well.
The book describes an arc from Cezanne's friendship with the impressionist Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) to the work of Henri Matisse (1869-1954) particularly in the years during World War I. Matisse had a beautiful Cezanne, "Three Bathers" (1879-82) that hung in his home and that was something of a lodestar for him in his own art. The 5 chapters plus conclusion allow Clark to start slowly, speak simply. Each builds on the premises elucidated before: Pissarro's significance, "Cezanne's Material (still lifes), "Cezanne and the Outside World" (landscape) and "Peasants" (figure studies and mostly the Card Players). Chapter 5, "Matisse in the Garden" is a great whacking climax that addresses that most foundational notion, what it means to be "modern."
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.
If you are at all interested in the art of Cezanne or the idea of modernism or what Matisse was doing in the mid-teens of the 20th century, there is no better book than this. The language is mostly clear, free of art historical jargon and arcane and unexplained references. Cezanne's oeuvre is presented in manageable sections without isolation his subjects away from each other. The pictures are beautiful. And Cezanne's paintings will never look the same to you again, especially not when you are looking at them in real time and space.
June 4, 2024
t.j. clark writes in the same way cézanne paints: ‘par taches.’ he allows his writing to wander like his mind does, and he tries to make sense of the painter through what feels like artistic studies of his own thoughts, individual and through several angles. these pieces, or ‘taches,’ overlap to form what feels like a piece which mimics, to the furthest extent possible, a cézanne painting. or at least replicating the way in which he tries to understand the world. clark does not claim to have answers, and allows himself to break the structures somewhat imposed on him, though he understands that they are there and he must acknowledge them in some way, again, just as cézanne does. he writes through inhabiting cézannes paintings, which is functionally the same as inhabiting his mind. but above all, clark is low key a bit of a renoir hater, just like me. i think i like this guy.
August 12, 2023
This is a book about the tension between representation and reality in Cezanne. It is a beautifully clear, precise and detailed analysis of some of Cezanne's works. The writing brings art to life, in every aspect, and reading it is like being jolted by perception.
December 13, 2023
It must surely be rare to lift a book expecting answers and be left, upon its completion, with so much of the original wondering. Yet that must be the case with Cézanne, a premise respected and turned with experience and insight by TJ Clark from frustration to the acceptance of mystery, of pigment upon surface, and of the moment of lived viewing.
We return from detailed, prolonged looking with him at the paintings to find ourselves unsettled by the subtlest of figurative inconsistencies deliberately wrought by Çézanne to respect the art object with its rich surface and a commanding presence that does not require us to see mountains or apples or peasants through its frame, but form.
A slow, enriching read that parallels the looking. Thank you.
We return from detailed, prolonged looking with him at the paintings to find ourselves unsettled by the subtlest of figurative inconsistencies deliberately wrought by Çézanne to respect the art object with its rich surface and a commanding presence that does not require us to see mountains or apples or peasants through its frame, but form.
A slow, enriching read that parallels the looking. Thank you.
January 15, 2024
It's pretty rare that writers writing about painting make me want to paint, but this book absolutely did, especially in the first four chapters. Amazing intuition, especially in the comparison of different paintings of the same theme. Imagine having someone care about your art this much?!
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January 3, 2023This was a great book directing Cézanne's paintings and those who have influenced him.
November 26, 2025
one of our best prose stylists!
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews