If These Apples Should Fall

Cézanne and the Present

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For more than a century the art of Paul Cézanne was deemed to hold the key to modernity.

His painting was a touchstone for Samuel Beckett as much as Henri Matisse. Rainer Maria Rilke revered him deeply, as did Pablo Picasso. If we lost touch with his sense of life, they thought, we lost an essential element in our self-understanding.

In If These Apples Should Fall, T. J. Clark looks back on Cézanne from a moment – our own – when such judgments may seem to need justifying. What was it, the book asks, that held Cézanne’s viewers spellbound?

At the heart of Cézanne lies a sense of disquiet: a homelessness haunting the vividness, an anxiety underlying the appeal of colour. T. J. Clark addresses this strangeness head-on, and examines the art of Pissarro, Matisse and others in relation to it; above all, he speaks to the uncanniness and beauty of Cézanne’s achievement.

Written in his characteristically engaging style by one of our most significant writers on art, If These Apples Should Fall is essential reading for anyone with a serious interest in Cézanne, or indeed the history of modern art.
Extent: 240 pp
Format: Hardback
Publication date: 2022-08-04
Size: 24.6 x 18.6 cm
ISBN: 9780500025284
Introduction
1. Pissarro and Cézanne
2. Cézanne’s Material
3. Cézanne and the Outside World
4. Peasants
5. Matisse in the Garden
Conclusion

Press Reviews

An electrifying account of looking intently to fathom Cézanne’s pictures: what makes their beauty still so uncanny, precarious, visionary. 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 ... The best book on Cézanne since Meyer Schapiro’s in 1952 … an electrifying companion
Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times, Books of the Year

Characteristically brilliant and provocative … fascinating
Gabriel Josipovici, TLS

Clark is an astonishingly good judge. He can bend language around an image until the two are only millimetres apart ... there are bold observations on almost every page of this book
Jackson Arn, Art in America

Fans of T. J. Clark will be fascinated by this latest stop on his sometimes unexpected intellectual journey
Tom Stammers, Literary Review

About the Author

T. J. Clark is Professor Emeritus of the History of Art at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of the seminal The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Followers (1984) and Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (1999). He writes art criticism regularly for the London Review of Books. He is the author of Heaven on Earth: Painting and the Life to Come (2018), also published by Thames & Hudson.

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