Is Painting Describable?

Camille Pissarro, Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873)

V. S. Pritchett, in his absorbing “Malraux and Picasso” (Lasting Impressions, 1990), said, “Painting and sculpture cannot be translated into words. One art cannot evoke another.” Is this true? I don’t think so. The easiest way to disprove it is to adduce T. J. Clark's wonderful art writings. Clark ingeniously explores difficult artworks. Here, for example, is an excerpt from his descriptive analysis of Pissarro’s Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873):

Light is coming down from a whitened sky, pink just beginning to appear in it – coming from behind the hill (whose crest has a few houses just visible among trees), so that the hill is silhouetted, but with light humming in the foreground, flooding everywhere, muting the high silhouettes, picking out feathery edges of foliage on the lower trees and the plump leaves in the cabbage patch. There are three peasants in the fields: a woman with a basket, a man in blue and a further faint figure far back to the right in a shadowed clearing. The emptiness of the air above the field closer to us – the coloured emptiness – is a tour de force of illusion. The man in blue alerts us to the presence of a haze, almost a ground mist, of very light blue-purple all round him, seeping towards the woman with the basket. And there is a ghostly blue halo behind the tree above him. The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth. There are many such wonders. 

Things emerge from the evening light only gradually: it is the light that is striking, not the ghosts of trees. The edge of visibility is a world of its own. Push towards the unnoticeable in vision, therefore, and if necessary the unpaintable: that seems to be Pissarro’s self-instruction. Look at the dark leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house. How did Pissarro do it? How did he see it as paintable in the first place? Or look at the light caught in the trees on top of the hill, and the final flourish of touches that establish the sparser tree standing on its own between the houses, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink. [“Strange Apprentice,” London Review of Books, October 8, 2020; retitled "Pissarro and Cézanne" in Clark’s excellent 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall]

I love that passage. It expands my appreciation of Pissarro’s great art. But note that “How did Pissarro do it?” Clark acknowledges the difficulty of what he’s doing. Perhaps Pritchett is partially right; a one-for-one equivalence of painting and words may not be possible. But one art can certainly evoke the other. Clark’s brilliant, subtle writing shows the way.