T. J. Clark's "Strange" Aesthetic

Paul Cézanne, House and Tree, L'Hermitage (1874-75)

“Strange” and “strangeness” are two of T. J. Clark’s favorite words. He uses them repeatedly: “the sheer strangeness” of Cézanne’s House and Tree, L’Hermitage; “the strange mixture of sadism and togetherness” of Bruegel’s Magpie on the Gallows; “the strange achievement” of Picasso’s Guernica; the “strange motif and viewpoint” of Cézanne’s House with Cracked Walls; the “strangeness and intricacy of the spatial set-up” in Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. He says that Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm is “full of a sense of the strangeness, the precariousness, of the emerging mode.” Bellini’s The Dead Christ Supported by Four Angels is “a strange mixture of the heart-rending and the lavish.” On Poussin’s Sacrament of Marriage, he says, “Veiled body and bare stone cylinder make a strange unity.” On Pollock’s drip paintings: “The process is as strange and extreme as any painting process ever was.” On Richter's "squeegee" paintings: "It is a strange world." On Cézanne’s House near Gardanne: “Landscape painting is given back its strangeness.” On Pissarro’s Two Young Peasant Women: “He was improvising strange (and wonderful) solutions to problems he had never set himself before.”  

In Clark's superb Picasso and Truth (2013), he writes,

Much of the history of twentieth-century art can be written in terms of artists looking at the loaves in Bread and Fruit Dish – looking at how they obey and resist the force field of the picture rectangle, and assert their own materiality against the paint they are made from – and thinking that somehow, in this, the true strangeness of representation had been invented again. 

Note that “true strangeness.” Later, in the same book, he says it again:

Cézanne’s still lifes, to move closer to Picasso, mostly posit a space that is absolute in its proximity to us, but at the same time – this is the true strangeness – fundamentally unbounded and untouchable. 

This is the true strangeness – Clark knows and appreciates strangeness when he sees it. It’s his ultimate value, the core of his aesthetic. A painting can be breathtakingly beautiful and still not totally grab him. In order for that to happen, it has to be strange. But what does he mean by that? What’s his idea of “strange”? 

The answer (or at least the beginning of one) is Cézanne. Clark makes this clear in his brilliant “Pissarro and Cézanne” (included in his 2022 collection If These Apples Should Fall), in which he analyzes the mentor-mentee relationship between the two artists and compares their styles. He says, “The difficulty with Pissarro – the difficulty of Pissarro – is his simplicity. ‘Strangeness’ is the last word that comes up in connection with him.” 

Clark looks at several Pissarros and notes their many felicities. Of Landscape near Pontoise (1872), he says,

The pale grey of the tree trunk at left is one such, done in a single smear. The path with its rustle of uncut dry grasses, and then the path losing its way by the fence and going on into distance, across fields not yet harvested, as a tentative green smudge. The pale blotted saplings on the other side of the fence; the flattened horizon way off to the right; the small square darker cloud. These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them. 

His description of Cabbage Field, Pontoise (1873) shows his delight in Pissarro’s details:

Can we agree that the light in Cabbage Field, which is breathtaking, is some kind of high-summer gloaming, maybe with moisture in the early evening air? (Of course the painting is equivocal about clock time. It isn’t a Monet sunset. It could be that the peasants are taking advantage of the coolness of morning. But the overall colour balance seems to look forward to dusk.) 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 leafless tree in the picture’s left foreground, drawn dark on dark against the hill and the house on its crest. 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 centre-right, its dark greens scrawled liquid on pink.

Those two exquisite paragraphs are among my favorites in all of art writing. They completely win me over to Pissarro, an artist I heretofore immensely underrated. I remember, when I first read them, thinking Can it be? Clark is showing Pissarro to be the greater artist. But then Clark pivots to Cézanne, looks at his House and Tree, L’Hermitage (1874-75), and says,

And the sheer strangeness of House and Tree does speak to something fundamental: we look at the picture’s precipitous road and front lawn to the left, or the desperate staccato of its branches against the house front, window, hilltop, red chimney, and know you’re in the presence already – impossibly – of the twentieth century. 

Clark’s verdict: 

The reader between the lines so far will have gathered that, however much I think we underestimate Pissarro, I largely accept the banal comparative judgment as to Cézanne’s and Pissarro’s strengths. I agree with Pissarro, in other words. Cézanne was the greater artist – more tragic and outlandish, more relentless and single-minded – and therefore modernity’s patron saint. 

Cézanne is strange; Pissarro isn’t. For Clark, that difference is clinching. Interestingly, a shorter version of “Pissarro and Cézanne” appeared in the October 8, 2020 London Review of Books. It’s title? “Strange Apprentice.”