10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature: #1 T. J. Clark's "Strange Apprentice"

This is the tenth and concluding post in my series “10 Best Essays of the 21st Century on Art and Literature.” Today’s pick is T. J. Clark’s exquisite “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020).

In this great piece – one of the subtlest, most delectable, enthralling studies of style I’ve ever read – Clark opened my eyes to the genius of Camille Pissarro. He begins by telling about the mentor-mentee relationship between Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. In the mid 1870s, Cézanne visited Pissarro and painted with him. Clark says, “Cézanne came to Pissarro to unlearn his first style.” Cézanne considered Pissarro a master. Clark tries to see Pissarro’s art through Cézanne’s eyes. He wants to avoid the usual contrasts between Pissarro and Cézanne – simple/complex, dull/interesting. He takes Pissarro’s seeming simplicity, seeming dullness, and opens them up, illuminating their beauty and depth. He does this by focusing on two of Pissarro’s paintings – Paysage à Pontoise (1872) and Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873). He says of Paysage à Pontoise,

So the true intensity of the new painting, Pissarro proposes, will inhere in its showing us what, after all, of beauty – of emphasis, of the suddenness of things seen – is there inthe dullness, not ‘punctuating’ it, not coming out of it. This is Pissarro’s painting’s triumph: the complete steadiness of its hold on a single plain state of the light; the subduing of every separate entity to that state; and the peculiar beauty of that submission. Granted, certain episodes in the scene are on the edge of becoming ‘things in themselves’. The pale grey of the tree trunk at left is one such, done in a single smear. Or the path with its rustle of uncut dry grass, and then the path losing its way by the fence and going on into distance, across the rough fields, 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. But they do not disturb the sense of the whole. They are fine tunings of a single song.

I love that “These are astonishments – the mind and eye can feast on them.” For me, it’s the ultimate critical compliment. But Clark is only getting started. His description of Le Champ de choux, Pontoise is extraordinary:

Can we agree that the light in Le Champ de choux, 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 coucher de soleil. But early evening seems reasonable.) 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.

I nominate that as one of the great passages in all of art writing. “The ruckus of cabbage leaves nearby is rhymed with the russet of new-turned earth” is inspired! We are approaching mid-point in Clark’s essay. Where is he going with it? Is it possible he’s arguing for a reconsideration of Pissarro, one that rates him even greater than Cézanne? Yes and no. Yes to reconsideration; no to higher rating. For in the end – in the second half of the essay – Clark returns to Cézanne. He compares Cézanne’s copy of Louveciennes (c.1873) with Pissarro’s original:

The difference between the two Louveciennes is summed up by what happens to the mother and child. Cézanne’s human beings do not really cast shadows: the mother’s shadow slides away from her, thick on the surface, and disappears into a rut. (In the Pissarro the rut carries a little rivulet of rainwater. Cézanne has no time for such traces of weather.) Space in Cézanne, we already begin to see, is not a reality inhabited by others besides ourselves, beings with an equal claim on the landscape. His two figures are groundless ghosts: they’re about to go around the corner into the abyss. Space in Pissarro is essentially containment, a form of surrounding: it can in the end be metaphorised, as here, by a holding of hands, the reaching up of a child to its mother. In Cézanne the gesture is the first thing to go. There need be no green gate at far left in the copy, leading out to other people’s property – marks of ownership are not part of seeing for Cézanne. No real light comes over the copy’s horizon – just a theatrical backlighting, which splashes crudely against the houses on the hill, breaking them into facets. There is no evening glow under the arches of the aqueduct. And of course no agriculture to speak of, no field system, no raked earth in peasant plots, no lines of new planting. Pissarro liked to call himself ‘a painter of cabbages’. Cézanne’s seeing does not divulge identities of this kind.

Clark finds the comparison of the two Louveciennes telling. He says, “The interest of the copy is not that Cézanne couldn’t do these many things that Pissarro could, but that the failures turn out to have their own coherence, their own aesthetic dignity: they shadow forth the Cézanne we know.” 

Clark also compares Cezanne’s Maison et arbre, quartier de l’Hermitage (1874) with Pissarro’s Maison bourgeoise à l’Hermitage (1873). He remarks on the “sheer strangeness” of the Cézanne – its “weird electricity.”  Strangeness is Clark’s governing aesthetic. Earlier in the piece, he calls it “the marker of modernity.” Cézanne is strange; Pissarro isn’t. This determines Clark’s ultimate judgment: “Cézanne was the greater artist.”

In the essay’s concluding paragraph, Clark makes one more inspired comparison:

Put Jas de Bouffan next to Inondation à Saint-Ouen-L’Aumône. The latter is dated 1873. (Saint-Ouen was a few miles downstream from Auvers, a village just beginning to be a suburb.) Look at the stretch of land in Saint-Ouen leading off between the trees to the village ... and the awkward pomposity of the house and chimney in the centre ... the factory smokestack just visible through branches to the left ... the birds battling the wind, the clouds still threatening rain ... the reflection in the water of the fruit tree’s supports. Humble and colossal. Every observation solid as a rock. A social world. The earth emerging after the flood. What must it have been like to have discovered, under such painting’s spell, that Pissarro’s feeling for time and place – his anarchist confidence in history beginning again – could not be one’s own?

Pissarro’s solidity versus Cézanne’s strangeness. It’s no contest. Cézanne wins. Or does he? Clark’s final paragraph gives Pissarro his beautiful due: “Humble and colossal”; “Every observation solid as a rock”; “Pissarro’s feeling for time and place.” My takeaway from this magnificent piece is Pissarro’s rich simplicity. Yes, Cézanne is the star. But Pissarro quietly steals the show. 

Credit: The above illustration is Camille Pissarro’s Le Champ de choux, Pontoise (1873).