Cézanne's "Card Players" and "Smokers": Clark v. Schjeldahl

It’s interesting to compare Peter Schjeldahl’s review of the Met’s “Cézanne’s Card Players” (“Game Change,” The New Yorker, February 28, 2011) with T. J. Clark’s piece on the same show when it was at the Courtauld (“At the Courtauld,” London Review of Books, December 2, 2010). Schjeldahl, in his review, refers to Clark’s piece, and says:

Clark still adores the pictures. I don’t, especially. The greatness of Cezanne’s art is undeniable but, for me, dauntingly saturnine, with a medicinal aftertaste, despite fugitive beauties of touch and color, which still often take me by surprise.

Schjeldahl is right; Clark does adore the pictures. In “At the Courtauld,” Clark says:

There is an astonishing trio of large portraits of a middle-aged man, probably a farm labourer, in his Sunday best – loans from Mannheim, St. Petersburg and Moscow – that it is worth traveling the earth to see hung in a row. They are the most complex depictions of “an ordinary man” to come down to us from the recent past.

When I read Clark’s piece, I found the references to “class position,” “his class’s best thinkers,” and “class identity” off-putting. Clark seemed way too class-conscious for my taste. One thing I can’t abide is snobbery, and I thought I detected a strong whiff of it from Clark’s review. Then, last week, when I read Schjeldahl’s “Game Change,” in which he points out that Clark is a Marxist, it became clear to me that all that “class” business in Clark’s Cézanne piece stemmed from his interpretative ideology. Ideological critics have always seemed to me to be bent on leaving out whatever in an artwork is not to their purposes, or on distorting, in the service of argument, what they do find to describe. I haven’t had the benefit of seeing the actual Card Players, but from what I can see of them in reproductions, I find myself agreeing with Schjeldahl when he says, “The scenes of the Card Players are thoroughly banal – unless you sentimentalize peasants, as Clark does, hailing them as actors in a ‘great historical turning point,’ mainly blooms of a perishing class.” Notwithstanding Clark’s ideological a priori, he is an amazing writer. Check out his description of the St. Petersburg Smoker: “In the St. Petersburg painting the red of the peasant’s lip bleeds – explodes – across his chin, neck, earlobe, shadowed forehead.” There’s a wonderful description of one of Cezanne’s paintings (the Orsay Card Players) in Schjeldahl’s piece, too: “Pooling darks intermingle with lighter hues that are like exhalations from damp earth.” When I look closely at the reproduction of Cézanne’s Study for the Card Players that is used to illustrate Schjeldahl’s New Yorker piece, I marvel at the way the figure of a man playing cards has been bodied forth in paint. As Schjeldahl says, “It is amazing, when you think about it, that a clutter of coarse, arbitrary-seeming strokes can add up to a solid – and impenetrably stolid – man.” How did Cézanne do it? Schjeldahl attributes Cézanne’s achievement to “being rigorously true to the testimony of eyesight.” This is helpful, but only in a general way. Clark seems to get closer to an answer when he focuses on the details of the paintings. For example, he says:

In the Hermitage Smoker, a group of black bottles and flushed fruit turns out to be a painting of part of a painting produced 20 years ago before (now in Berlin): an ominous, doom-laden vision of familiar things, done in great thunder and lightning impasto of Cézanne’s first (I hate “early”) style. The Moscow Smoker’s elbow goes off at a neat tangent into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain, and over to the right he is given a woman partner on the wall, on a piece of canvas whose corner refuses to stay flat.

That “into a long vertical borrowed from the edge of the curtain” is very fine. But then Clark suddenly stops his fascinating analysis and rather crazily says, “Blather about these sorts of detail being so many tokens of ‘paintedness’ has me immediately switching off my metaphorical hearing aid and humming the ‘Ça ira.’” Well, I, for one, don’t consider it blather at all. Those descriptions of detail are the most interesting things in Clark’s piece – far more interesting than his points about “class position,” “class identity,” and so on, which truly are blather.

Credit: The above artwork is Paul Cézanne’s “Study for the Card Players” (ca. 1890-92), used to illustrate Peter Schjeldahl’s “Game Change” (The New Yorker, February 28, 2011).