T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #8

Frank Auerbach, Primrose Hill (1971)

This is the eighth post in my monthly series “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style,” a consideration of what makes Clark’s writing so distinctive and delectable. Each month I choose a favorite passage from his work and analyze its ingredients. Today’s pick is from his brilliant “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015; included in Frank Auerbach, edited by Catherine Lampert, 2015). It’s a descriptive analysis of Auerbach’s Primrose Hill (1971): 

The wonderful sky in the 1971 Primrose Hill is pictorial, even picturesque. That doesn’t mean I disapprove of it, any more than I do of the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner. But the sky and corner are stratagems, moves in a game. They’re easily recognised as such. Now turn to the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground, or the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place, or the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin ... about these I’m much less certain. The white sky and the purple-brown field are maybe there essentially to release these episodes – so that the painting moves up, where it matters, from the realm of illusion to that of presence. ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it. Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns.

Clark is an ingenious interpreter of paint strokes: “the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner”; “the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground”; the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place”; “the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin.” He focuses on the yellow and red: “ ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it.” And then it’s almost as if he enters the painting: “Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns.” What? That last line is electrifying. So unexpected – shocking, even. Guns in the trees of Primrose Hill? Can it be true? Yes, look again. I see them now, thanks to Clark’s inspired guidance. This is no peaceful walk in a park. This is an ambush!  

On T. J. Clark's Superb Art Descriptions

T. J. Clark (Photo from blogs.getty.edu)

I see in the February 9 New York Review of Books that T. J. Clark was awarded the 2023 Grace Dudley Prize for Arts Writing. The announcement says,

His focus on art throughout its history as an expression of social and political conditions of its time has brought what the judges called “revolutionarily fresh and vivifying insights into subjects as diverse as Bruegel, Giotto, Courbet, and Picasso in a manner that is as notable for its deep humanity as it is for its uncompromising acuity.”

In my opinion, the judges reached the right decision for the wrong reasons. Clark is a superb art writer, and is absolutely deserving of the Dudley Prize. But his strength is not social and political interpretation. If anything, that’s his weakness. His great strength is his descriptive power. He’s an extraordinary describer. Here are three examples:

On Frank Auerbach’s Primrose Hill (1971):

The wonderful sky in the 1971 Primrose Hill is pictorial, even picturesque. That does not mean I disapprove of it, any more than I do of the pulled purple-brown strokes sealing in and stamping down the picture’s bottom-right corner. But the sky and corner are stratagems, moves in a game. They’re easily recognised as such. Now turn to the red-brown furrows scraped across the picture’s midground, or the two slivers of yellow locking the red-brown in place, or the slab of deep green laid on top of the trees at right like the lid of a coffin ... about these I’m much less certain. The white sky and the purple-brown field are maybe there essentially to release these episodes – so that the painting moves up, where it matters, from the realm of illusion to that of presence. ‘Something’, in the red and yellow, takes hold of the painting process and accelerates it almost to breaking point. Whatever that something is – ‘seeing’, ‘totality’, ‘the thing itself’ – the oil paint is twisted and scarified by it. Space begins to elude us. The ground hardens. The trees are full of camouflaged guns. [“Frank Auerbach,” London Review of Books, September 10, 2015]

On Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932):

Touch – the imagination of contact and softness and curvature – is consumed in the Nude on Black Armchair by something else: a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property. The nude’s near hand, holding onto the clawlike white flower, is an emblem of this: fingers and petals become pure (predatory) silhouette. The body’s pale mauve is as otherworldly a color – as unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone – as the yellow and orange in the sky. Maybe in the picture night is falling. The blue wall to the left is icy cold. The woman’s blonde hair is sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast. Blacks encase her as if for an eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window. [Picasso and Truth, 2013]

On Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855):

Take the horse’s head. It is first and foremost a picture of a creature looking death in the face; and if one goes on to think about it, the face of death – the face the horse seems to fix with its desperate glare – is most likely that of the fallen rider, the man in the turban, his fingers still clutching the horse’s mane. The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity. It must have been painted with the same pigment, at the same moment, as the wild red of the horseman’s turban, which itself has the look of a bleeding bald skull. Maybe the plume of blue tassels issuing from the red like a tuft of hair is meant to evoke a scalping. The two reds – the turban-scalp and the boiling nostril – insist on the beauty of blood. The choice of supporting colours is a stroke of genius. The dry green and gold bridle of the horse intensifies the red’s oiliness and carnality, so that even the fleck of red in the horse’s eye makes a spectator flinch. The cold gold of the horseman’s tunic, again with its exquisite green filigree, is a kind of deathly counterpoint to the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath: the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows. [“A Horse’s Impossible Head,” London Review of Books, October 10, 2019]

I could easily quote a dozen more. I love Clark's descriptions. They are themselves a form of art – the art of translating paint into words. 

In Praise of Texture: Philip Guston and Frank Auerbach

Philip Guston, Ride (1969)

For me, one of the most enjoyable art reviews of 2021 (so far) is Susan Tallman’s “Philip Guston’s Discomfort Zone” (The New York Review of Books, January 14, 2021). I’m not a fan of Guston’s cartoon imagery. His potato-head creatures and convertible-riding Klansmen do nothing for me. But what I do like is Tallman’s description of it. For example:

So how is it that Philip Guston, dead these forty years, is still pushing our buttons? Until a few months ago, he seemed to conform to the anticipated arc—early show of talent, challenging departure from status quo, posthumous popularity. An eminent Abstract Expressionist, he had flummoxed the art world in 1970 with a late-career tack into figuration, nudging paint into the shapes of bottles and bricks and comical, conical white hoods with oversized hands and the creepy softness of the Pillsbury Doughboy. Between lovely painterly passages, the patched and dowdy hoods smoked cigars, drove around town, worked at easels, and beat themselves up, in both senses. 

Note that “lovely painterly passages.” To me, that’s the key to enjoying Guston’s late work. My first exposure to his crazy Klansmen was the cover of Sanford Schwartz’s great 1990 essay collection Artists and Writers. It shows a close-up detail of Guston’s Untitled (Two Hooded Figures in a Car). What grabbed me wasn’t the bizarre imagery; it was the rich, thick texture of the paint. In one of the book’s essays, “Polk’s Dots, or, A Generation Comes Into Focus,” Schwartz compares Guston’s paint strokes to butter: “These marks – they’re the size of pats of butter, and have a buttery texture.” Yes, they do. That “buttery” description has stayed with me down through the years, and influenced my personal aesthetic. I love the buttery texture of thickly applied paint. I love the work of painters who paint this way. 

I thought of Schwartz’s “buttery” description when I read his recent “A Painter’s Performances” (The New York Review of Books, March 11, 2021), a marvelous review of an exhibition of Frank Auerbach’s “head” paintings. Like Guston’s Klansmen, these Auerbach images aren't to my taste. Schwartz describes them as “mangled,” and that seems exactly right. In a delightful passage, he says, 

They are pictures in which Auerbach, looking at people straight on, from the side, or from below, continually outdoes himself in delectable color choices and displays of seemingly impromptu, brilliantly zigzaggy brushwork—displays that can leave a head resembling a piece of hacked wood, a wad of chewing gum, bodies wrestling, or an abstract shape recalling a bird’s nest.

Frank Auerbach, Head of J.Y.M. (1978)

Auerbach’s heads, especially the early ones, e.g., Head of J.Y.M. (1978), are thickly painted. “Thick and luscious” is how Schwartz describes them. That’s the quality I relish. My eyes devour them, not as strange imagery, but as delicious texture.