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).

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.”  

T. J. Clark and the Fiction of Individuality

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

T. J. Clark is one of my favorite writers. I want to stress that at the outset. But there’s an aspect of his thinking that bugs me. He contends that the individual subjectivity of the artist is a fiction. In his otherwise brilliant “Strange Apprentice” (London Review of Books, October 8, 2020), a comparative analysis of Cézanne and Pissarro, he writes,

I said that these painters believed the world had somehow to happen to a picture – impinge on it, touch it. This ultimately is the point of the ‘tache’. It puts us back in the moment when the world occurs to the sensorium; and at that point it isn’t clear to the painting subject whether the occurrence is something made by the mind – by the mind’s eye – or entirely a material event, an actual unstoppable touch of light on the receptor evolved to receive it. Is the ‘tache’ transitive or intransitive, in other words? It is certainly a made thing, but made by what ... by whom?

He further states:

This brings us back to Schapiro and the question of individualism. Both Cézanne and Pissarro put their trust in the idea that their painting was founded on truth to their own irreducible ‘petite sensation’. But what the ‘petite sensation’ was remained for them a mystery. This was the great thing that painting was meant to find out. Yes, it was ‘mine’; but as I made the actual marks that were my seeing (‘Je vois, par taches’), I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity. It, the ‘sensation’, was the contact – the deep structure of the contact – between sensorium and surrounding. Unique to each individual, doubtless, but full of a materiality, an exposure to the exterior, that put individuality at risk.

Maybe it’s just me, but I find that a weird bit of magical thinking, especially the part in the second passage when Clark suddenly starts talking as if he’s Cézanne. “I came to understand that in some sense it did not belong to me at all – or at least to the ‘me’ of the mind, of subjectivity” – those are Clark’s words, not Cézanne’s. Clark is doing more here that just putting words in Cézanne’s mouth.  He’s questioning the existence of Cézanne’s individual subjectivity. This isn’t the first time he’s done this. In a previous piece, also on Cézanne, he wrote, “The sadness and tension and confinement in Cézanne, I’ve been proposing, are all bound up with the ultimate fiction, ‘individuality’ ” (“Relentless Intimacy,” London Review of Books, January 25, 2018).

I find this view puzzling. For one thing, it offends common sense. It’s Cézanne’s sensorium that is making contact with his surroundings. And it’s Cézanne who is making the marks. The idea that Pool at Jas de Bouffin, say, or House and Tree, L’Hermitage somehow occurred without any operation of Cézanne’s mind is crazy. Cézanne as a brainless Tin Man on automatic pilot, standing at his easel without a thought of what he’s doing or how he’s doing it? Come on! It contradicts Clark’s own thesis – that Cézanne apprenticed himself to Pissarro “to unlearn his first style.” That “unlearn” suggests a mind intent on stylistic change. Style is an unmistakable, idiosyncratic, formally coherent personal way of doing something. It implies individuality. Clark’s denial of it is perplexing. 

Landscape and Specificity

Paul Cézanne, Pines and Rocks (1896-99)

Mark Strand, in his “Landscape and the Poetry of Self” (included in his 2000 essay collection The Weather of Words), said, “The reality of landscape has little to do with accuracy of depiction or representation.” He said that in seeing a landscape, “What is usually experienced is something general and atmospheric, an impulse to identify with certain light or the look of a terrain.” He said that landscape painting “represents an escape from particularity.” 

Is he right? I don’t think so. The landscape paintings I admire brim with specificity. See, for example, the many inspired accuracies of Cézanne’s Pines and Rocks (1896-99) – the shimmering areas “where the green of the pines shows against the blue of the sky,” “the parts of the ochre trunks where shadows outline and intermix,” “the foreground, rendered in parallel diagonal strokes, of earth and grass” (I’m quoting here from John Updike’s wonderful description of Pines and Rocks in his Just Looking, 1989).

See also the exhaustive specifics of color and shape in Van Gogh’s The Plain of Auvers (1890).

Vincent Van Gogh, The Plain of Auvers (1890)

Look at what Van Gogh said about painting it:

I am totally absorbed by that immense plain covered with fields of wheat which extends beyond the hillside; it is wide as the sea, of a subtle yellow, a subtle tender green, with the subtle violet of a plowed and weeded patch and with neatly delineated green spots of potato fields in bloom. All this under a sky of delicate colors, blue and white and pink and purple. For the time being I am calm, almost too calm, thus in the proper state of mind to paint all that. [from Van Gogh’s letter to his mother, July, 1890]

Such words do not evince the sensibility of a generalist. Quite the opposite – they show an artist intent on capturing the subtlest qualities of the Auvers landscape.

One more example: Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650-51). 

Nicolas Poussin, Landscape with a Calm (1650-51)

T. J. Clark, in his brilliant The Sight of Death (2006), says of it, “The details are exquisite and singular.” Details such as the two birches, of which Clark notes, 

Poussin has put a lot of effort separating the two birch trees and having the leaves of the right-hand one be closer to us, overlapping and partly obscuring the others, and certainly catching the light differently – catching it full on, seemingly, and reflecting more of it back. So that this tree is more a flimsy three-dimensional substance, to the other’s pure silhouette.

These are only three examples, but they’re sufficient, I submit, to cast doubt on Strand’s view. Far from escaping particularity, Cézanne, Van Gogh, and Poussin immersed themselves in it. 

T. J. Clark on Cézanne’s Portraits

      Paul Cézanne, Woman with a Cafetière (c.1895)  

T. J. Clark’s dazzling “Relentless Intimacy” (London Review of Books (January 25, 2018), attempts to light a fuse under traditional Cézanne criticism. The piece begins thrillingly:

Look first at Woman with a Cafetière, who presides over the next to last room of the Cézanne Portraits show, staring down even the saturnine Ambroise Vollard. Then meet the gaze of Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, infinitely courageous in her alarming throne-room, oppressed – or is it enlivened? – by a glorious Vermeer curtain, a bucking dado, a chairback like a coffin lid, exploding fire tongs, white lightning in the grate, a painting – or is it a mirror? – perched on the chimney breast. It matters that both portraits are of women, and I shall come to that. But it matters just as much that still, more than a century after they were painted, these images so effortlessly keep their distance, resisting our understanding, refusing (as the philosophers say) to ‘come under a description’. In particular they strike me as putting the strange word ‘expression’ to death.

The orthodox line on Cézanne is that his portraits are “inexpressive,” that he’s “detached” from his subjects. For example, Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent “High Anxiety” (The New Yorker, April 9, 2018), a review of “Cézanne: Portraits” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., writes,

Once, at the Metropolitan Museum, I counted dozens of people clumped in front of several paintings by van Gogh while one or two or none paid a whole room of Cézannes cursory attention as others walked through with passing glances. I empathized. A glance at his work warns of slow going ahead. That’s because he didn’t paint for the pleasure of other people but for his own, always elusive satisfaction. I’m used to feeling lonely when looking at his work—as humanly unconsidered as Hortense, who, through hours and days and years, displays not the slightest flicker of happiness. 

Note that “as humanly unconsidered as Hortense.” The reference is to Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne), the subject of at least twenty-eight Cézanne portraits. 

Clark rejects this view. He says, “Cézanne is not in the least ‘detached’ from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them.” Cézanne’s intimacy, he argues, is in his details (“Avert your gaze from Madame’s mummified torso and attend to the earth-quaking room instead”), e.g., the spoon in Woman with a Cafetière:

The spoon in Woman with a Cafetière is upright with its own identity: it has a halo of shadow to keep the rest of reality from contaminating it. The woman’s hands (or her hair with its geological parting) have the same weight and distinctiveness as the spoon. And yet spoon, hair and hands are fitted like cogs or levers into the pictures naïve, elaborate of the world-all-at-once: the table so eager to be there for us, pushing its way through the picture plane; the flowers tumbling down the wall, changing colour as they hit the floor; the long central seam of the woman’s dress splitting open under her fist.

This is magnificent critical writing, and what makes it magnificent is its concentration on detail. Another strand of Clark’s argument – his theory that “the famous ‘inexpressiveness’ of his [Cézanne’s] sitters has to do (not wholly, but indubitably) with their situation in class society” – is less persuasive. But his argument from particulars is exhilarating. “Relentless Intimacy” is one of this year’s finest critical essays.  

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).