On Matisse's "Woman with a Hat": Fine vs. Clark

Zachary Fine, in his absorbing “Matisse’s Ugliest Painting” (newyorker.com, August 31, 2026), says of Henri Matisse’s “Woman with a Hat” (1905), “The painting looks like a box of melted saltwater taffy that’s been churned together and encouraged to express itself as a chic fungus.” He says that he still can’t reconcile himself to “the shock of its ugliness.”

Fine tells us why he finds it ugly. He says,

The painting is filled with inconsistencies and bizarre compensatory moves. Its attitude can be summarized by a single square inch at the base of Amélie’s neck, where one finds eight colors in competition: orange, yellow, blue, white, teal, apricot, pale brown, and some black, as underdrawing.

He goes on,

Matisse takes every opportunity to disturb passages of chromatic balance. The red hair that connects with the green of Amélie’s temple? It’s interrupted by a few strokes of magenta, to increase the tension. The blue of the hat’s brim? A splash of teal agitates its roundness. While some of the color contrasts do articulate planar shifts, such as the candy-stripe lips (red for upper, pink for lower), many of the touches are arbitrary splotches that neither bolster a shape nor set another off. I have to imagine that Matisse was tickled by his decision to put a large tract of green in front of Madame’s face and, instead of extending it all the way to her throat, suddenly introduce a purple goatee.

He says,

The aspect of the painting that troubles me most, though, is the sleeve of Amélie’s dress. Fauvism was supposedly characterized by the phasing out of the Neo-Impressionist tache, or uniformly pointillist stroke—abundant in “Luxe, Calme et Volupté” and “The Port of Abail”—in favor of broader patches of color, but the green sleeve, with its cobra-headed cuff, is a creepy disturbance to the brushwork elsewhere. Compared with the thick smudges of white on the fan that Amélie is holding, or the broad, lush strokes of the background, the sleeve is fidgety. None of its marks seem to maintain their integrity for more than an inch or two without being fretted or spoiled. There’s a slight air of death around it, as if the arm is deteriorating in front of us.

This is good provocative criticism. Some of the descriptions make me smile, e.g., “chic fungus,” “anxious smear job.”  

But is Fine right? Is “Woman with a Hat” ugly? T. J. Clark, in his brilliant “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008; included in his great 2025 collection Those Passions), says no. He doesn’t say so expressly, but it’s implicit in his ravishing descriptions of the painting. Consider this passage:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! Clark is amazed by the colors. He doesn’t dismiss them as “arbitrary splotches” as Fine does. Instead, he attempts to interpret them: 

All the same, some colours occur only once, at crucial junctures. Look at the purple curlicue I pointed to earlier, between the hand and cane; or the exact shade of green chosen for the bar of shadow (if that is what it is) across Parayre’s brow; or the kind of purpled mauve, more opaque and decisive than any of its many near relatives, that opens up the space at the front of her throat. The painter wants us to see the subtlety, and also the wilfulness, of his variations on a theme, or his seeing of different things in the same light; but then he also expects us to register the decisive leap out of the established scale. He wants us to notice, and to gasp at, his suddenly seeing how to fix, or transfix, a singular optical fact. Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it. Nothing could be more hardworking, more investigative and empirical, than the way her mouth is drawn. First there were two plain strips of red and pink – bars at the top of an abstract ladder of colour, pink for the chin, green for the recession above it, pink again for the underlip, and flaring red for the upper one. But then this abstraction of sensuality had to be made into a particular mouth. A tentative, half-transparent line of greyed mauve was put over the red to the left, as if trying to inscribe on top of it more of a Cupid’s bow. And a bolder, more opaque dab of mauve was put next to the pink of the lower lip, giving the left side of the mouth a shape. And was this the point at which the amazing, inorganic green of the shadow under the nose was strengthened, so as to intensify the play of complementaries? Did the pear drop of yellow occur as part of this process? Was it maybe thrown up by the business of getting the other greens and yellows to keep the mouth – the mouth’s wounded sensuality – from running away from the rest of the face? (Of course the mouth runs away with the picture. The picture turns on it. But for that very reason it had to be held down, and held back. It had to be intensely, naively correct.)

I love that “Nothing will prepare us, or will have prepared the painter, for the final dab of yellow on the tip of Parayre’s nose – but the whole picture hangs on it.” Clark is clearly entranced by this painting. He says he finds it both “chilling” and “exhilarating.” 

Clark mainly focuses on Madame Matisse’s face and body. Of the hat, he says,

The hat is splendid, but slightly crushing. It casts an implacable green shadow straight along Parayre’s forehead, and its blue all but annihilates the red of her hair. But the hat is abstract: the painter does not seem interested in making its extravagance palpable.

Fine accords more significance to the hat than Clark does. He sees it as the embodiment of Matisse’s “project.” He says, 

In “Femme au Chapeau,” at least a third of the composition is chapeau—and this particular hat is more of a mangled fruit basket, in which nothing is decipherable. The purple tongue sticking out of the top might belong to an iris, and the lobes of reddish orange could be an apple, but they likely aren’t. We’re looking through the eyes of someone who doesn’t want to actually see the hat. Matisse’s project was to wrench the appearance of things, particularly their colors, away from reality, and to let them entertain a new internal correspondence guided by his expressive whims.

Fine calls the hat “a mangled fruit basket.” Clark calls it “a crazy bird’s nest of pleasures and promises.” Both images wonderfully express the sensuousness that, for me, is the essence of this great painting. 

Postscript: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905)

Dennis Lim's Remarkable "How Should a Pixel Be?"

A still from Alexandre Koberidze's Dry Leaf (2025)

Every now and then a review appears that is so original, so audacious, so delightful, it blows my mind. Namwali Serpell’s “ ‘She’s Capital!’ ” is such a piece. And so is Patricia Lockwood’s “Malfunctioning Sex Robot.” And so is T. J. Clark’s recent “V is for Vagina.” Now comes Dennis Lim’s transfixing “How Should a Pixel Be?” in this month’s New York Review of Books. It’s a review of Alexandre Koberidze’s new film Dry Leaf. 

What is thrilling about Lim’s piece is that he defends what, for me, seems artistically indefensible, and that he does so brilliantly and persuasively. Dry Leaf, Lim tells us, was shot with the camera of a nearly twenty-year-old mobile phone, a Sony Ericsson W595. Lim says,

The W595 shoots video at fifteen frames per second—producing a choppier moving image than the customary twenty-four frames per second, deemed the minimum for perceived smoothness of motion—and a maximum resolution of 240 pixels, which is to say its images contain at least eighty times less visual information than the current 4K standard. 

Lim comments, “Even at the time it would have been inconceivable to use a camera like this, with its weak sensors and puny pixel counts, for any professional video production, let alone to shoot an entire feature film.” The result is a film consisting entirely of blurry images – an “unstable smear,” in Lim’s words. Who wants to watch that? Not me. I hate blurry images. I love sharp focus – the sharper the better. Lim is well aware of the issue. He quotes the scholar Martine Beugnet: “an unexpectedly blurry image draws attention to the workings of the camera; it risks undoing the illusion of reality.” Yes, exactly.

Dry Leaf is a road movie – “a quest narrative, in which a father travels the length and breadth of Georgia in search of his adult daughter, a sports photographer who has left home for reasons unknown.” This sounds like my kind of film. Why did Koberidze have to ruin it by using an outmoded camera that blurs everything? 

This is where Lim’s piece surprises. He loves Dry Leaf’s blur. He compares it to Impressionism:

Dry Leaf lingers at length on landscapes, on their flora and fauna, on the weather and light conditions that determine their legibility before the gaze of an easily overwhelmed camera. These soft, vague images are so distant from contemporary photographic realism that, for many, the reference that will first spring to mind is painting. Koberidze encourages this comparison with a few still lifes, directing our attention to, say, a plate of apples or a handful of freshly picked apricots. The landscapes at times evoke Impressionist and Post-impressionist vistas, the practically countable pixels suggesting the visible brushstrokes of impasto.

Okay, I can dig this. I love impasto. Lim continues,

Experienced as cinema, every frame of Dry Leaf enacts a drama of form. Figure and ground lose their distinctness. A smudge turns out to be a person, who seems to vanish before our eyes as they recede toward the horizon only to reappear moments later. Clouds take on serrated edges; power cables resemble dotted lines. The pixel, an unwanted video artifact, becomes a compositional element, a visible unit of information that periodically fills the screen with grids and gradients. Even apparently static shots are alive with contingency. Scenes in which nothing much happens are in fact trembling battles between darkness and light, as the camera struggles to adapt to its environment. The throbbing lag of the image, a result of digital compression, comes to seem like the very pulse of the movie, its electronic heartbeat. In its lack of nuance and tendency to overcorrect, the color range produces striking, often beautiful distortions: radioactive sunsets, a golden-hour glow. Paradoxically, the lo-fi aesthetic betrays a sensitivity to the atmospheric, or at least a compatibility with the gaseous and liquid states that Koberidze keeps returning to: the ever-present fog and mist of mountain terrain, the incessant flows of streams and waterfalls.

Lim makes me want to see this strange film. He calls Dry Leaf “a bet as well as an experiment”: “Koberidze’s wager is that these blurred images, to twenty-first-century eyes accustomed to the crisp edges of high definition, will be not just sufficient but replenishing.”

I never thought I’d see any value in a blurred image. Lim has persuaded me otherwise. 

T. J. Clark's Extraordinary "V is for Vagina"

Willem de Kooning, Suburb in Havana (1958)

I just want to spotlight an extraordinary art review in this month’s London Review of Books – T. J. Clark’s "V is for Vagina." It’s a consideration of Willem de Kooning’s 1958 Suburb in Havana. I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a more granular description of a painting, even by Clark, than this one. Clark analyzes it stroke by stroke. Here’s a sample:

Physical description first. I warn you I shall probably try your patience for the next page or so; but I think that the only way to de Kooning’s intention, which is where I want to end up, is by way of process – by trying to reconstruct the sequence of marks in the case, so as to arrive at an intuition of what the sequence may have been aiming for. I believe Suburb in Havana originally had an off-white ground, maybe with a bit of yellow already worked into it. The big blank area going up from the bottom left corner looks to me like a survival from this first stage. The paint hereabouts is thin enough in places for the canvas grain to show through. Yellow seems to have been the first colour put over the off-white ground – certainly that’s true of the yellow in the picture’s lower reaches. There are several streaks and dollops of blue paint on top of the yellow, which seemingly landed when the yellow was half dry. Obviously de Kooning did not proceed from yellow to blue without looking back. If you focus on the areas where the two colours meet, particularly the painting’s horizon line and the broad yellow scrawl just underneath it, you see straightaway that the blue and yellow were applied alternately – the yellow scrawl has pulled up some blue within it and the horizon line of yellow is transparent to the blue underneath. It looks like the sliver of yellow at the picture’s top right corner was added on top of the blue, though it is hard to say what is going on in this area with any certainty. Clearly, to return to firmer ground, the great vertical stroke of yellow to the left was put down when the blue was already there. You can see spatters of yellow falling across the blue field from the first thick clot of colour at the stroke’s top right. The yellow turns green, quite dramatically, in among the rust brown at the top left corner, and once you notice this, you begin to register how much ‘yellow plus blue equals green’ is happening locally elsewhere, all around the yellow vertical and across the transverse yellow scrawling. This is painting in the wet – it is meant to look liquid, and the paint detail tells you that the look is true to the facts.

Clark continues in this vein for several more paragraphs. His review is a tour de force of descriptive analysis. He concludes that Suburb in Havana intends its viewer to focus on the dramatic difference between wet paint and dry: “The yellow scrawl is meant to look liquid: liquidity is bound up with fluency and therefore speed. The dirty brown slash, by contrast, is meant to look as dry as they come – obdurately dry, like old faecal matter.” Yes, you read that last part correctly. Clark is comparing the brown slash to something you might see in a lavatory: “A vagina put up on a dirty yellow wall with something that looks like faeces.” This does not appear to be a favorable view. Yet, Clark, ever the foxy dialectician, also describes de Kooning’s picture as “beautiful, colourful, internally coherent.” It’s an astonishing review. Highly recommended. 

Jed Perl's "Impassioned Ferocity" (Part I)

Jed Perl, in his absorbing “Impassioned Ferocity” (The New York Review of Books, November 6, 2025), reviews three recent books of criticism: Andrea Long Chu’s Authority; Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess; and T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. 

Perl asserts that Chu, in her book, misunderstands the nature of a critic’s power. He quotes her as saying that “the critic has consistently been understood as embodying a key political figure: in the eighteenth century, an enlightened king; in the nineteenth, a free citizen; in the twentieth, a state bureaucrat.” In response, Perl says,

The problem, as I see it, is that critics, at least the ones who matter, aren’t anything like kings, ordinary citizens, or state bureaucrats. They operate at an angle to society. They’re closer to street fighters than to kings. They’re self-invented. They see things their own way. They make their own rules. They’re tough, willing to commit murder, at least metaphorically, as Randall Jarrell did in his takedowns of poets whose work infuriated him.

I think Perl is right. The critics I admire definitely see things their own way. They resist orthodox interpretation. They’re always probing, questioning, arguing. They don’t take things at face value. 

Perl argues brilliantly for the critic’s right to be deeply and totally subjective. He writes,

Criticism isn’t a search for truth but for a particular person’s truth. I’ve heard critics say they approach each new experience without preconceptions. But criticism involves deep, personal conceptions, what Greenberg referred to as “homemade esthetics,” the title he had in mind for a book he never finished. (It became the title of a posthumous essay collection.) Those homemade esthetics are only the beginning of what a critic needs. Formidable critics are engaged in a dynamic or dialectic, the experience of the moment approached not without preconceptions but with an open mind, and tested against some underlying belief or beliefs, which are aesthetic beliefs. Over time those beliefs may change or evolve. Criticism isn’t a search for an absolute, what some might regard as perfect taste. It’s an experiment in aesthetic experience. This is why we can be excited by critics with whom we have fundamental disagreements. We see how their minds work, and that helps us see how ours work.

I like Perl’s emphasis on “aesthetic beliefs” and “aesthetic experience.” To me, the best criticism is aesthetic criticism. Helen Vendler defined it as follows:

The aim of an aesthetic criticism is to describe the art work in such a way that it cannot be confused with any other art work (not an easy task), and to infer from its elements the aesthetic that might generate this unique configuration. [Introduction to The Music of What Happens, 1988]

That, to me, is the essence of criticism. It’s a formalist definition. It’s interested in the elements of a particular artwork’s style – in how and why it is what it is.   

The second book considered by Perl is Becca Rothfeld’s All Things Too Small: Essays in Praise of Excess. Perl says, 

What Rothfeld has that I find missing in many other writers of her generation is an abiding critical vision, some rock-solid belief that informs everything she does. 

According to Perl, Rothfeld’s “rock-solid belief” is that “artistic experience parallels, mirrors, extends, and magnifies our most visceral experiences.” Perl compares her to Kael. He says, 

Reading her sometimes reminds me of what it felt like, many years ago, to first encounter Pauline Kael’s work. The title of Kael’s earliest collection, I Lost It at the Movies (1965), was as brash as Rothfeld’s All Things Are Too Small. With both writers the bravado and slangy conversational tone are grounded in an aesthetic of amplitude, a view that art touches on life in multiple ways. Rothfeld would surely agree with Kael when she wrote of movies that they can “affect us on so many sensory levels that we become emotionally accessible, in spite of our thinking selves.”

I haven’t read enough of Rothfeld to say whether this is true or not. Her review of James Wood’s Serious Noticing disappointed. She described his writing as “sensuous,” “lush,” and “novelistic.” No. Wood is cutting. His sentences are like scalpels. He dissects texts and shows their inner workings. Rothfeld seriously misdescribes him.

The only other Rothwell piece I’ve read is her personal essay “All Good Sex Is Body Horror” (newyorker.com, February 17, 2024), in which she ingeniously connects David Cronenberg, Kafka, and sex. It’s a strange and intriguing piece. It contains at least one inspired sentence: “Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies.” But it also contains passages like this:

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

I’m not sure what Kael would make of that. She’d probably relish the reference to “Cronenberg’s fever dreams.” She’d probably laugh at the idea that hopping into bed with someone is like being “on the precipice of metamorphosis.” Then again, she might not. She might think of what she wrote in her superb “Tango” (The New Yorker, October 28, 1972):

He brings into this isolation chamber his sexual anger, his glorying in his prowess, and his need to debase her and himself. He demands total subservience to his sexual wishes; this enslavement is for him the sexual truth, the real thing, sex without phoniness. And she is so erotically sensitized by the rounds of lovemaking that she believes him. He goads her and tests her until when he asks if she’s ready to eat vomit as a proof of love, she is, and gratefully. He plays out the American male tough-guy sex role—insisting on his power in bed, because that is all the “truth” he knows.

That kind of sexual battle would be hard to shake off. It would be transformative all right, but not in a good way. It would be degrading and dehumanizing. Is that the risk Rothwell is referring to? Or is it just the risk of going through life without ever experiencing wild, weird Cronenbergian sex? I don’t know. I’m not going to worry about it.

The third book reviewed by Perl is T. J. Clark’s Those Passions: On Art and Politics. As Perl points out, Clark’s abiding belief is Marxism. Perl says,

While I entirely disagree with Clark that there is some inextricable link between art and politics, in some of the essays in the new collection, many written for the London Review of Books, he holds me because he allows his elegantly nuanced Marxism to be challenged by the immediacy of his responses. This Marxist is a hedonist. And a formalist. The result is some exhilarating reading.

I totally agree. It’s Clark’s hedonism – the deep, sensuous pleasure he takes in light, color, shape, and texture – that redeems him. I find his political writing too abstract. I relate to his “politics in a tragic key,” but terms like “relations of production” and “historical materialism” have always escaped my grasp. Unlike Clark, I don’t believe in class. “Nobody better, better than nobody” is my motto. His contempt for capitalism and “bourgeois society” strikes me as hypocritical. His life and work are made possible by that very system. His exceedingly beautiful books are a product of it. So is their availability to people like me out here in the sticks of Prince Edward Island. Thank you, Indigo. Thank you, Amazon.     

Perl says that the strongest essay in Clark’s book is “Art and the 1917 Revolution.” I don’t think so. My favorite piece is “Madame Matisse’s Hat,” a study of Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905). Clark writes,

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” That “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” is inspired! This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful.

For me, delight is a key ingredient of critical writing. Perl values belief. But I think delight is just as important. 

Postscript: This is the first part of a two-part post on Perl’s stimulating piece. Part II will take issue with Perl’s comment that Janet Malcolm lacked an “aesthetic position.”  

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!  

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #7

Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Land of Cockaigne (1567)

This is the seventh 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 splendid “Bruegel in Paradise,” included in his great 2018 collection Heaven on Earth. It’s a description of Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Land of Cockaigne (1567):

At bottom left, especially, grass gives way to earth. But again, whatever upset and instability the tilt of the land may bring on is more than counteracted – this is my answer to the idea of Cockaigne as the world in the negative – by the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.

There is no good way of repeating the relish in words. Pointing out and enumerating are what language is designed to do, whereas what is glorious in Cockaigne is just pointless endless proliferation. Look at the airholes in the cheese! Look at the excellent ironwork on the flail. Or the fine silver clamps on the Bible. How exquisite the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips. Look at the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue. Compare the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail. How beautiful the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds. Notice the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel – a typical Bruegel interest here in the character of a particular root system, plus a specific kind of spreading into the surrounding earth, and a set of outrider saplings.

Two of the cactus loaves are half sunk in the grass, like tombstones. The peasant has a thick mane of hair. The soldier’s lance is steel-tipped, glinting even in the shadow. The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!

I find this passage ravishing. Why? What makes it so? There’s poetry in it. Clark takes his cue from the picture: “the painting’s relish for things, details, textures, contours. All the contents of the world’s full stomach.” The key word here is “relish.” Clark, in describing Cockaigne, doubts whether he can convey Bruegel’s “relish for things, details, textures, contours.” He says, “There is no good way of repeating the relish in words.” But he tries anyway, and he magnificently succeeds, noting detail after vivid detail: “the airholes in the cheese”; “the excellent ironwork on the flail”; “the fine silver clamps on the Bible”; “the man of letters’ face – pink cheeks and nose, glinting eyes, delicate nostrils and lips”; “the flayed-flesh pink of his tunic and leggings, the latter like exposed tissue”; “the furred lightness of the soldier’s chainmail”; “the drawing of the young man’s shirt, especially its neckline and long liquid folds”; “the roots of the tree by the mountain of gruel”; “a set of outrider saplings”; “the cactus loaves ... half sunk in the grass, like tombstones”; the peasant’s “thick mane of hair”; the soldier’s steel-tipped lance, “glinting even in the shadow”; the egg in the foreground, “yolk spilling down the right side of its shell.”

Note the exclamation marks (“Look at the airholes in the cheese!” “The egg in the foreground has yolk spilling down the right side of its shell!”). Clark is excited. He relishes Bruegel’s “endless proliferation” of “things, details, textures, contours.” It’s double relish – Bruegel’s and Clark’s. 

My Cubist Summer

This month I’ve been happily immersed in two superb essays on Picasso’s Cubism – T. J. Clark’s “Cubism and Collectivity” (included in his 1999 collection Farewell to an Idea) and Leo Steinberg’s “The Intelligence of Picasso” (included in his posthumous 2022 collection Picasso). It’s fascinating to compare them. 

In “Cubism and Collectivity,” Clark considers some of Picasso’s most extreme works of Cubism, e.g., Man with a Pipe (1911), Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”) (1911-12), and The Architect’s Table (1912). To describe these strange, elusive paintings, Clark uses “grid”: “Look at the way the buttons in Man with a Pipe are rolled along various lines to apexes or points of intersection on the grid, like zeros in a three-dimensional sum....”; “The grid had been, and still was, essentially a compositional device....”; “The grid is never entirely part of the perceptions it totalizes....” “I should say that Picasso’s grids are very often, perhaps most often, stretched or filled to breaking point.” And this beautiful passage on the grid in “Ma Jolie”: 

It is filled with the luminous, the dappled and glistening, the chequered shade, the translucent and half-penetrable – indicators that geometry had somehow now been divulged by seeing. Lines are invaded by light. The grid shivers again with Cezanne’s perceptual uncertainties, not the Douanier’s confidence in the sign.

Clark changed my view of Picasso’s grids. He lit them up – “lines invaded by light.”

Steinberg wasn’t a fan of the grid. In his “The Philosophical Brothel” (also included in Picasso), he wrote,

New York painters and critics valued Cubism less as a body of work than as a modus operandi, a pictorial “strategy” that offered escape from the pitfalls and sinkholes of deep perspective. The so-called Cubist grid was an ideated flat-level armature that enabled a painter, any painter whatever, to traverse the expanse of a canvas without falling through. Rather than seeing Picasso’s Cubist creations as part of an artist’s personal inventory, continually feeding into the rest of the work, the supposed structure described by the term “Cubist grid” was depersonalized. [“The Philosophical Brothel”]

In “The Intelligence of Picasso,” Steinberg didn’t use “grid”; he used “facet,” “arris,” and “watershed.” For example:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris. Planes define themselves as prismatic facets. And not body planes only: in a back view, at bottom center, even the interval between the thighs joins in the faceting, as if solids and void deserved the same stepwise pacing from any one point to whatever lies next. Picasso here disavows all continuous surfacing – the kind you caress; he is plotting the incidence of watersheds in a faceted system. 

I confess that before I read Steinberg’s essay, I didn’t know what an arris is. The dictionary defines it as “a sharp edge formed by the meeting of two flat or curved surfaces.” Steinberg first used it in his description of the cheekline in Picasso’s Self-Portrait (1907):

In the 1907 Self-Portrait, the cheekline runs wild, lancing, impaling the ear. The line, black and rigid, flouts the ostensible anatomical program – cooperating neither with skin tone nor with the requisite continuities. It signifies a change of plane at the cheek from front to side on a receding slope – and that’s all it will do. With chin or eye socket it makes no connection; and that’s why it looks wrong. How shall we explain this wrongness? And explained it should be, if we believe in Picasso’s intelligence; because intelligence should be intelligible.

Steinberg explained it: 

So what about this cheekline that is clearly too long and too inorganic? Picasso has abstracted it from its bedding. In the given context, the line still tells as an arris, defining a change of planes – but without adhering to the planes it supposedly turns. Does this sound absurd? Can a ridge at the junction of planes, as in this early Picasso, exist apart from those planes? Think of the arris down the prow of a ship – can you imagine it without the planes it defines? Yet this is exactly what Picasso conceives. He wants the arris seen apart from its connection with body – as an idea: not a thing but a meaning. And by making it unanatomical, inorganic – black, rigid, and overlong – he dissociates that line from its physical cause, from the bulk it articulates, almost as an abstracted sign.

Steinberg called that cheekline “the most fertile single line drawn in the twentieth century.” He tracked Picasso’s subsequent use of it. He saw it as the source of Cubism:

From this moment forward, the arris or watershed in Picasso’s work gets off an amazing career: during the following year, 1908, he works every rounding surface to a sharp ridge. Every swell becomes discontinuous, breaking against an arris.

Clark doesn’t see it this way. He doesn’t see Cubism as a continuous line of development. He says, “I believe we can best understand the painting Picasso did in 1911 and 1912 if we see it as not issuing from the process of inquiry of the previous three years.” Where Steinberg saw a continuum, Clark sees a break. The break comes in 1911, in Céret: 

What the pictures from Céret posit is a hypothetically complete and alternative system of representation, which they have found and instantiate. Nothing could be more different from the manner and matter of the paintings done in the years before.

In Céret, Clark argues, Picasso “changed course. He made his way back to the world of phenomena.” He looks at the work Picasso did the previous summer, in Cadaqués; he sees a significant contrast. The Cadaqués paintings “speak a uniquely spare, impalpable, diagrammatic language: they are, and have always recognized to be, Cubism near freezing point.”

Interestingly, Steinberg, in his piece, looked closely at a Picasso painted in Cadaqués – Harbor at Cadaqués (1910) – and found it “lovely.” He wrote,

The boat, half reclaimed by its atmospheric surround, dissolves into quivering accents, tokens of planar change accentuated by light. The component parts of the boat are still recognizable: stem and stern; the hint of a mast; the ribbing of its concave; the phantom anchor at lower right; while the browns of the boat’s wooden fabric melt in blueing air.

So much for “Cubism near freezing point.” 

Clark’s governing aesthetic is strangeness. His taste is for “Cubism’s deep, wild, irredeemable obscurity.” The Cubism that appeals to him are the dense, complex grids of Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. Clark revels in their strangeness. I do, too. But I have a question. Do they describe anything? Clark says yes:

The fragments of planes, lines, lighting, and spacing that make up the texture of “Ma Jolie” may or may not have forfeited “their former descriptive functions” ... but they clearly still carry their former descriptive appearance. They are full of the kinds of particularity, density, and repleteness that usually go with visual matching. They still look to be describing.

Steinberg said yes, too, but less emphatically: “Only minimally do the objects evoked serve as analogues to exclusively visual data.” But when he said this, he wasn’t looking at extreme Cubist paintings like Man with a Pipe, Woman with a Zither (“Ma Jolie”), The Architect’s Table. He was looking at spare works of diagram and collage – Fruit Bowl, Bottle, and Bread Loaf on a Table (1912), Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table (1912), and Bottle, Glass, and Violin (1912) – that appear to be cousins of the 1910 Cadaqués paintings. Of Bottle, Wineglass, and Newspaper on a Table, he said, 

I love the airy brightness of it, every object conceived in thought, without clotting embodiment. If some find these products of Picasso’s nightlife unappealing, I hope, at least, they’ll respect the intelligence of their maker. My own pleasure in them derives partly from their elegant clarity, their cool; and in part from their wisdom.

That’s a perfect note to end on. These two great essays expanded my appreciation of Picasso’s Cubism immensely. Highly recommended.

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso's Woman with a Zither ("Ma Jolie") (1911-12). 

Pablo Picasso, Harbor at Cadaqués (1910)

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #6

This is the sixth 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 superb “The Chill of Disillusion” (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012). It’s an excerpt from Clark’s brilliant comparative analysis of the two versions of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks – the Paris version (1483-1486) and the London version (1495-1508):

Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger. There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again. It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion. No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour. Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt. It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding.

The first sentence is quintessential Clark, urging us (and himself) to “look again”: “Look again at the angel in Paris with the pointing finger.” 

The second sentence tells us why we should look again: “There had never been a figure like it before in painting, and there never would be again.” 

The third sentence is extraordinary – a ravishing blend of sensuous description and perceptual analysis: 

It is not just the foot on the grass and the pointing finger that are uncanny: it is the pose as a whole, spreading out laterally, half turning towards us, but meeting our eyes from an utter remoteness; and the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery; and the astonishing – unthinkable – explosion of rich red, tying the figure to a world of flesh and blood but spreading and unfolding far beyond (it feels like) the mere frame of the illusion.

That “the roll of the green sleeve and the long pale arm inside its diaphanous puff of drapery” is inspired! Drapery is one of Clark’s fondest focal points.

The fourth and fifth sentences pivot to the London version and begin the comparison: “No wonder all this – this overflowing wish-fulfilment – had to be corrected in 1508. The London angel’s drapery is still elusive, but at least now it adheres to a possible anatomy: it does not just seem to occur as the brush tries out a new colour.” 

The sixth, seventh, and eighth sentences continue the comparison: “Colour drains away. The angel’s shoulders come out of their carapace. The figure is clear and coherent (comparatively) but also (comparatively) unfelt.” 

The ninth and final sentence yields a vivid image: “It is as if the invention had been put back inside a box – robbed of its first fairytale unfolding.” Note the repetition of “unfolding.” Note the beautiful alliterative pattern: “unfolding far beyond,” “overflowing wish-fulfilment,” “unfelt,” “first fairytale unfolding.” The passage enacts the unfolding it describes and then ingeniously boxes it all up. 

Credit: The above illustration is the Paris version of Leonardo da Vinci’s Virgin of the Rocks (1483-1486).  

June 30, 2025 Issue

Notes on this week’s issue:

1. Vince Aletti, in his mini-review of “Constellation,” a Diane Arbus exhibition at the Park Avenue Armory, describes Arbus’s work as “tough, provocative, and brilliantly dark.” I agree. He also says that Arbus “isn’t easy to love.” This is also true. Aletti’s note reminded me of Susan Sontag’s great essay on Arbus – “Freak Show” [The New York Review of Books, November 15, 1973; included in her brilliant On Photography (1977) under the title “America, Seen Through Photographs, Darkly”]. It contains one of my favorite Sontag sentences: “Hobbesian man roams the streets, quite visible, with glitter in his hair.”

2. Hilton Als’ “Goings On” review of Gagosian Gallery’s “Willem de Kooning: Endless Painting” is illustrated with a reproduction of de Kooning’s “Suburb in Havana” (1958). It’s one of my favorite de Koonings. I first saw it in a piece by T. J. Clark called “Frank Auerbach’s London” (London Review of Books, September 10, 2015). Clark writes, 

If I’d been able to glimpse a de Kooning landscape from ten years earlier – say, Suburb in Havana from 1958 – lurking under Autumn Morning, I might have been a little less at sea. But the problem would only have shifted ground. I would still have had to sort out why and how de Kooning’s elegant, lavatorial graffiti – his Cuban-blue depth, the lavish decisiveness of his foreground ‘V’ – were turned in the Auerbach into a kind of waterlogged storm-streaked slipperiness. 

"Elegant lavatorial graffiti"? Ouch. Clark has thrown a barb. Is he right? 

3. A shout-out to photographer Heami Lee for her delectable pizza shot in Helen Rosner’s “Tables for Two: Cactus Wren.”

4. And let’s give a huzzah for Alena Skarina’s wonderful, eye-catching illustration for Elizabeth Kolbert’s disconcerting “Seeds of Doubt.”

 

Sasha Frere-Jones on T. J. Clark

I’ve just finished reading Sasha Frere-Jones’ Bookforum review of T. J. Clark’s new essay collection Those Passions: On Art and Politics. For several weeks now, I’ve been considering buying this book, but the “politics” part of the title puts me off. I love Clark’s writings on painting. But I’m allergic to his Marxist politics, particularly his obsession with class. The tagline of Frere-Jones’ piece – “An art historian locates the political in paint” – seemed a red flag to me. And yes, according to his review, Those Passions does contain a lot of politics. He says, “Clark’s latest collection of essays, Those Passions, continues a project that stretches (at least) back to 1999’s Farewell to an Idea, slowly x-raying the paint to find the fingerprint of capital.” But he also says this: “In “Sex and Politics According to Delacroix,” Clark sees a world in the vortical bodies in Delacroix’s 1855 painting The Lion Hunt.” Wait a minute! Could this be the same piece that appeared in the October 10, 2019 London Review, the one called “A Horse’s Impossible Head”? I believe it is. It’s one of my all-time favorite Clark essays. Its political content is minimal; its ekphrasis is extensive and ravishing. Later in his review, Frere-Jones refers to another Clark essay in the new collection – “Madame Matisse’s Hat.” That’s another one of my favorites. It appeared in the August 14, 2008 London Review. That clinched it. These two essays alone are worth the price of the new book. I’m buying it.

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 Ravishing Style #5

This is the fifth 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 superb “Madame Matisse’s Hat” (London Review of Books, August 14, 2008). It’s a description of Henri Matisse’s Woman with a Hat (1905):

The puzzle is the pose, and the nature of the woman’s costume. In a sense we are back to the jeering fellow-painters and their demand for literal truth. What sort of dress is Parayre wearing? What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder? How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it? Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper? How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms? It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves. And the glove in the centre – close to us, apparently – is resting on a green vertical, capped with a curlicue of purple. Sometimes in the literature she is said to be sitting with her hand resting on the arm of a chair. I wonder. I see no other sign of chair-ness hereabouts, except maybe the blunt diagonal of blood red propping up Parayre’s elbow. She could as well be holding a metal-tipped cane, or a parasol. What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak? Is it a handkerchief? If it is, the material appears to be sticking to the glove as opposed to being held by the hand inside it. Or is it a great limp flower? But never has a shape been less like any specific botanical specimen. Presumably the strip of yellow, orange and red that crosses the body towards the bottom is meant as a belt. In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

This is Clark musing out loud. He lets us in on his thoughts as his omnivorous eyes scan the painting, absorbing its details. The passage exemplifies a key aspect of his approach – his use of questions. He proceeds interrogatively – nine questions in this one paragraph alone:

What sort of dress is Parayre wearing?

What are the contours of her breasts and shoulder?

How do we interpret the short line of white that puts an end to the sweep of colour on the right-hand side, and the halo of indigo just beyond it?

Are we looking at a boundary line between flesh and dress material here – a truly spectacular décolletage – or between one kind of dress material and another; between a flower-patterned lace or taffeta coming down from Parayre’s throat and the start of her dress proper?

How much flesh is visible – at Parayre’s neck, at her breast, on her arms?

It looks, does it not, as if she is wearing long green and pink gloves.

What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?

Or is it a great limp flower?

In that case, are we to read the analogous crossbar of orange at the neck not as a brilliant transposition of flesh-tone (which the overall mode of the painting might suggest) but a necklet whose colours roughly match the belt – the kind of accessory that often crops up in fashion plates from the time?

Clark is a connoisseur of color. He describes it exquisitely: “halo of indigo,” “curlicue of purple,” “aureole of pink.” The seventh question is my favorite: “What do we make of the astonishing aureole of pink colliding with yellow, put in around the glove’s dark beak?” This is quintessential Clark – surprising, original, delightful. 

Credit: The above illustration is Henri Matisse's Woman with a Hat (1905).

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #4

This is the fourth 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 “A Horse’s Impossible Head: Disunity in Delacroix” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019). It’s a description of 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.

Zero in on the word “carnality” (“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”). Clark is a carnal writer. He apprehends through his senses. He’s a thinker, too. But his descriptions are intensely sensuous: “The blood in the horse’s nose is beautiful and disgusting, bubbling out of the nostril with a thick viscosity”; “the lion’s thick fur, the horse’s hide, the soft pillow of warmer gold just visible down in the shadows.” He devours color: “the wild red of the horseman’s turban”; “the cold gold of the horseman’s tunic ... with its exquisite green filigree”; “the yellows and pinks all round, still fighting for breath.” The passage enacts the painting it describes; it’s a sensation delivery system. 

Credit: The above illustration is Eugène Delacroix’s Lion Hunt (1855). 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #3

This is the third 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 superb Picasso and Truth (2013). It’s a description of 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 on to 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 failing. 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 eternity. The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.

I’ve chosen this passage to make a point. The word “imagination” in the first line is key. Clark is an imaginative responder to painting. He feels and thinks imaginatively. I relish his definition of “touch” – “the imagination of contact and softness and curvature.” Nude on Black Armchair is not a painting that invites your imagination to touch it, he says. Touch is “consumed by something else” – “a higher, shallower, in the end more abstract visuality, which will never be anyone’s property.” He sees the nude’s hand holding the white flower. He describes the flower as “clawlike.” This is imaginative description. Not everyone would see it like that. But Clark does. He’s trying to imagine his way into Picasso’s imagination. He calls the “clawlike white flower” an “emblem” of the nude’s sexual unavailability. She will “never be anyone’s property.” Fingers and petals appear “predatory.” Her body’s pale mauve is “otherworldly,” “unlocatable on the spectrum of flesh tone.” “The blue wall to the left is icy cold.” The woman’s blonde hair is “sucked violently into a vortex next to her breast.” Wow! Clark’s imagination is on a heater. He’s not done. “Blacks encase her as if for eternity.” And then this – the clinching line, the most inspired of all – “The rubber plant tries to escape through the window.” That line makes me smile every time I read it. It’s true, too. Look at the rubber plant. Clark says it’s a rubber plant. I believe him. Look at it. It does appear to be escaping through the window – escaping from the sleeping naked monster. It’s a strange interpretation of a strange painting. I love it. 

Credit: The above illustration is Pablo Picasso’s Nude on Black Armchair (1932).   

Writing Red

Jackson Arn, in his wonderful “Royal Flush” (The New Yorker, February 17 & 24, 2025), says, “Look at Warhol’s Red Lenin or STIK’s Liberty (Red) and feel the wet raspberry splatter you.” I love that line. Some of my favorite art descriptions involve red. For example:

In Quappi’s bone-white face, her red lips assume a sweetly wry expression while visually exploding like a grenade. – Peter Schjeldahl, “The French Disconnection” (The New Yorker, March 8, 1999)

In the flesh, a single beautifully judged swipe of washed-out Indian Red, tracing the collar of the child’s T-shirt, jumpstarts the picture into succulent immediacy. – Julian Bell, “At the Whitechapel: Wilhelm Sasnal" (London Review of Books, January 5, 2012)

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. – T. J. Clark, “A Horse’s Impossible Head” (London Review of Books, October 10, 2019)

“Red is the first color, the strongest color, the one that stands for color itself,” Arn says. He’s right. He claims some people are scared of it. He’s probably right about that, too. I’m not one of them. I love red. There’s a strange red painting by N. H. Pritchard called Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69. Do you remember it? The New Yorker used it to illustrate one of Peter Schjeldahl’s last pieces – “All Together Now” (April 11, 2022). Schjeldahl said of it, “Red Abstract / fragment is a lyrical verse text typewritten on a brushy red ground and scribbled with restive cross-outs, revisions, and notes. Its meanings dance at the edge of comprehension, but with infectious improvisatory rhythms.”

Red is a rich, fascinating subject. Arn explores it beautifully. 

Credit: The above illustration is N. H. Pritchard's Red Abstract / fragment (1968-69).