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. 

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).  

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).   

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #2

This is the second 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 marvellous “Masters and Fools: Velázquez’s Distance” (London Review of Books, September 23, 2021). It’s a description of Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640):

The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds? Is the dark material on top of the white another strip of leather? But what is the shape that seems to be holding it down? A weight of some sort? An opened shackle? One historian thought it a pasteboard crown. Did he mean as used in some court buffoonery? I don’t understand the trace of bright red at Aesop’s left ear, and the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage. Is it a mark of slave ownership?

Here we see many of the same elements contained in the Bosch passage that we looked at previously: the many questions (seven of them); the attention to color, especially red (“visceral trace of pale red,” “trace of bright red”); the attention to detail (“the clamp of dark metal seemingly attached to the ear’s cartilage”). The new ingredient here – the main reason I chose this passage (aside from its beauty, which is exquisite) – is Clark’s attention to the folds of Aesop’s sash: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Clark is a connoisseur of folds. Three examples: 

Let me start from a typical transfixing Leonardo detail, the unfolded yellow lining of the Virgin’s cloak. In the Paris picture (whatever the changes brought on by time) there was a connection, I am sure, between the yellow fold and the light in the sky. The lining, spellbinding as it is – separate from and superior to its being a condition of some stuff in the sun – is a dream condensation of the yellows of late afternoon. In Paris the lining still has softness: it is conceivable as folded, touched by human fingers. The yellow emerges, at first quite gradually, from under the stretched canopy of blue. It is the inside of a garment spilling out. We may see it as a concentration of the landscape light, but also as a way of bringing that far light closer – optically, seemingly accidentally – in a manner that viewers can accept as actually happening, here among the rocks. [“The Chill of Disillusion”]

Most great painters use folds and intersections of forms, especially of drapery, for purposes of exposition, laying out the world before us, turning the contours and edges of things slowly through space, having light modulate across a shifting but comprehensible surface. Rubens is a good example. Delacroix very often does the opposite. He folds and refolds things, filling every inch with colour, until a shape becomes a scintillation. (In Lion Hunt, the glimpse of crumpled green cloak beneath the lion’s midriff is a good example of such horror vacui. Or the billow of black, red and orange in the painting’s bottom left corner.) ["A Horse’s Impossible Head”]

Let’s turn aside from the questions of tipping and tilting in Cézanne for the moment and look at the question of folds. It is just as fundamental. The way man-made material, or even the continuous surfaces of the natural world – a screen of foliage, for instance, or the surface of the sea – the way such surfaces are folded and crinkled in order to catch the light: this is painting’s life blood. [“Cézanne’s Material,” included in Clark's great If These Apples Should Fall, 2022]

Clark’s sentence is worth quoting again: “The pucker and ripple of the grey and white fabric, with its visceral trace of pale red (a strange rhyming of the folds here with those on Aesop’s chest) – what are they, these folds?” Note the structure. We saw it in the Bosch passage, too: “The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do?” Description, dash, question – a quintessential Clarkian combo. I love it.

Credit: The above illustration is Diego Velázquez’s Aesop (1640). 

T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style #1

This is the first 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 wonderful “Aboutness: Bosch in Paradise” (London Review of Books, April 1, 2021). It’s a description of Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1505-15):

Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions. The pink, grey and white of the young man’s rags, dazzling as they are, don’t seem to be deployed just to dazzle. I think they’re meant to float the figure into a realm of fragility, vulnerability, perhaps even pathos – anyway, somewhere different from the idiocy below. The jester’s smallness is calculated: it moves him away from the group. The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest? Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them. Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree. The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching. 

This gorgeous passage contains at least five key elements of Clark’s style:

1. The “Look at” in the first sentence is classic Clark: “Look at the jester on the branch in the Louvre Ship of Fools: he is one of Bosch’s prime inventions.” That’s a great sentence! Reading it, my eyes focus. I’m ready to see what Clark is going to show me. And every time, he shows me something new, something I wouldn’t notice on my own. His “look at” is a cue: sharpen your focus, get ready, here comes something you haven’t seen or thought of before. Here comes a revelation!

2. Clark relishes details: “The wandering lines of white on his costume, delicate even by Bosch’s standards, and dramatized by little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces – what do they do? What are they meant to suggest?” I love that sentence. It actually combines two of Clark’s signature moves – description of detail and quest for meaning. 

3. Clark is always asking questions. It’s one of his favorite ways of advancing his examination. In the Bosch passage, above, he poses two questions: what do the “wandering lines of white” and the “little dots and stitches applied to the belt, cap, guy rope and trailing flounces” on the jester’s costume do? And what are they meant to suggest? He posits a couple of interesting answers: “Maybe that the costume is threadbare. Maybe that it’s flimsy and transparent. Jesters are beggars, after all. Burghers are not amused by them.”

4. Clark is a superb noticer and interpreter of color. In the Bosch passage, the grey of the jester’s costume catches his attention. He writes, “Somehow the nature of the grey material draws the young man closer to the natural world (further from the nudities in the foreground). He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree.” 

He fits into the frame of leaves; he grows out of the grey tree – how fine that is!

5. Clark’s descriptions move exquisitely toward perception. At the end of the Bosch passage, he’s still looking closely at the jester. He concludes, “The dialogue between his profile and the face on the wand is infinitely touching.” It’s an inspired observation – beautiful, luminous, epiphanic. Who else would think of it? No one. Clark is a genius.

Credit: The above illustration is Hieronymus Bosch’s Ship of Fools (c. 1505-15). 

On the Horizon: T. J. Clark's Ravishing Style

I want to consider T. J. Clark’s style. It’s one of the most distinctive, delectable styles I’ve ever read. What makes it so? What are its constituent elements? How does it work? Why do I love it? Each month over the next twelve months, I’ll pick a favorite passage from Clark’s work and attempt to analyze it. A new series then – “T. J. Clark’s Ravishing Style” – starting January 22, 2025.