Nowadays, I grant that only philistines call Cezanne inept or incompetent. His apotheosis, along with the omnipresence of self-taught painters and consciously ‘bad art’ makes it difficult to understand this claim. Compared to Francis Bacon or Peter Saul, I grant, Cezanne is a model painter. But that present critical perspective in large part is a major cultural change, inspired in part by massive admiration for him. Many complex theories have been developed (by Roger Fry, Erle Loran, Meyer Schapiro, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Richard Shiff) to explain why Cezanne’s paintings may look inept, but in fact are authentically expressive. And so it takes some historical perspective to understand their original strangeness. When some time ago the Musée d’Orsay was rehung to present sympathetically the Salon painters, that display was generally found uninspiring. Who, apart from a graduate student doing a doctoral thesis, responds to Thomas Couture? Cezanne’s status has become secure. On both days when I visited, this exhibition was crowded. What does this present almost universal admiration for Cezanne reveal, about our culture? Clark has a very well developed answer to this question. “We have a sense of ourselves as implicated in a world – reaching out to it, orienting ourselves to it, having it come (or not come) to where we are” (p. 110). That Clark’s Cézanne is a phenomenologist is unsurprising, for Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s famous essay “Cézanne’s doubt” popularized that claim. What, however, is more surprising is that Clark finds political implications in that role. “Cézanne’s unique way of being (pictorially) in the world” (pp. 147-8) ultimately revealed that “modernity (involves) loss of world” (p. 62).

In making these claims Clark is a ‘formalist.’ By that often controversial word, I allude to what’s been called in philosophy the synthesis of the manifold in perception. That is, just as philosophers discuss how we organize experience from sense impressions, so Clark’s interested in how the objects in Cezanne ’s pictures are put together, and not primarily in the artist’s highly personal choice of subjects. Edouard Manet’s still life subjects include oysters, plums, and salmon. No such luxury goods for Cezanne. And so it’s reasonable to ask why he sticks to his humble apples. Clark does have an extended discussion relating the fabrics in the still lives to Marx’s account of commodification. In the nineteenth century, Clark argues, human relationships with others were mediated by objects, in a way that was fictive. (This was fetishism.) But his discussion of alienation in industrial capitalism, which is a very familiar topic, doesn’t tell us much about Cézanne’s chosen subjects. What’s authentic about Cezanne, if I understand Clark’s account, was that he was the artist who best depicted this capitalist worldview. Cezanne’s paintings provide such a good image of nineteenth-century capitalism precisely because they do not depict factories, workers or the actual products of industrial production. For Clark, it’s the form of Cezanne’s paintings, and not their content, that demands a materialistic formalist analysis. How these paintings are put together has, he claims, political implications.

There is nothing wrong with formalism—not for me. When, however, Clark writes, “the word ‘Bloomsbury’ is my least favorite in the language” (p. 117), then you can sense his ambivalence about this analysis, for he does repeatedly argue at length and great sympathy with Roger Fry. And when he goes on to treat Cezanne as an aesthetic painter, then you sense his admirable willingness to be challenged and enchanted by these artworks that he loves. He doesn’t name ‘Heidegger’ when he says “The picture is the world we are in” (p. 223), but that’s one source, I suspect, of his account. Clark is concerned to explain how Cezanne’s landscapes are composed, without discussing the ownership of these sites. But since English leftist historians have discussed the ownership of the landscapes of Thomas Gainsborough and John Constable, might it not be instructive to ask who possessed and who worked these French lands? Many Marxists, including Clark himself, are fascinated by the urban subjects of the Impressionists. And it’s natural to ask, as he doesn’t, why Cezanne generally avoided showing city scenes. Paris Rooftops (1882), one exception, devotes a large part of the painting to depicting the banal rhythms of the rooftop, a subject worth of Sean Scully. But generally Cezanne shows very little interest in the modern city, or in industrialization. Clark-the-formalist doesn’t deal with that concern.

The account of present day politics in Afflicted Powers. Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, a book that was co-authored by Clark, also is in one way a formal account. This study of the politics of Islamic  struggles with the West, focused almost entirely on political forms of struggle, says almost nothing about specifically religious issues. In my judgment, that is an obviously strange omission. In the seventeenth-century, conflicts between the Ottomans and Europe were framed in religious terms. And so surely something of that tradition remains important, even if nowadays the European nations are essentially secular. Clark’s working assumption in both books, his account of Cezanne and Afflicted Powers, not really presented, much less defended in so many words, is that political concerns animate both Cezanne’s art and this thinking about 9/11.  Hence his critical claim:

Personal objects, including mass-produced objects, will necessarily go on being one main instrumentation of meaning and desiring in any human society we care to imagine. But they cannot and do not work the magic they are presently called on to perform (p. 179).

It would be worthwhile relating that claim made, as made in Afflicted Powers, to discussion of Cezanne’s still lives, for the unity of Clark’s thinking is important.