If These Apples Should Fall

In a TLS review of Cezanne by Achim Borchardt-Hume et al and T.J. Clark’s If These Apples Should Fall, attendant upon the Tate Modern show, Gabriel Josipovici remarks: “For the danger each time is that by communicating the incommunicable, you lose the sense of its incommunicability.” A still life is known as nature morte. But reading Josipovici’s essay one is reminded Cezanne’s famous apples are forbidden fruit. In describing Cezanne, Jossipovici invokes "the egotistical sublime,"  "the phrase Keats used of Wordsworth."  The essay is full of locutions that add to the mystery and in some way is an ambitious undertaking in and of itself recalling seminal works like Roger Fry's Cezanne A Study of His Development (1927). “It is not what the artist wants but what the work wants that in the end drives it to its conclusion,” comments Josipovici. And here is a quote from Merleau-Ponty’s “Le doute de Cezanne” which Josipovici draws upon in examining the phenomenological effect of Cezanne’s revolutionary work, “Nature itself is denuded of those attributes that prepare her for animistic communion: the landscape without wind, the water of Lake Annecy without movement, the objects frozen hesitant as though at the origin of the universe.”

read "Inventing Abstraction at MoMA" by Francis Levy, HuffPost

and watch the trailer for Erotomania