The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing

by T.J. Clark

Book Overview

A renowned art historian confronts the specific powers of painting, and the hold of the visual image on the viewer's imagination

Why do we find ourselves returning to certain pictures time and again? What is it we are looking for? How does our understanding of an image change over time? In his latest book T. J. Clark addresses these questions--and many more--in ways that steer art writing into new territory.

In early 2000 two...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300137583
• ISBN13: 9780300137583
• Release Date: April 2008
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 1.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.8" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Dwelling Beautifully on "Affliction"

Reviewed as a radical departure in art writing, it is a departure only from the postmodern mordancy. Although a good book, with some insights about the Poussin's Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, I became bored with Clark's diary of his somewhat predictable relationships with the paintings. His views are motivated by seeing "A socialism, if that's what we shall persist in calling it, that starts from misfortune, pain, and death." p 240 His response to these paintings and his own emotions dwells on "Affliction, misfortune, distress-of course Landscape with a Snake matters preeminently, and has held my attention so long, because it is my example of a coming to terms with the horror of nature that posits a "Huerte, huerte" ["Today, today" referring to Bach's Actus Tragicus] here in the horror, now in the moment of revulsion." The horrors, to me, are smallish in the whole of Poussin's landscapes, somewhat like Breughel's Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. I am not moved by Clark's socio-philosophy, but his writing is fluid and personal to some extent.

The Publisher Needs Glasses

A marvelous book -- evocative, erudite, beautifully written. For me, the stamp of distinction in writing appears when I find myself engaged in a conversation with the author, when the written word becomes a voice inviting some kind of verbal response, when the voice appears with a gentle tap on the shoulder at breakfast or during a boring meeting and says "Hey, have you given any thought to what I was trying to pull off about the use of space in Poussin's paintings?" and I say "Why yes I have ...." Just about every page of this book achieves that distinction, UNTIL I CAME TO THE PHANTOM PAGE 103. Oh, yes, page 103. Nothing Professor Clark did. The publisher, on the other hand, needs to be made aware that pages 103-118 are missing and pages 119-134 were inserted twice. This means that anyone who buys this book online runs the risk of receiving a poor copy. Of course, the missing pages most likely can be had from the publisher, but even so the interruption is pretty annoying. I wouldn't mind so much if the writing was bad or banal (or both), but Professor Clark's book has legs and is deserving of better care from the publisher. On the other hand, one can have a surrealistic good time trying to make sense out of the sentence created by the missing pages: "Various corrections, then, as I check my intuitions against the facts; but the point about the screen of trees in Snake can just about stand -- at worms always lurking in buds) into something else."