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The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing
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 extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.
In early 2000 two extraordinary paintings by Poussin hung in the Getty Museum in a single room, Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. Clark found himself returning to the gallery to look at these paintings morning after morning, and almost involuntarily he began to record his shifting responses in a notebook. The result is a riveting analysis of the two landscapes and their different views of life and death, but more, a chronicle of an investigation into the very nature of visual complexity. Clark’s meditations—sometimes directly personal, sometimes speaking to the wider politics of our present image-world—track the experience of viewing art through all its real-life twists and turns.
252 pages, Hardcover
First published June 23, 2006
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About the author
T.J. Clark
35 books63 followersTimothy James Clark often known as T.J. Clark, is an art historian and writer, born in 1943 in Bristol, England.
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
Clark attended Bristol Grammar School. He completed his undergraduate studies at St. John's College, Cambridge University, he obtained a first-class honours degree in 1964. He received his Ph.D. in art history from the Courtauld Institute of Art, University of London in 1973. He lectured at the University of Essex 1967-1969 and then at Camberwell College of Arts as a senior lecturer, 1970-1974. During this time he was also a member of the British Section of the Situationist International, from which he was expelled along with the other members of the English section. He was also involved in the group King Mob.
In 1973 he published two books based on his Ph.D. dissertation: The Absolute Bourgeois: Artists and Politics in France, 1848-1851 and Image of the People: Gustave Courbet and the Second French Republic, 1848-1851. Clark returned to Britain from his position at the University of California, Los Angeles and Leeds University to be chair of the Fine Art Department in 1976. In 1980 Clark joined the Department of Fine Arts at Harvard University. Chief among his Harvard detractors was the Renaissance art historian Sydney Freedberg, with whom he had a public feud.
In 1988 he joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley where he held the George C. and Helen N. Pardee Chair as Professor of Modern Art until his retirement in 2010.
In 1991 Clark was awarded the College Art Association’s Distinguished Teaching of Art History Award. Notable students include Brigid Doherty, Hollis Clayson, Thomas E. Crow, Serge Guilbaut, Margaret Werth, Nancy Locke, Christina Kiaer, Michael Kimmelman, Michael Leja, John O'Brian, Bridget Alsdorf, Matthew Jackson, Joshua Shannon, and Jonathan Weinberg.
In the early 1980s, he wrote an essay, "Clement Greenberg's Theory of Art," critical of prevailing Modernist theory, which prompted a notable and pointed exchange with Michael Fried. This exchange defined the debate between Modernist theory and the social history of art. Since that time, a mutually respectful and productive exchange of ideas between Clark and Fried has developed.
Clark's works have provided a new form of art history that take a new direction from traditional preoccupations with style and iconography. His books regard modern paintings as striving to articulate the social and political conditions of modern life.
Clark received an honorary degree from the Courtauld Institute of Art in 2006. He is a member of Retort, a Bay Area-based collective of radical intellectuals, with whom he authored the book Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, published by Verso Books.[1]
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December 4, 2013
I’ve recently finished a book about how to look at great works of art (The Intimate Philosophy of Art). A large part of the point of that book is to give people some tools to use when they are confronted with a piece of art they know is ‘great’, but that when they look at it doesn’t exactly ‘speak’ to them. The advice given is to basically do what your high school English teacher would have suggested when reading poetry. That is, try to figure out why each word is there, think of the other words that might have been used instead, think of the images that come to mind as you read and even think of the things in your own life that are brought to mind too and why those have been stirred and not other things. Basically, if you want to see how or why a great work of art might move you, you have to bring your entire self to that work of art. Not just the bit of yourself you might think of as your aesthetic appreciation faculty or even just your rational self, but your emotions and intuitions and, well, like I said, all of you. Understanding art is an immersion. Like the difference between looking and seeing - it isn't only done with the eyes.
Now, when I went to the UK earlier in the year I spent lots of time in art galleries. And there are sort of two experiences to be had in art galleries. One is the experience you have in amongst the standard collection areas. You can stroll, you can stop, you can listen to someone who always seems to have something interesting to say – there are always so many teachers with groups of students and gallery tour guides walking about and chatting to herds of followers and I really like the overheard things I get to hear while I'm just wandering about. (oh, one of which seems to almost invariably be a discussion of negative space as if it was the perfect secret to art and artistic endeavour.
The other experience to be had, and quite a different one too, is the blockbuster exhibition. These really are something else entirely. There is obviously a quasi-religious feeling to be had at those things. This is ART you are looking at here and you have to appreciate how special this occasion is. But, in a lot of ways, these exhibitions are more like people filing past a coffin. There is only really time to pay respects to the artwork, certainly not time to really see it. And then there are so many of the frigging things at those exhibitions. Painting after painting after painting. You file past and you can feel a headache coming on. You might read a bit of the text beside some of the paintings, try to find the bear that’s meant to be hidden in the trees or see how unnatural the ground looks beside the snow and birch trees and rather than looking at art, what it feels much more like playing Where’s Wally. Or reading one of those books called something like ‘how to be ridiculously well read in one evening’.
This isn’t really about looking at works of art, but rather doing something so as to be able to say you’ve been in the same room as them at one stage. "Oh yes, I've seen Monet's Haystacks - very yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Van Gogh's".
So, how should you look at a work of art, and how long is long enough? My guess is that most of us spend less than a minute looking, but imagine we have spent hours. It is a strange paradox.
This book is about two paintings. This one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil... and this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil... and I have to say that the second image here looks like it has been seriously lightened so you can clearly see the snake and buggered up in the process.
On my various trips around galleries I would have probably been unlikely to have stopped for ages in front of either of these two paintings - actually, this is proof of serious gaps in my ability to appreciate art - holes in my education, if you like. Yep, there’s the dead guy and there's the snake – got that one – and yep, that looks pretty calm, although, I’m not sure why you might need the indefinite article – perhaps it makes more sense in French.
This book is a diary. It records what the author sees in these two paintings, although, more in the second than the first, over a number of months. He goes in to see these paintings remarkably frequently over that time. And he looks and he records and he thinks. I am a very strong believer in apprenticeships, not where you are told what to do, but rather where you learn by doing under the guidance of someone who can. And that is exactly what this book offers you.
He shows you, with beautiful photographs of the paintings and of details from the paintings, exactly what he is looking at and why it has drawn his attention or held it.
There is all the usual stuff you might expect to hear. Art critics love to tell you that paintings are mute. Sometimes, as in the snake painting, the painter has actually captured a moment that is silent, just before someone speaks, while they are held in trance just before they must say something. There is an anticipation that, as Keats noticed a couple of centuries ago with his Greek jug, will go on forever.
One of the things the author does very early on in this is to start each entry with a description of the light that is illuminating the painting. The difference this makes is remarkable to what he can see and how it gets him to look at the painting. If the light is good then details jump off from the canvas. When the light is not so good, the old varnish becomes a Holmes-like London fog.
He notices visual rhymes – like how the shape of the dead man’s body under the snake is virtually the same as the body of the man in the boat and also that of the man on the other side of the lake swimming. I think visual rhymes have much the same effect on us as rhyme does in poetry. Remember, rhyme isn’t simply repetition, it is repetition with modification. As someone said once, history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. It is this sense of rhyming that he means. Bodies that are nearly in the same shape, but doing quite different things, shapes that curl and twist in ways that resemble one another. And these draw our attention to each shape and these similar shapes comment on each other too. An alive and a dead person in a painting in the same shape can hardly not be saying something interesting.
For probably two-thirds of this book the author relies on his own vision to understand these artworks – well, his own vision and his own knowledge of how stuff works in paintings, so, his eyes and god knows how many years experience of intense looking. What he doesn’t do is go to reference books and look up what is the standard interpretation of these pieces. Not yet, anyway. He wants to give himself time to see. It is only much later that we learn he has had a longstanding interest in one of the paintings.
There is always an attraction and a danger to say something stupid, and that stupid thing is that what is important about paintings is what cannot be put into words about them. Yes, yes, yes – if what a painting did could be put into words the painter would have done that instead. It is certainly not the case that the painter of these works was inarticulate – from what is quoted of him here he seems perfectly well able to chat fluently about his paintings when he needs to. The point, like the point about above the visual rhymes above, is not that you can say exactly what the ‘truth’ of the painting is – but rather that you can paraphrase what you see and in so doing you may help others to also see the painting in ways they might not have been able to otherwise.
Now, the problem. I mentioned Holmes before and fog. One of the things I worry about endlessly – given my thesis sort of involves doing something similar to this – is that there is something very bizarre about playing Sherlock Holmes with paintings. And not just bizarre, but basically tasteless and fundamentally proof you are a bit up yourself. As someone very wise said once, it is much better to be down on your luck than up yourself. What gives anyone the right to assume they can see more in a painting than other people can? This is the strange thing about paintings and visual images generally. We imagine we can ‘see’ them immediately. That is, our 'real' seeing of images shouldn’t be mediated by other considerations, the image is there, we see it, we take it in as if we were sponges. But if this book proves anything at all, it proves that is simply not true.
He shows us you why certain trees need to be in certain places, and how the painter must have worried over where to place the people in his image and how they were placed late on, when the painting was nearly finished, and how the boat on the lake with the fishermen was added after the men were painted. These paintings are really huge visual problems that have been thought over and worried over and painted over for months by the artist. They weren’t slapped onto canvas in minutes. So, why should we assume that minutes of glancing at them will be enough for us to understand them?
So, while Clark is asking why we return time and again to look at the same paintings and just what is it that we expect to see from these return visits? – I am asking as well, why is it that we read art criticism? And I think it is to receive lessons from experts in how to see. How to look with care and love and patience. It is not about finding Wally, and it is not about finding the murderer (the snake did it, by the way) – it is about pressing one’s mind and feelings and attention against a painting and seeing what can be seen, what can be understood.
It is only at the end that he begins discussing symbolism in these paintings, and in particular in the snake painting. He says that snakes are interesting symbols – oh yes, I thought, time for some phallus symbol talk. I'm up for a bit of dick talk, if I have to be. The snake jumps up to strike – an erect penis in anger. Its shape is all too obvious, with its tubular body and its bulbous head. Except, snakes devour by swallowing their prey whole. A snake’s open mouth is no longer a penis, it is a kind of terrifying vagina. It is hardly surprising we might have been tempted out of paradise by such a creature.
And how do I think we can saved from Holmes's tricks? There is to be no ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ here. There is no conclusion, really. While there are questions that are answered, these are nowhere near as interesting as the ones that are left unanswered, that can’t be answered, but that are fascinating (in the true sense of that word) merely in their being asked.
I really enjoyed this book. It is a useful guide in so many ways, and not just to the two pictures discussed here. By following in the footsteps of someone who has thought their way through a painting like this we learn how to think our own ways through them too.
Now, when I went to the UK earlier in the year I spent lots of time in art galleries. And there are sort of two experiences to be had in art galleries. One is the experience you have in amongst the standard collection areas. You can stroll, you can stop, you can listen to someone who always seems to have something interesting to say – there are always so many teachers with groups of students and gallery tour guides walking about and chatting to herds of followers and I really like the overheard things I get to hear while I'm just wandering about. (oh, one of which seems to almost invariably be a discussion of negative space as if it was the perfect secret to art and artistic endeavour.
The other experience to be had, and quite a different one too, is the blockbuster exhibition. These really are something else entirely. There is obviously a quasi-religious feeling to be had at those things. This is ART you are looking at here and you have to appreciate how special this occasion is. But, in a lot of ways, these exhibitions are more like people filing past a coffin. There is only really time to pay respects to the artwork, certainly not time to really see it. And then there are so many of the frigging things at those exhibitions. Painting after painting after painting. You file past and you can feel a headache coming on. You might read a bit of the text beside some of the paintings, try to find the bear that’s meant to be hidden in the trees or see how unnatural the ground looks beside the snow and birch trees and rather than looking at art, what it feels much more like playing Where’s Wally. Or reading one of those books called something like ‘how to be ridiculously well read in one evening’.
This isn’t really about looking at works of art, but rather doing something so as to be able to say you’ve been in the same room as them at one stage. "Oh yes, I've seen Monet's Haystacks - very yellow, but not nearly as yellow as Van Gogh's".
So, how should you look at a work of art, and how long is long enough? My guess is that most of us spend less than a minute looking, but imagine we have spent hours. It is a strange paradox.
This book is about two paintings. This one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil... and this one http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fil... and I have to say that the second image here looks like it has been seriously lightened so you can clearly see the snake and buggered up in the process.
On my various trips around galleries I would have probably been unlikely to have stopped for ages in front of either of these two paintings - actually, this is proof of serious gaps in my ability to appreciate art - holes in my education, if you like. Yep, there’s the dead guy and there's the snake – got that one – and yep, that looks pretty calm, although, I’m not sure why you might need the indefinite article – perhaps it makes more sense in French.
This book is a diary. It records what the author sees in these two paintings, although, more in the second than the first, over a number of months. He goes in to see these paintings remarkably frequently over that time. And he looks and he records and he thinks. I am a very strong believer in apprenticeships, not where you are told what to do, but rather where you learn by doing under the guidance of someone who can. And that is exactly what this book offers you.
He shows you, with beautiful photographs of the paintings and of details from the paintings, exactly what he is looking at and why it has drawn his attention or held it.
There is all the usual stuff you might expect to hear. Art critics love to tell you that paintings are mute. Sometimes, as in the snake painting, the painter has actually captured a moment that is silent, just before someone speaks, while they are held in trance just before they must say something. There is an anticipation that, as Keats noticed a couple of centuries ago with his Greek jug, will go on forever.
One of the things the author does very early on in this is to start each entry with a description of the light that is illuminating the painting. The difference this makes is remarkable to what he can see and how it gets him to look at the painting. If the light is good then details jump off from the canvas. When the light is not so good, the old varnish becomes a Holmes-like London fog.
He notices visual rhymes – like how the shape of the dead man’s body under the snake is virtually the same as the body of the man in the boat and also that of the man on the other side of the lake swimming. I think visual rhymes have much the same effect on us as rhyme does in poetry. Remember, rhyme isn’t simply repetition, it is repetition with modification. As someone said once, history doesn’t repeat, it rhymes. It is this sense of rhyming that he means. Bodies that are nearly in the same shape, but doing quite different things, shapes that curl and twist in ways that resemble one another. And these draw our attention to each shape and these similar shapes comment on each other too. An alive and a dead person in a painting in the same shape can hardly not be saying something interesting.
For probably two-thirds of this book the author relies on his own vision to understand these artworks – well, his own vision and his own knowledge of how stuff works in paintings, so, his eyes and god knows how many years experience of intense looking. What he doesn’t do is go to reference books and look up what is the standard interpretation of these pieces. Not yet, anyway. He wants to give himself time to see. It is only much later that we learn he has had a longstanding interest in one of the paintings.
There is always an attraction and a danger to say something stupid, and that stupid thing is that what is important about paintings is what cannot be put into words about them. Yes, yes, yes – if what a painting did could be put into words the painter would have done that instead. It is certainly not the case that the painter of these works was inarticulate – from what is quoted of him here he seems perfectly well able to chat fluently about his paintings when he needs to. The point, like the point about above the visual rhymes above, is not that you can say exactly what the ‘truth’ of the painting is – but rather that you can paraphrase what you see and in so doing you may help others to also see the painting in ways they might not have been able to otherwise.
Now, the problem. I mentioned Holmes before and fog. One of the things I worry about endlessly – given my thesis sort of involves doing something similar to this – is that there is something very bizarre about playing Sherlock Holmes with paintings. And not just bizarre, but basically tasteless and fundamentally proof you are a bit up yourself. As someone very wise said once, it is much better to be down on your luck than up yourself. What gives anyone the right to assume they can see more in a painting than other people can? This is the strange thing about paintings and visual images generally. We imagine we can ‘see’ them immediately. That is, our 'real' seeing of images shouldn’t be mediated by other considerations, the image is there, we see it, we take it in as if we were sponges. But if this book proves anything at all, it proves that is simply not true.
He shows us you why certain trees need to be in certain places, and how the painter must have worried over where to place the people in his image and how they were placed late on, when the painting was nearly finished, and how the boat on the lake with the fishermen was added after the men were painted. These paintings are really huge visual problems that have been thought over and worried over and painted over for months by the artist. They weren’t slapped onto canvas in minutes. So, why should we assume that minutes of glancing at them will be enough for us to understand them?
So, while Clark is asking why we return time and again to look at the same paintings and just what is it that we expect to see from these return visits? – I am asking as well, why is it that we read art criticism? And I think it is to receive lessons from experts in how to see. How to look with care and love and patience. It is not about finding Wally, and it is not about finding the murderer (the snake did it, by the way) – it is about pressing one’s mind and feelings and attention against a painting and seeing what can be seen, what can be understood.
It is only at the end that he begins discussing symbolism in these paintings, and in particular in the snake painting. He says that snakes are interesting symbols – oh yes, I thought, time for some phallus symbol talk. I'm up for a bit of dick talk, if I have to be. The snake jumps up to strike – an erect penis in anger. Its shape is all too obvious, with its tubular body and its bulbous head. Except, snakes devour by swallowing their prey whole. A snake’s open mouth is no longer a penis, it is a kind of terrifying vagina. It is hardly surprising we might have been tempted out of paradise by such a creature.
And how do I think we can saved from Holmes's tricks? There is to be no ‘elementary, my dear Watson’ here. There is no conclusion, really. While there are questions that are answered, these are nowhere near as interesting as the ones that are left unanswered, that can’t be answered, but that are fascinating (in the true sense of that word) merely in their being asked.
I really enjoyed this book. It is a useful guide in so many ways, and not just to the two pictures discussed here. By following in the footsteps of someone who has thought their way through a painting like this we learn how to think our own ways through them too.
Read
June 13, 2012Have not read and have never heard of this book.
August 1, 2025
Amazing work. I need a few days to think about this. What I like about Clark's writng is his focus and the ability to avoid "art talk" and get into the painting's feel. I know very little about this area of art history, but through his eyes I'm getting an incredible education.
August 20, 2012
‘It takes more than seeing to make things visible’: at the beginning of The Absolute Bourgeois, first published in 1973, T.J. Clark lays claim to the wager that will run throughout his substantial oeuvre. Provocative, intuitive, that wager comes right to the fore in The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing, a book devoted to the work of looking at, and writing about, two paintings: Nicolas Poussin’s Landscape with a Calm (1650–51) and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (1648). Both paintings were hanging in the Getty Research Institute in January 2000 when Clark arrived for a six-month period of research, intending, if somewhat vaguely, to devote his time to thinking about Picasso between the wars. If that project happened, it is not in this book. Going in search of Landscape with a Calm a day or so after his arrival, Clark discovers the picture in a small gallery, hanging to the right of the door. At the same time, he comes upon the painting that appears, in retrospect, to have determined the course of the book: ‘Straight ahead, holding the wall on its own, was Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake. I knew immediately that I was in luck.'
Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake usually hangs in the National Gallery in London (the Gallery bought the painting in 1947). To see both paintings in the Getty, hanging across the room from one another, was, Clark tells us, the chance of a lifetime. He could go back, time after time, day after day, to look at them (anyone who has attempted to see Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in the jostling dimness of the room in the National Gallery in which it currently hangs will appreciate this point). And it is from that experience of looking, thinking, and making time for time that The Sight of Death begins to emerge. ‘I began writing’, Clark recalls, ‘and could not stop’. This is one of several indications of something involuntary, even compulsive, at work in this experiment, its grappling provisionality. Juxtaposed to one another in a new way, it is as if the paintings happened to Clark anew. Taking place over time, The Sight of Death is a chronicle of that happening; a (revised) diary of the act of looking, repeatedly, day after day – and, of course, of thinking about that looking. Clark’s epigraph from Bernini, writing on Poussin’s Sacraments in 1665, strikes the tone: ‘I can’t get the thought of those paintings of his out of my mind.’
What do paintings do in our minds? What do our minds do to paintings? The questions run through The Sight of Death, driving its attempts to forge a language more responsive to the image, to modes of seeing, to the differences between our experiences of the visual and the verbal. With striking generosity, Clark invites his readers to participate in his struggle for words. ‘I still haven’t found a word for this kind of paint application in Poussin’, he writes on 7 February, a diverse entry that moves from Andre Felibien’s contemporary account of watching Poussin paint, to Poussin’s capacity to draw his viewers into the parts of his pictures that they cannot quite see, to his ‘painterly “touch”’ in the service of the dialectic between stillness and movement that Clark asks us to discover in Landscape with a Calm. ‘There is a word and a concept hovering here’, Clark concludes, ‘to do with the point where the mental and manual meet, or the conceptual and material; but for the moment they’re escaping me.’
One response to that sense of escape is to look again. And ever closer. Describing Clark’s viewing, The Sight of Death also conducts our own. This book is very much a physical and visual object – Clark acknowledges as much in his Preface – requiring its readers to look, or to try to look, at the paintings in question (even if, on one level, Clark is talking and writing to himself): ‘Look at the wrinkles for bricks on the front pillar ...’; ‘Go in close again ...’; ‘Look at every stroke in the kneeling woman’s dark face!’ The Sight of Death reproduces both Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake; details, bringing us closer, abound, underlining Clark’s insistence on the fact that looking takes time; paintings do not exist in the here and now, all at once, there to be seen. We look at different moments, from different views, different distances. In this sense, The Sight of Death confounds the lure of visibility in which its reproductions tend to participate. ‘Landscape with a Snake seems to me wonderful’, Clark writes towards the beginning of the book, ‘because it puts just that fiction of visibility to the test.’
That sense of wonder is one of the most contagious aspects of this book, its invitation to look at Poussin, certainly, but also at Clark looking at Poussin. From a distance, up close, he makes us all too aware of the play of light and shadow in the gallery, its effects on the possibilities for vision (to say nothing of the squeaking Nikes that interrupt one particularly tantalizing entry). One afternoon, Clark counts seventeen figures in Landscape with a Calm, from a 5-inch high goatherd to two unicellular heads and shoulders, no more than a millimetre across, looking out from the windows of the citadel. Look at the details reproduced before and after his entry and you just might see them. But it’s a struggle (part of the pleasure of reading The Sight of Death is that struggle, the moving back and forth through the pages to find the image that might just reveal what is being described). ‘I need to think about the point and effect of this play of scale’, Clark muses, ‘and above all the intensity of the very small.’ What mode of seeing is this? What kind of participation in the world of the picture? Once noticed, those figures, the miniaturization at work in the paintings, exert enormous pressure. What are they doing? Where have they come from? What will they do next? The longer one looks, Clark notes, the more of these tiny figures there are – a claim that, so far as Poussin’s painting is concerned, tends to tie the act, and time, of looking to the comprehension of being human. ‘In practice’, Clark has already suggested, ‘smallness becomes a way of discovering the limits of the human’ – a discovery that takes place not through words, prosody, diction, syntax but at the level of scale, colour, opacity, transparency, light, shadow.
In other words, Poussin is thinking in images, establishing the difference – however fleeting, however fragile – between visual and verbal so crucial to The Sight of Death. ‘I believe the distance of visual imagery from verbal discourse’, Clark writes in the course of an entry given over to reflection on his own project, ‘is the most precious thing about it. It represents one possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs.’ That tone of more or less angry lament will become familiar to a reader of The Sight of Death. ‘This is hopelessly wrong’, Clark exclaims at one point, reflecting on the predominance of the concept of perspective in accounts of how pictures create viewing positions. Elsewhere it is his frustration with the so-called ‘Left academy’ that makes itself felt. At such moments, it is worth recalling that The Sight of Death was written largely in tandem with the jointly-authored Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts; Verso, 2005). That coincidence, or companionship, is important. If Afflicted Powers engages directly with what images have to do with the forces of terror in modernity – the urge to life-denial as the authors describe it towards the end of the book – then part of what is at stake in The Sight of Death is its exploration of a mode of seeing that might begin to argue with that image regime and its effects. To put it bluntly, what does it mean to be human, to live a human life, in the new millennium? How do the new technologies of the image – technologies that have come to structure the experience of looking in the modern period – bear on the possibility of the human?
Back to Poussin: if this is nostalgia, Clark writes, then so be it. But, by now, we know that it cannot be as simple as that: Poussin, it seems, thought that he was living ‘in specially malignant times.’ If, for example, smallness is one way of elaborating the limits of the human, then the question of what it means to be human must be agitating through Poussin’s pictures. Such agitation may be more visible, if not finally sayable, at the other end of the scale: think of the running man and the kneeling woman in Landscape with a Snake, caught in the moment before speech, in a world interrupted by the sight of death (the painting is described by the National Gallery as ‘a sort of study of fear’: the running man is, appropriately enough, a terrified spectator of death). We will never hear what the running man is about to say, as he runs away from death towards the woman. The scene underscores the silence of painting that, Clark suggests, Poussin reveled in. But it is the difference of scale that draws Clark’s attention to Poussin as ‘the painter of the unnoticeable’, of the next-to-nothing. Looking at Landscape with a Calm one January morning, Poussin’s handling of emptiness preoccupies Clark: ‘The hillside is insignificant, and that’s what has to be painted.’ How do you paint the insignificant, or, in one resonant turn of phrase, an ‘accurate likeness of the unnoticeable’? What is the significance – Clark’s word is ethics – of that paint, its gesture, especially so far as those tiny figures, the barely visible people, are concerned? Let’s recall Clark’s early wager: ‘It takes more than seeing to make things visible’. What does it take to make some things, some people, visible? And what might that have to do with the question of their humanity? Suddenly, the word ‘ethics’ does seem to be the right one. And Clark’s occasional diatribe about this ‘terrible moment in the politics of imaging’ begins to finds its place in the repeated looking at two paintings.
Not that that place is any sense secure. ‘Readers looking over my shoulder’, he notes, ‘may find a touch of madness in them [his entries], or maybe pathos. I seem to be operating on the assumption that just pointing things out, in the case of a painting like Landscape with a Calm, can (and ought to) go on for ever.’ Is it that Clark, like Poussin, does not know when to stop? Or that to look at Poussin – to really look at Poussin – is to enter into that world of not knowing, its barely perceptible imaginary of stasis, smallness, meticulousness? These are qualities, and questions, that Clark wants now. Above all, it is that invitation to visual complexity, to visual interference with what we think we see and know, that seems to turn Clark back to Poussin. What we need to do, he insists, is to inhabit the idiom of the paintings. It’s an interesting word, ‘idiom’, though Clark’s direct reference to it takes place in passing, in the course of a reflection on how to move from pictures to texts, from Poussin to his contexts: to inhabit the language, gestures, and characteristics of the paintings is to know how to find their trace in the verbal record (this is one way, then, to ‘do’ art history).
Again, all this takes time. But the concept of idiom may well be vital if The Sight of Death is to follow through on its interest in that thinking in images, of discovering a language more adequate to the experience of looking. As ‘An Experiment in Art Writing’, for example, this book is also an experiment in idiom, an invitation to create a space between reader and writer in which that other space – between Poussin and Clark, between painting and viewer – can begin to take verbal shape. Of course, such an invitation can always be refused (writing in the London Review of Books, for example, Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, appeared at once baffled and belligerent (4 January 2007)). How we look and read is also a question of how we use our objects, or allow ourselves to be used by them. At one moment, Clark talks of submitting himself to Poussin’s pictures, underscoring the passivity – more strongly, the vulnerability – of looking in a way that may well prepare us for what takes place in the closing pages of the book. Close to the ending, Clark goes back to the beginning, to the origins of his own subjective idiom in what he describes as the ‘very first world of responses I inhabited’: a man’s (on one level, deeply reluctant) memory of his mother’s face; the exchange of looks between two, between mother and child, mother and baby.
This is a profoundly Romantic figure: think of Wordsworth’s ‘blest Babe’, who ‘sinks to sleep/Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul/Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!’ (The Prelude). Wordsworth’s is a vision of unmediated, or at least preverbal, expression – a privileged means to intimacy – that has helped to structure modern sensibilities towards mothers and babies (not least in the discourse of psychoanalysis with which Clark finds himself engaged at this point). But who knows what those feelings might be? What the babe, blest or otherwise, might take in through the eyes? And how far does that profoundly maternal dimension to the visual structure the act of looking, the experience of looking in the creative displacements of collective life? Or, indeed, in its more atrocious displacements? Clark helps to make such questions possible, but they are not his immediate concern here. The penultimate entry in The Sight of Death is dated 21 September 2003. Wondering what socialism is, or can be, in the years to come, Clark reflects on the fact that it must start from the experience of misfortune, pain, and death. From our vulnerability, our passivity, to others, to the world: this is, perhaps, part of the possibility of the politics of the present moment, including its image regimes (what Clark is grappling with at this point may recall Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (Verso 2004). It is also, finally, the moment in which Clark sees Poussin as the painter who can help us to relearn the meanings of monstrosity and affliction (is this word a companion for Clark?): the painter who, at this time, for this time, waits to be seen.
Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake usually hangs in the National Gallery in London (the Gallery bought the painting in 1947). To see both paintings in the Getty, hanging across the room from one another, was, Clark tells us, the chance of a lifetime. He could go back, time after time, day after day, to look at them (anyone who has attempted to see Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake in the jostling dimness of the room in the National Gallery in which it currently hangs will appreciate this point). And it is from that experience of looking, thinking, and making time for time that The Sight of Death begins to emerge. ‘I began writing’, Clark recalls, ‘and could not stop’. This is one of several indications of something involuntary, even compulsive, at work in this experiment, its grappling provisionality. Juxtaposed to one another in a new way, it is as if the paintings happened to Clark anew. Taking place over time, The Sight of Death is a chronicle of that happening; a (revised) diary of the act of looking, repeatedly, day after day – and, of course, of thinking about that looking. Clark’s epigraph from Bernini, writing on Poussin’s Sacraments in 1665, strikes the tone: ‘I can’t get the thought of those paintings of his out of my mind.’
What do paintings do in our minds? What do our minds do to paintings? The questions run through The Sight of Death, driving its attempts to forge a language more responsive to the image, to modes of seeing, to the differences between our experiences of the visual and the verbal. With striking generosity, Clark invites his readers to participate in his struggle for words. ‘I still haven’t found a word for this kind of paint application in Poussin’, he writes on 7 February, a diverse entry that moves from Andre Felibien’s contemporary account of watching Poussin paint, to Poussin’s capacity to draw his viewers into the parts of his pictures that they cannot quite see, to his ‘painterly “touch”’ in the service of the dialectic between stillness and movement that Clark asks us to discover in Landscape with a Calm. ‘There is a word and a concept hovering here’, Clark concludes, ‘to do with the point where the mental and manual meet, or the conceptual and material; but for the moment they’re escaping me.’
One response to that sense of escape is to look again. And ever closer. Describing Clark’s viewing, The Sight of Death also conducts our own. This book is very much a physical and visual object – Clark acknowledges as much in his Preface – requiring its readers to look, or to try to look, at the paintings in question (even if, on one level, Clark is talking and writing to himself): ‘Look at the wrinkles for bricks on the front pillar ...’; ‘Go in close again ...’; ‘Look at every stroke in the kneeling woman’s dark face!’ The Sight of Death reproduces both Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake; details, bringing us closer, abound, underlining Clark’s insistence on the fact that looking takes time; paintings do not exist in the here and now, all at once, there to be seen. We look at different moments, from different views, different distances. In this sense, The Sight of Death confounds the lure of visibility in which its reproductions tend to participate. ‘Landscape with a Snake seems to me wonderful’, Clark writes towards the beginning of the book, ‘because it puts just that fiction of visibility to the test.’
That sense of wonder is one of the most contagious aspects of this book, its invitation to look at Poussin, certainly, but also at Clark looking at Poussin. From a distance, up close, he makes us all too aware of the play of light and shadow in the gallery, its effects on the possibilities for vision (to say nothing of the squeaking Nikes that interrupt one particularly tantalizing entry). One afternoon, Clark counts seventeen figures in Landscape with a Calm, from a 5-inch high goatherd to two unicellular heads and shoulders, no more than a millimetre across, looking out from the windows of the citadel. Look at the details reproduced before and after his entry and you just might see them. But it’s a struggle (part of the pleasure of reading The Sight of Death is that struggle, the moving back and forth through the pages to find the image that might just reveal what is being described). ‘I need to think about the point and effect of this play of scale’, Clark muses, ‘and above all the intensity of the very small.’ What mode of seeing is this? What kind of participation in the world of the picture? Once noticed, those figures, the miniaturization at work in the paintings, exert enormous pressure. What are they doing? Where have they come from? What will they do next? The longer one looks, Clark notes, the more of these tiny figures there are – a claim that, so far as Poussin’s painting is concerned, tends to tie the act, and time, of looking to the comprehension of being human. ‘In practice’, Clark has already suggested, ‘smallness becomes a way of discovering the limits of the human’ – a discovery that takes place not through words, prosody, diction, syntax but at the level of scale, colour, opacity, transparency, light, shadow.
In other words, Poussin is thinking in images, establishing the difference – however fleeting, however fragile – between visual and verbal so crucial to The Sight of Death. ‘I believe the distance of visual imagery from verbal discourse’, Clark writes in the course of an entry given over to reflection on his own project, ‘is the most precious thing about it. It represents one possibility of resistance in a world saturated by slogans, labels, sales pitches, little marketable meaning-motifs.’ That tone of more or less angry lament will become familiar to a reader of The Sight of Death. ‘This is hopelessly wrong’, Clark exclaims at one point, reflecting on the predominance of the concept of perspective in accounts of how pictures create viewing positions. Elsewhere it is his frustration with the so-called ‘Left academy’ that makes itself felt. At such moments, it is worth recalling that The Sight of Death was written largely in tandem with the jointly-authored Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War (Iain Boal, T.J. Clark, Joseph Matthews, Michael Watts; Verso, 2005). That coincidence, or companionship, is important. If Afflicted Powers engages directly with what images have to do with the forces of terror in modernity – the urge to life-denial as the authors describe it towards the end of the book – then part of what is at stake in The Sight of Death is its exploration of a mode of seeing that might begin to argue with that image regime and its effects. To put it bluntly, what does it mean to be human, to live a human life, in the new millennium? How do the new technologies of the image – technologies that have come to structure the experience of looking in the modern period – bear on the possibility of the human?
Back to Poussin: if this is nostalgia, Clark writes, then so be it. But, by now, we know that it cannot be as simple as that: Poussin, it seems, thought that he was living ‘in specially malignant times.’ If, for example, smallness is one way of elaborating the limits of the human, then the question of what it means to be human must be agitating through Poussin’s pictures. Such agitation may be more visible, if not finally sayable, at the other end of the scale: think of the running man and the kneeling woman in Landscape with a Snake, caught in the moment before speech, in a world interrupted by the sight of death (the painting is described by the National Gallery as ‘a sort of study of fear’: the running man is, appropriately enough, a terrified spectator of death). We will never hear what the running man is about to say, as he runs away from death towards the woman. The scene underscores the silence of painting that, Clark suggests, Poussin reveled in. But it is the difference of scale that draws Clark’s attention to Poussin as ‘the painter of the unnoticeable’, of the next-to-nothing. Looking at Landscape with a Calm one January morning, Poussin’s handling of emptiness preoccupies Clark: ‘The hillside is insignificant, and that’s what has to be painted.’ How do you paint the insignificant, or, in one resonant turn of phrase, an ‘accurate likeness of the unnoticeable’? What is the significance – Clark’s word is ethics – of that paint, its gesture, especially so far as those tiny figures, the barely visible people, are concerned? Let’s recall Clark’s early wager: ‘It takes more than seeing to make things visible’. What does it take to make some things, some people, visible? And what might that have to do with the question of their humanity? Suddenly, the word ‘ethics’ does seem to be the right one. And Clark’s occasional diatribe about this ‘terrible moment in the politics of imaging’ begins to finds its place in the repeated looking at two paintings.
Not that that place is any sense secure. ‘Readers looking over my shoulder’, he notes, ‘may find a touch of madness in them [his entries], or maybe pathos. I seem to be operating on the assumption that just pointing things out, in the case of a painting like Landscape with a Calm, can (and ought to) go on for ever.’ Is it that Clark, like Poussin, does not know when to stop? Or that to look at Poussin – to really look at Poussin – is to enter into that world of not knowing, its barely perceptible imaginary of stasis, smallness, meticulousness? These are qualities, and questions, that Clark wants now. Above all, it is that invitation to visual complexity, to visual interference with what we think we see and know, that seems to turn Clark back to Poussin. What we need to do, he insists, is to inhabit the idiom of the paintings. It’s an interesting word, ‘idiom’, though Clark’s direct reference to it takes place in passing, in the course of a reflection on how to move from pictures to texts, from Poussin to his contexts: to inhabit the language, gestures, and characteristics of the paintings is to know how to find their trace in the verbal record (this is one way, then, to ‘do’ art history).
Again, all this takes time. But the concept of idiom may well be vital if The Sight of Death is to follow through on its interest in that thinking in images, of discovering a language more adequate to the experience of looking. As ‘An Experiment in Art Writing’, for example, this book is also an experiment in idiom, an invitation to create a space between reader and writer in which that other space – between Poussin and Clark, between painting and viewer – can begin to take verbal shape. Of course, such an invitation can always be refused (writing in the London Review of Books, for example, Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, appeared at once baffled and belligerent (4 January 2007)). How we look and read is also a question of how we use our objects, or allow ourselves to be used by them. At one moment, Clark talks of submitting himself to Poussin’s pictures, underscoring the passivity – more strongly, the vulnerability – of looking in a way that may well prepare us for what takes place in the closing pages of the book. Close to the ending, Clark goes back to the beginning, to the origins of his own subjective idiom in what he describes as the ‘very first world of responses I inhabited’: a man’s (on one level, deeply reluctant) memory of his mother’s face; the exchange of looks between two, between mother and child, mother and baby.
This is a profoundly Romantic figure: think of Wordsworth’s ‘blest Babe’, who ‘sinks to sleep/Rocked on his Mother’s breast; who with his soul/Drinks in the feelings of his Mother’s eye!’ (The Prelude). Wordsworth’s is a vision of unmediated, or at least preverbal, expression – a privileged means to intimacy – that has helped to structure modern sensibilities towards mothers and babies (not least in the discourse of psychoanalysis with which Clark finds himself engaged at this point). But who knows what those feelings might be? What the babe, blest or otherwise, might take in through the eyes? And how far does that profoundly maternal dimension to the visual structure the act of looking, the experience of looking in the creative displacements of collective life? Or, indeed, in its more atrocious displacements? Clark helps to make such questions possible, but they are not his immediate concern here. The penultimate entry in The Sight of Death is dated 21 September 2003. Wondering what socialism is, or can be, in the years to come, Clark reflects on the fact that it must start from the experience of misfortune, pain, and death. From our vulnerability, our passivity, to others, to the world: this is, perhaps, part of the possibility of the politics of the present moment, including its image regimes (what Clark is grappling with at this point may recall Judith Butler’s Precarious Life (Verso 2004). It is also, finally, the moment in which Clark sees Poussin as the painter who can help us to relearn the meanings of monstrosity and affliction (is this word a companion for Clark?): the painter who, at this time, for this time, waits to be seen.
May 24, 2010
Well - the second half was a letdown. The subjective crawled in... quietly, and surreptitiously... like a snake... and finally coiled itself around the body of the text and strangled it... like the corpse in Snake. Even Clark, with all his passionate looking, couldn't trust entirely simply to... looking. That is sad, because what he does in the first half of this beautiful book is so original and sustained... and successful.
Despite all this, I can't recommend this book highly enough -- provided, of course, you know when "enough is enough".
Speaking of snakes, here is Landscape with a Snake, which I don't believe I posted on the other site:
[image error]
(For the first 40 or 50 pages I had to chew each page like a cow -- now, each line... maybe each letter. Now, about half-way through, I am actually 'reading'.... My copy, which does not have the offending omissions that some have noted, has however started to fall apart -- the pages with the two-page spreads of both Calm and Snake having disengaged from their spine.
Always a good sign, I think...)
Despite all this, I can't recommend this book highly enough -- provided, of course, you know when "enough is enough".
Speaking of snakes, here is Landscape with a Snake, which I don't believe I posted on the other site:
[image error]
(For the first 40 or 50 pages I had to chew each page like a cow -- now, each line... maybe each letter. Now, about half-way through, I am actually 'reading'.... My copy, which does not have the offending omissions that some have noted, has however started to fall apart -- the pages with the two-page spreads of both Calm and Snake having disengaged from their spine.
Always a good sign, I think...)
September 15, 2022
In the spring of 2001, the author begins to spend all day in L.A.'s Getty Museum, observing two paintings day after day. They are among the landscapes of the artist's late period, intricately detailed outdoor settings with some characters in the foreground. One is Landscape with a Calm, the other Landscape with a Man killed by a Snake. He isn't quite sure why he is so fascinated by these paintings but feels driven by some subterranean urge, which, as the book unfolds, will eventually be unearthed, and relates to his personal history. (He recalls standing outside the National Gallery as a student in 1968, while a speaker got a crowd worked up about the injustice of the museum, and discussing with a friend which painting he would destroy, if so compelled by the mob. His choice was Calm.)
This is a diary of Clark's sessions. Some entries go into the history of the painting, Poussin's relationship with his patrons and peers, the way it was assessed in its time and by later art writers. Some are about the chemistry of the paint, and what X-ray analysis can tell about its composition. (It has apparently changed quite a lot over time, which just makes it more crazy that Clark is willing to dissect the nuances of tiny changes in shading.) There is some poetry, which isn't very good. And then some of the usual pretensions about the "moral" and "epistemological" messages of the painting. (He cites Jean-Luc Godard, gone this week, that "tracking shots are a matter of ethics".) But mostly it is just (240 pages of!) ultra-fine-grained analysis of two pictures. The light in the room get discussed a lot. (9/11 happens near the end but only gets a few lines.)
Clark refers at times to Panofksy's famous essay on Et in Arcadia Ego, where he shows Virgil to have invented a new kind of genre, the elegiac sentimentality of a bucolic paradise lost. It is this which is experienced by the characters in Poussin's painting of this name (which is based on a misinterpretation of the Latin). Snake, too, arouses powerful emotions in the viewer: whether it is (as Huxley supposed) the similarity of the snake's coils to the human viscera, or the simple sight of the death-mask in the foreground. "Calm is the greater work," a friend assures him, but he is fixated on the picture on the other wall, the psychoanalytic shadows it casts, his own past trauma. If there is a political point to this book, it is that we live in an image-saturated culture, but that these images are shallow, empty of significance, "words with visual cladding". It is only in the complexity of images like this one, their richness of colour, geometry, light, the many hours invested in their tiny details that we are able to absorb deeper meaning. That there is something rich in them that can only be understood through long, patient hours of contemplation, is a pretty cool idea.
This is a diary of Clark's sessions. Some entries go into the history of the painting, Poussin's relationship with his patrons and peers, the way it was assessed in its time and by later art writers. Some are about the chemistry of the paint, and what X-ray analysis can tell about its composition. (It has apparently changed quite a lot over time, which just makes it more crazy that Clark is willing to dissect the nuances of tiny changes in shading.) There is some poetry, which isn't very good. And then some of the usual pretensions about the "moral" and "epistemological" messages of the painting. (He cites Jean-Luc Godard, gone this week, that "tracking shots are a matter of ethics".) But mostly it is just (240 pages of!) ultra-fine-grained analysis of two pictures. The light in the room get discussed a lot. (9/11 happens near the end but only gets a few lines.)
Clark refers at times to Panofksy's famous essay on Et in Arcadia Ego, where he shows Virgil to have invented a new kind of genre, the elegiac sentimentality of a bucolic paradise lost. It is this which is experienced by the characters in Poussin's painting of this name (which is based on a misinterpretation of the Latin). Snake, too, arouses powerful emotions in the viewer: whether it is (as Huxley supposed) the similarity of the snake's coils to the human viscera, or the simple sight of the death-mask in the foreground. "Calm is the greater work," a friend assures him, but he is fixated on the picture on the other wall, the psychoanalytic shadows it casts, his own past trauma. If there is a political point to this book, it is that we live in an image-saturated culture, but that these images are shallow, empty of significance, "words with visual cladding". It is only in the complexity of images like this one, their richness of colour, geometry, light, the many hours invested in their tiny details that we are able to absorb deeper meaning. That there is something rich in them that can only be understood through long, patient hours of contemplation, is a pretty cool idea.
July 29, 2018
I couldn't imagine reading 250 pages about practically one Poussin painting would be that interesting!
January 26, 2024
I just read 250 words on TWO paintings and I enjoyed it a LOT. Clark writes experimentally but interestingly and I can say I learned a lot.
December 15, 2011
A mesmerising book. He goes to a room in the Getty Museum every day to look at two Poussin paintings that are hanging in splendid isolation. He then writes about his daily devotion, uncovering layer after layer of meaning and taking me on a unique journey.
March 2, 2013
Clark can make even Poussin thrilling.
October 5, 2016
the recording, in time, of an interpretation. the dialectic in fertile action. nice cover
September 5, 2023
This is a wonderfully self-indulgent book. First of all, I can't believe it was published as it must've cost a fortune with all the beautiful color illustrations. It's a feat of editing and design layout as almost ever time the author refers to something in one of the two Poussin artworks that are the focus of the book, there's a reproduction of said artwork or a detail either on the page in which that text appears or on the next page, which is incredibly generous to the reader! And it must've been horribly vulnerable for Clark to have written this, which is something of a collection of essays of stream of consciousness (albeit highly edited) observations regarding two Poussin paintings that were simultaneously on view at the Getty while Clark was in residence there for a research project. "Landscape with a Calm" (1650-51) and "Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake" (1648) are the focus, beginning with "Calm" but focussing largely on "Snake," and most rewarding (in my opinion) on what is visible within the two paintings. Although Clark references other historians' writings about the works (he assumes you know to whom he refers) and to the people within Poussin's milieu (whom he also assumes you're familiar with), the bulk of the writing is about what is seen via close looking at the paintings. And the rewards of this looking are endless. There is SO MUCH to see in these paintings! I hadn't a clue before reading this book as to how many details, how many tiny dramas, how many choices Poussin included in landscapes such as these. In fact, I likely would've walked right past them had I seen them in a museum. Each time Clark would point out a figure here or there, or an architectural detail wwwwwwaaaayyyy in the distance, and I'd think, well crap, he's right! That is there. Why on earth did Poussin spend so much time adding all these incredible details to the work? And now, I feel as though I know these paintings thoroughly, yet have more to explore. Which is the whole point of "slow looking" as a technique in art education circles. I'd say Clark's subtitle for the book, "An Experiment in Art Writing" was quite the success. I'm ready to book my tickets to LA to see "Calm" at the Getty, and to London to see "Snake" at the National Gallery. And I can't wait!
Read
May 21, 2024Zed and I are in a debate with another philosopher that involves a dispute about the importance of "seriousness" in aesthetic judgment. Roughly, we're for it and our opponent is against it, and in favor of a kind of free play of mutual appreciation. This book demonstrates the value of the "serious" attitude, of prolonged looking and reflection, and of argument on one hand, and awareness of the limits of argument in the face of artworks on the other. The most impressive thing that Clark does in this book is to change not only how two paintings of Poussin's look, but to demonstrate the power of
a sustained practice of looking, which might sound absurd described at one level: going to one room in the Getty and looking at two paintings over and over again and writing down what he sees and thinks about. Descartes' Meditations are alluded to in a couple of places, and Poussin was painting in the age of Descartes, and this book is like the Meditations in the harmony between the content and the literary form; the day-by-day diary form draws you into the pattern of looking, doubting, and revising—the process of aesthetic judgment.
This is, I think, the best example of the Cavellian picture of aesthetic judgment, which is drawn out over time and takes the object seriously (in the technical sense that we're arguing with the other philosopher about). Here's a couple of remarks Clark makes that make me think that (though the book as a whole is the real example):
Paul Valéry says somewhere that a work of art is defined by the fact that it does not exhaust itself—offer up what it has to offer—on first or second or subsequent reading. Art-ness is the capacity to invite repeated response. Snake, or my experience of Snake, is a strong case of that.
No doubt Valéry is right that in a sense this ability of certain formulations—certain new combinations of form and content—to make us want to return to them, perhaps in order to remember what it was like to encounter them for the first time: this just is the aesthetic, and as such profoundly ordinary…and probably beyond the reach of analysis. But I think writers about art should try harder before admitting defeat. That is what the current experiment is premised on. (p.118)
a sustained practice of looking, which might sound absurd described at one level: going to one room in the Getty and looking at two paintings over and over again and writing down what he sees and thinks about. Descartes' Meditations are alluded to in a couple of places, and Poussin was painting in the age of Descartes, and this book is like the Meditations in the harmony between the content and the literary form; the day-by-day diary form draws you into the pattern of looking, doubting, and revising—the process of aesthetic judgment.
This is, I think, the best example of the Cavellian picture of aesthetic judgment, which is drawn out over time and takes the object seriously (in the technical sense that we're arguing with the other philosopher about). Here's a couple of remarks Clark makes that make me think that (though the book as a whole is the real example):
Paul Valéry says somewhere that a work of art is defined by the fact that it does not exhaust itself—offer up what it has to offer—on first or second or subsequent reading. Art-ness is the capacity to invite repeated response. Snake, or my experience of Snake, is a strong case of that.
No doubt Valéry is right that in a sense this ability of certain formulations—certain new combinations of form and content—to make us want to return to them, perhaps in order to remember what it was like to encounter them for the first time: this just is the aesthetic, and as such profoundly ordinary…and probably beyond the reach of analysis. But I think writers about art should try harder before admitting defeat. That is what the current experiment is premised on. (p.118)
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January 8, 2019I really liked this. An experiment in art writing indeed.
"Here’s why it seems to me more and more urgent, politically, to point to the real boundaries between seeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And to try to keep alive the notion of a kind of visuality that truly establishes itself at the edge of the verbal—never wholly apart from it, needless to say, never out of discourse’s clutches, but able and willing to exploit the difference between a sign and a pose, or a syntactical structure and a physical (visual, material) interval. Sure, I count myself an enemy of the present regime of the image: not out of some nostalgic “logocentricity,” but because I see our image machines as flooding the world with words—with words (blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning) given just enough visual cladding.
This is what The Sight of Death is aimed against. It wants to discover what images are capable of—and what real wordlessness, in the face of the world of words, looks like. The running man in the main painting I look at—Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake—is someone genuinely at the edge of speech, just outside the reach of the verbal. And Poussin wants to show us what is involved in being there—what risks there are in wordlessness, what possible powers…"
"Here’s why it seems to me more and more urgent, politically, to point to the real boundaries between seeing and speaking, or sentence and visual configuration. And to try to keep alive the notion of a kind of visuality that truly establishes itself at the edge of the verbal—never wholly apart from it, needless to say, never out of discourse’s clutches, but able and willing to exploit the difference between a sign and a pose, or a syntactical structure and a physical (visual, material) interval. Sure, I count myself an enemy of the present regime of the image: not out of some nostalgic “logocentricity,” but because I see our image machines as flooding the world with words—with words (blurbs, jingles, catchphrases, ten thousand quick tickets to meaning) given just enough visual cladding.
This is what The Sight of Death is aimed against. It wants to discover what images are capable of—and what real wordlessness, in the face of the world of words, looks like. The running man in the main painting I look at—Poussin’s Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake—is someone genuinely at the edge of speech, just outside the reach of the verbal. And Poussin wants to show us what is involved in being there—what risks there are in wordlessness, what possible powers…"
October 6, 2021
I am not someone who could sit in front of the same painting every day, for months on end, and continue to find new things to say about it. I am very far from being that person. Fortunately, T.J. Clark is that person; is a marvelous writer; and herein turns his daily meditations on two Nicholas Poussin paintings — extended over months — into a magical work of art criticism. Every aspect of each painting is pointed out, its implications teased out (though never dogmatically), and the power of the artwork slowly revealed, minute detail by minute detail — until sweeping claims about the painting become natural conclusions. Through his sustained attention, Clark makes an implicit, yet exemplary, case for the richness of classical paintings, and their potential to reward serious examination. In so doing, he also points out the contrast with visual media of our current age, which inundates and overwhelms viewers, but makes no attempt to merit prolonged contemplation. As someone who doesn’t naturally “get” visual art, I found this equally enlightening and engrossing.
August 17, 2023
It’s often said that the average American museum visitor looks at a painting for only 6-10 seconds. To overcome this short attention span, the “Slow Looking” art movement recommends taking 5-10 minutes to look at a painting. This book is about an extreme version of “slow looking,” where the author took several months to look at (and muse at book length about) two landscape paintings by Nicolas Poussin (1594-1665) at the Getty Museum (one of the paintings was on loan from the National Gallery London). T.J. Clark’s book forced upon me a “slow reading” approach, partly because the not very familiar subject matter required to look up lots of references, partly because I found the book’s small print somewhat tiring. So, in the end, was plowing slowly through the whole book worth the effort? Maybe my conclusion is subject to a type of sunk cost fallacy, but my takeaway is that approaching a painting with a very “slow looking” approach can have large rewards, even for people who are not professional art historians.
December 9, 2024
This book was required reading in my undergraduate Art History course. While I wouldn't call it a page-turner, I give the book five stars because it represents the value of close study of single works of art and the surprising rewards that come from returning to the same works of art over time. What continues to be revealed to the viewer over time? How does the viewer change over time and therefore alter the viewer's perception of the same work? It's almost so fundamental it's taken for granted, but T.J. Clark describes these experiences and proves the exercise is worthwhile. Dare I say it is less important to finish the book than it is to heed the book's lesson and enact it in your life.
May 3, 2024
hmm… this one was a weird one. on one hand, inspiring as an exercise (returning repeatedly to and writing in depth on one painting). on the other, that painting really did not resonate with me, making the book a bit of a slog. usually, absorbing someone’s close reading of a piece will make me appreciate the piece even if it’s not to my taste, but try as i might, i simply could not summon anything close to the affinity he feels for the painting :-/ again, a cool form and concept
February 25, 2022
This is a really interesting idea for an art methodology but a little hard to get through as you find yourself asking ‘what is the point of this?’ a few times throughout. Unfortunately I couldn’t get through the whole thing but I might come back to it at a later date.
October 23, 2021
Genuinely loved this book. I read it in two four hour sessions, literally could not put it down.
August 18, 2025
4.5⭐️ (but rounded to 4)
June 18, 2025
The Sight of Death
By T. J. Clark
I first came across this book from Maggie Nelson. She explained how she is interested in what Clark explores here as a way to live our life - how can repeat visits to the same thing, and seeing it differently each time can shape and shift our worldview in current circumstances- where our attention span is constantly at risk and being distorted due to hyper connectivity.
The book was a conscious decision to carry with myself during this vacation to Spain- I didn’t want other books to distract me. I wanted to do a similar read - like the way the book is structured - sole focus on it. Nothing else but the book. It paid of somewhat.
Background - Clark visits Paul Getty museum and examines his take on two paintings by Nicolas Poussin - a. Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and b. Landscape with a Calm. I didn’t know much about this artist and safe to say, Clark won me over Poussin and his plethora of fantastic works throughout the book.
The book itself was difficult. And I am left to wonder - why? The repeat visits - slow unwinding was really well captured. There were times I’d feel like he was losing it, yet he would identify things such as the lack of shadow of the bull on the water (in Calm), that whips me back to reality. Was it intentionally missed? Poussin has such great attention to details - what happened here? Clark seemed to have moved on from it quickly - I wish he pondered a bit more. Would that be too much asking of myself, in a book where he is negating such individualism and focus upon the art itself?
I appreciated that Clark stayed away from too much personal interpretation and looked at the art more closely for what it truly is. This was a challenge for me since I think if Clark examined his own inclinations more, this could have bred a more robust exploration of the art. Of all the pieces that exists - by Poussin and other artists, clearly these two drew him in, and the why behind it - beyond the art and its intricate meaning and value, could have helped breed some life into this book - as at times, it did feel repetitive- which Clark was aware of and you could sense his frustrations along the way. There was a breaking of the fourth wall - if you will, happening every now and then.
Yet, in a world that can be deeply hung up on individualism, it’s then deeply refreshing for someone to challenge that and stay with the art constantly, is commendable and asks me of how I too can live a life like that. I can live with such a risk taking.
By T. J. Clark
I first came across this book from Maggie Nelson. She explained how she is interested in what Clark explores here as a way to live our life - how can repeat visits to the same thing, and seeing it differently each time can shape and shift our worldview in current circumstances- where our attention span is constantly at risk and being distorted due to hyper connectivity.
The book was a conscious decision to carry with myself during this vacation to Spain- I didn’t want other books to distract me. I wanted to do a similar read - like the way the book is structured - sole focus on it. Nothing else but the book. It paid of somewhat.
Background - Clark visits Paul Getty museum and examines his take on two paintings by Nicolas Poussin - a. Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake and b. Landscape with a Calm. I didn’t know much about this artist and safe to say, Clark won me over Poussin and his plethora of fantastic works throughout the book.
The book itself was difficult. And I am left to wonder - why? The repeat visits - slow unwinding was really well captured. There were times I’d feel like he was losing it, yet he would identify things such as the lack of shadow of the bull on the water (in Calm), that whips me back to reality. Was it intentionally missed? Poussin has such great attention to details - what happened here? Clark seemed to have moved on from it quickly - I wish he pondered a bit more. Would that be too much asking of myself, in a book where he is negating such individualism and focus upon the art itself?
I appreciated that Clark stayed away from too much personal interpretation and looked at the art more closely for what it truly is. This was a challenge for me since I think if Clark examined his own inclinations more, this could have bred a more robust exploration of the art. Of all the pieces that exists - by Poussin and other artists, clearly these two drew him in, and the why behind it - beyond the art and its intricate meaning and value, could have helped breed some life into this book - as at times, it did feel repetitive- which Clark was aware of and you could sense his frustrations along the way. There was a breaking of the fourth wall - if you will, happening every now and then.
Yet, in a world that can be deeply hung up on individualism, it’s then deeply refreshing for someone to challenge that and stay with the art constantly, is commendable and asks me of how I too can live a life like that. I can live with such a risk taking.
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February 15, 2019Professor McCalla– I read a lot of art history and criticism partly because I like it, and partly because art scholars seem able to write simultaneously for the professional and non-professional, something less common among music historians. Part of this, of course, is that the painting sits there while you look at it, and can be more or less well reproduced in the book; whereas music moves through time, and to pinpoint specific moments, we musicians often have to have recourse to isolated notated examples, or refer people who can read music to the score. Even so, reading what and how art scholars write is often very helpful to me in my own work.
The Sight of Death is a chronicle of Clark's going to look every day for two months at two paintings of Poussin (1594?-1665), Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, in early 2000 hung in the same room of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It's a sort of diary in which Clark's responses to the paintings, which he noted daily, vary according to the lighting in the room (i.e., the time of day, natural or artificial light), to his moods and to the cumulative effects of his daily visual, visceral and intellectual reactions to the artworks. Then as these effects crowd and linger in his mind, he also moves into an even more basic consideration, the "experiment" of his subtitle, thinking deeply about how we look at art (works are static, we are not), why we do so, what happens when we do so repeatedly, and ultimately what the relationship of human beings to art is or can be. I don't know yet how it comes out, but it's worth the trip.
The Sight of Death is a chronicle of Clark's going to look every day for two months at two paintings of Poussin (1594?-1665), Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake, in early 2000 hung in the same room of the Getty Museum in Los Angeles. It's a sort of diary in which Clark's responses to the paintings, which he noted daily, vary according to the lighting in the room (i.e., the time of day, natural or artificial light), to his moods and to the cumulative effects of his daily visual, visceral and intellectual reactions to the artworks. Then as these effects crowd and linger in his mind, he also moves into an even more basic consideration, the "experiment" of his subtitle, thinking deeply about how we look at art (works are static, we are not), why we do so, what happens when we do so repeatedly, and ultimately what the relationship of human beings to art is or can be. I don't know yet how it comes out, but it's worth the trip.
September 29, 2015
This is a beautiful book in many senses - it's lovely to hold, with great paper and has many fantastic reproductions, whose details are even better than seeing the actual painting "Landscape with Snake" in the National Gallery which has aged terribly.
However this kind of art writing often really annoys me. At times it comes across as too academic, too closed, too esoteric. I switch off or am totally baffled by some it. I don't think the author even knows what he means some of the time.
There are lots of interesting bits (who knew the restoration process could damage paintings so much) but the very broad approach to the value of paintings feels alien to me, possibly as I don't read this kind of thing very often.
Also as a painter it is strange to me that there is not more about the paint, it's application or the process of painting. I rationalise this as art criticism's needing to take the broadest possible approach to help people understand the impact of art...it's subject, its resonance...
But I like the book more than I thought I would.
And I am now really fascinated by Poussin, who I used to think was quite "light", even fey.
As a huge consumer of images on the internet, sharing a space with a painting and revisiting it and looking at it, again and again, under different lights, being in different moods, feeling different, has made me think again about the value of painting and why these objects persist
However this kind of art writing often really annoys me. At times it comes across as too academic, too closed, too esoteric. I switch off or am totally baffled by some it. I don't think the author even knows what he means some of the time.
There are lots of interesting bits (who knew the restoration process could damage paintings so much) but the very broad approach to the value of paintings feels alien to me, possibly as I don't read this kind of thing very often.
Also as a painter it is strange to me that there is not more about the paint, it's application or the process of painting. I rationalise this as art criticism's needing to take the broadest possible approach to help people understand the impact of art...it's subject, its resonance...
But I like the book more than I thought I would.
And I am now really fascinated by Poussin, who I used to think was quite "light", even fey.
As a huge consumer of images on the internet, sharing a space with a painting and revisiting it and looking at it, again and again, under different lights, being in different moods, feeling different, has made me think again about the value of painting and why these objects persist
November 25, 2008
An Art Historian's experimentation with his own approach to art. This is written in a journal-format, and the author is looking specifically at two Poussin paintings.
I enjoyed reading this. Clark's approach was simple and sincere. But, as I progressed further into the book, I realized that Clark's text lacks any academic references. His experiment depends the study of one's own personal response to a painting, rather than academic analysis. It was an interesting read, but I found myself fundamentally opposed to the message that one's subjective response is equal to rigorous academic research.
This experiment could almost be made with any two pieces of art. It left me wondering if I could find something new in a Rothko, Pollock, or Mondrian everyday of my study.
Clark does remind his reader to spend time with their object of study, which is nice.
Overall, I would recommend this to friends who enjoy T.J. Clark, Poussin, Visual Theory, or all of the above. Just keep reminding yourselves that Clark's text is only an experiment.
I enjoyed reading this. Clark's approach was simple and sincere. But, as I progressed further into the book, I realized that Clark's text lacks any academic references. His experiment depends the study of one's own personal response to a painting, rather than academic analysis. It was an interesting read, but I found myself fundamentally opposed to the message that one's subjective response is equal to rigorous academic research.
This experiment could almost be made with any two pieces of art. It left me wondering if I could find something new in a Rothko, Pollock, or Mondrian everyday of my study.
Clark does remind his reader to spend time with their object of study, which is nice.
Overall, I would recommend this to friends who enjoy T.J. Clark, Poussin, Visual Theory, or all of the above. Just keep reminding yourselves that Clark's text is only an experiment.
February 11, 2017
I didn't consider that a book like this could be written until I had read it. An example of the possibilities for art writing. If only it would be massively influential...
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February 10, 2017it is for my phd thesis. I think it is very good book
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
November 19, 2013
What possessed T. J. Clark to enter this book for publication is completely baffling to me. Here, Clark, presents his thoughts on two paintings by Nicolas Poussin (Landscape with a Calm and Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake) in the form of a diary. As this diary has few entries of a personal nature, this should accurately be described as dated collection of notes. There is a good age-old reason why notes are edited, researched further and finally put into a legible prose. I finished this book out of pure stubbornness and the one star is given for the few and far between interesting points in this book.
May 24, 2015
One of the best books on looking at painting that I have read. What it reminds one is that paintings are not genre or something that the artist did, or how he spent his childhood. All these are peripheral to the main event of the actual painting and it's to this that Clark directs most of his attention. It's a corrective to the over-curated, contextualised, biographised, "block-buster" view of painting and re-iterates the opinion that a painting is a silent, profound and eternally renewing experience. One note of warning tho'- this is not an easy read and although I found it thrilling, I think it would not appeal to those with a slighter interest in Poussin & painting in general.
July 15, 2008
Please note that I read the hardcover and not the paperback.
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