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?... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0300117264
• ISBN13: 9780300117264
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Yale University Press
• Length: 192 Pages
• Weight: 1.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.5" x 1.0" x 6.3"

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.