by Jon Lackman | 27 February 2007 | Baroque/Neoclassical, Books
In the Feb. 2007 Artforum, Arthur Danto reviews T.J. Clark’s The Sight of Death, which Clark wrote after spending half a year before two Poussin paintings: “all this is pure association, and it is a pretty meager havest for six months of intense looking … the experiment ought not to have just awakened personal associations, but to have deepened our understanding of Poussin, and then of how Poussin conveyed some philosophical idea through images, even if we cannot detach that idea from the painting itself … ‘My art history has always been reactive,’ Clark writes … ‘Its enemies have been the various ways in which visual imaging of the world has been robbed of its true humanity.’ His enemies are my enemies. I am all for his project of ‘making the painting fully part of a world of transactions, interests, disputes, beliefs, ‘politics.’ I just don’t see this book as greatly advancing that agenda. Speaking politically, as he uses the term, I feel he has lost to the paintings.”
