The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art WritingYale University Press, 2006 M01 1 - 260 pages 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. |
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Anthony Blunt balance bank blue body bordure Bridgeman Art Library Calm Cassiano dal Pozzo cent livres cy citadel clouds color corpse dawn Detail of Landscape Diogenes distance Dulwich Picture Gallery edge ethics face feel feet Félibien's figures foreground frame Getty Giovanni Bellori grass green ground plane happens hault hill human hundred livres Item another picture Item un autre Killed kind lake London looking Louvre metaphor morning National Gallery nature Nicolas Poussin oil on canvas ouvrage dudit Poussin painted on canvas painter painting's path Paul Getty Museum peinct sur thoille Phocion picture's pieds de long Pointel prisé la somme Pyramus and Thisbe realize running man's seems sense shade shadow Snake space stream surface things tion touch trees turn viewers visual wall washhouse whole woman words writing