The Sight of Death
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,...
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, the capacity of certain images to sustain repeated attention, and how pictures respond to, but also resist, their viewers' deepest wishes. 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.
T.J.克拉克（T.J.Clark，1943-），以新马克思主义艺术史家闻名于当代美术界，早年就学于剑桥大学圣约翰学院，30岁在伦敦大学考陶尔德艺术研究院获得美术史博士学位。在英国多所大学担任教职后，年仅37岁的即担任了美国哈佛大学艺术史教授，现为伯克莱加州大学现代艺术校级教授。著有《现代生活的画像：马奈及其追随者艺术中的巴黎》等“新艺术史”三部曲及《告别观念》等。