Early in January 2000 the art historian T. J. Clark arrived in Los Angeles for a six-month stint at the Getty Research Institute. He was fortunate to see, in the Getty Museum, two great pictures by Poussin, the Getty’s ‘Landscape with a Calm’ and the National Gallery’s ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, on loan from London. Over a period of weeks Clark visited the pictures almost every day and was able to register the tiny but memorable changes brought about not only by the process of intense contemplation but the traces left in memory and dream fragments which could only be clarified by more looking.
Attempts to translate these experiences stimulated but never dogmatically proposed a new form of art historical writing. In previous scholarly works — on Courbet and Manet — Clark was rightly insistent on the political and sociological contexts in which these painters worked. Now he goes further. For the question here is not ‘what does this picture mean?’ but ‘how do I see it?’ Or rather, ‘receive it?’ ‘How does time alter the spectator, and, in changing light, the picture itself?’ His reflections are written as diary entries, and if these become modified in real time that is part of the process. ‘I want to write a reaction … not a theory,’ he writes. Part of this is a revolt against the present-day dominance of the moving image, and partly a rebuke to the so-called elitism of pure contemplation. The result is wonderfully dynamic, and, as he concentrates more and more on ‘Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake’, relevant in ways that could not have been foreseen.
The picture is easily read. On a canvas which Clark remembered as far wider than it actually is something terrible has taken place.
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