The best critics have a way of working from close descriptions of paint and canvas, line and color, that causes you to see things in paintings and to think thoughts about paintings that you would never otherwise have done. This may sound like a banal thing to say, but their capacities of detailed description need to be read to be believed: from the thick impasto of details arise audacious insights. They inspire me to read the Roman authors I'm working with now, mainly Sallust and Horace, with greater care for small effects and the larger trains of thought that these effects generate.
Take Clark on Cézanne's Bathers at Rest: "Never, for a start, has a picture declared itself so openly -- so awkwardly -- as made out of separate, overdetermined parts coexisting only on sufferance. The paint is piled up and up around the contours of the bather in the center, or the one lying on the ground, or the smaller one at rear staring off into the landscape, and the build-up in each case seems intended to effect some final disengagement of figure from ground -- some absolute, and no doubt absurd, isolation of the body not just from the others next to it but from anything else. Even from light (which snaps at the heels of the figure in the background like an ineffectual shark). The picture is paratactic... Even the clouds seem to participate in the general dementia. They peer down on the poor bathers' doings with shocked solicitude, inquisitive despite themselves, like the gods in Homer."
Having read Clark -- clouds peering down like Homeric divinities! -- I can't help but see this picture as a time-lapse portrait of Odysseus cleaning up on Phaeacia, Nausicaa's island. More seriously, I see a personalization of nature that gives the painting a manic tone, both anthropocentric (the trees and clouds bend themselves around man) and alienating (as in a de Chirico cityscape, man seems fundamentally out of place). I find Cézanne difficult to think about and Clark's close-to-offhand comment brightens and energizes my thoughts, like the triangle of sunlight nipping at the heels of the bather in the back.
Another more surprising pleasure involved in reading about art is the sheer delight the writers take in reading, not the work of other art critics but poetry, film criticism, novels, philosophy, musicology, histories, you name it. If you have to guess the academic field where you're most likely to meet Pollock, Gramsci, Pound, Levi, Beckett, and Pasolini on the same page, it's this kind of writing. These names appear on p 407 of Timothy Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism. And here's the real point of this post, with apologies for the delay and the awkward translation. It's a poem about the poor, the left-wing dream or fantasy of the masses' possession of political power, the terror of the knowledge that history in the progressive sense has vanished and along with it, perhaps, the hopes of the left.
from Pasolini's The Ashes of Gramsci (1954)
eccoli, miseri, la sera: e potente
in essi, inermi, per essi, il mito
rinasce... Ma io, con il cuore cosciente
di chi soltanto nella storia ha vita,
potrò mai più con pura passione operare,
se so che la nostra storia è finita?
(Look, the wretched ones, at dusk. And powerful
in them, defenseless as they are, through them, the myth
is reborn. But I, with the knowing heart
of one who can live only in history,
shall I ever again be able to work with pure passion,
when I know that history is finished?)
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