T.J. Clark Picasso and Truth: From Cubism to Guernica and Lowry and the Painting of Modern Life (the latter with Anne Wagner) are out in June.
Literature and literary criticism, Poetry
Vol. 34 No. 8 · 26 April 2012 » T.J. Clark » Poem: ‘At Sils-Maria’
page 36 | 323 words
The print edition of the London Review of Books in which this poem appears and a downloadable PDF version of this poem are also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
From Andrew Wilton
I am sorry to have piqued T.J. Clark over his misunderstanding of Turner’s so-called Interior at Petworth into such a silly riposte (Letters, 10 May). Because I pointed out recent research into the picture that he has overlooked, he accuses me of philistinism. I didn’t offer an aesthetic appreciation of it, only an explanation of what it actually is in Turner’s creative process; so his comment is uncalled for. As a lifelong curator of British pictures, and particularly of Turner (I published the defamatory Italian cartoon he cites in 1987), I do not think I can be labelled so crudely. No, he has merely reinforced my point: that people who want art history to lead to – and culminate in – modernism, are wilfully indifferent to facts.
Andrew Wilton
London SW11