The Sight of Death ― An Experiment in Art Writing

The experiment conducted in The Sight of Death is that of trying to move writing closer to the experience - and especially, the tempo - of looking at paintings.
In early 2000 two great landscape paintings by Poussin hung face to face at the Getty Museum: Landscape with a Man Killed by a Snake (National Gallery, London) and the Getty's own Landscape with a Calm. T. J. Clark found himself returning morning after morning to confront the two paintings, and began to jot down his shifting responses in a notebook. After a while it dawned on him that we have almost no records of an individual's return, day after day, to a visual image - still less an inquiry into what might compel the return, and reward it.
Why does most writing about painting pretend that images reveal themselves all at once, in a single charged moment? Many of us, Clark believes, go back repeatedly to certain pictures, as if we sensed there is always more to see in them. This book is about such a process - about the wishes and fears that may drive it. Behind the experiment, finally, lies a set of questions about the nature of truth - of adequacy to experience - in visual representations. And these questions are made the more urgent by the "battle of images" being fought, especially since 11 September 2001, in the surrounding world.