Paul Cézanne
Catagorizing the style of Paul Cézanne’s (Say-zahn) artwork is problematic. As a young man he left his home in Provence in the south of France in order to join with the avant-garde in Paris. He was successful too. He fell in with the circle of young painters that surrounded Manet, he had been a childhood friend of the novelist, Emile Zola, who championed Manet, and he even showed at the 1st Impressionist exhibition, the one that we have already explored at Nadar’s studio in 1874. However, there were problems from the beginning. Whereas Monet and many of the other painters of this circle were primarily concerned with the effects of light and reflected color–”To hell with form!” might have been their cry, for Cézanne, form remained deeply important. Feeling out of place, he left Paris after a relatively short period and returned to his home in Aix-en-Provence. He would remain in his native Provence for most of the rest of his life. He worked in the semi-isolation afforded by the country, but was never really out of touch with the breakthroughs of the avant-garde. Like the Impressionists, he often worked outdoors directly before his subjects. But unlike the Impressionists, Cézanne used color, not as an end in itself, but rather like line, as a tool with which to construct form. Ironically, it is the Parisian avant-garde that would eventually seek him out. In the first years of the 20th century, just at the end of Cézanne’s life, young artists would make a pilgrimage to Aix, to see the man who would change painting.
Paul Cézanne is often considered to be the most influential painter of the late 19th century. Pablo Picasso, who rarely praised anyone besides himself, readily admitted his great debt to the elder master. Similarly, Henri Matisse once called Cézanne, “…the father of us all.” The Museum of Modern Art in New York has historically organized its collection so as to begin with an entire room devoted to Cézanne’s painting. The Metropolitan Museum of Art also gives over an entire large room to him. Clearly, many artists and curators consider him enormously important. The problem is, when you actually stop and look carefully at his paintings, it is not at all clear that he actually knows how to draw! Let’s go see for ourselves. I want to introduce you to three main themes in Cézanne’s art: landscape, still life, and bathers. I will begin with the theme of bathers.
Bathers
Paul Cézanne, Bather, 1885-86 50″x38″ (MoMA)
The first image that we will examine, hangs in The Museum of Modern Art. The picture is of a single male in an ambiguous landscape. The figure is pushed up to the front of the canvas and he fills it almost from top to bottom. Behind him, deep space is defined, but there is something of a visual tug-of-war going on. Cézanne has, as is traditional, defined both the near and distant ground planes, although he leaves out a middle plane which intensifies the distance between the fore and backgrounds. The trouble begins when he collapses the two. Look closely at the contour that defines the edge of the figure. Don’t look inside the line that defines the edges of his body, look just outside (see especially beside the right leg). Cézanne has changed the brushwork and color just slightly. It appears that after the background and after the figure were finished, he went back and reworked the part of the atmosphere surrounding the bather. The result is an odd shift in distance. The illusion of depth that allows our eye to travel back in space is ruptured as the reworked paint seems to cling to the foreground figure. It is as if the background is lifted forward, attaching itself to the edge of the man like a frame. Why? Why would Cézanne want to destroy the spacial relationships that he has carefully rendered. This sounds like a question that I might have asked regarding the work of Edouard Manet doesn’t it? Like Manet, it is as if Cézanne wants the viewer to try to account for this distortion–to engage actively in the picture.
Such questioning becomes even more insistent if we look at the rendering of the figure. Clearly this is not the work of Raphael nor of the refined academic technicians associated with the 19th-century Salon. It fact, the figure is a mess. Beyond being generalized, the parts do not seem to belong together. Look at the arms, for instance. The left doesn’t relate to the right. The same is true of the chest and even the face. The legs are particularly awkward. Although one is forward, it is nevertheless far too long in relation to the other. So what is the careful observer to think? Has The Museum of Modern Art made a terrible mistake? Have museums around the world given over precious wall space to a charlatan? Well, no. Cézanne could actaully draw beautifully when he chose to. So why this obviously conscious disregard for the traditions of representation? Before we try for an answer to these questions, let’s look at some more artwork.
Landscape
Paul Cézanne, Bend in the Road at Montgeroult, 1899 25-1/2″x20-1/2″ (MoMA)
Here is a painting recently acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. It was considered one of the few great cavases by Cézanne still in a private collection. It was given to the museum by Mr. and Mrs. John Hay Whitney along with six other masterpieces by Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. Some gift. Still the painting is problematic. At first, the structure of space is straight forward. As expected, there is a foreground (the green foliage at the bottom), a middleground (the road and houses) and an area of deep recession (the sky). Each of these zones are largely defined by color; green for the bushes in front, a warm ocher for the middle plane (road and houses), and blue for the sky. It is here that Cézanne begins to play tricks. Having rejected clear linear or atmospheric perspective as a means of constructing recessionary illusion, Cézanne relies on the clues afforded by scale, overlapping, and color.
Yet for all this, the space in Bend in the Road at Montgeroult, 1899 seems badly undermined. Even as we see the three zones of space in relation to each other, the painting seems oddly flat, as if the sky were pulled forward and the foreground were pushed back. Of course we still see the illusion, but even as we see the space that Cézanne’s line insists upon, the painting looks too much like three flat planes resting atop each other and the painting begins to remind us that it is, in fact, a vertical curtain. There are two means by which Cézanne has sabotaged the space of this canvas (unfortunately the effect is muted in reproduction and even more so on the computer screen–so trust me on this). The first is brushwork. In an old master landscape, the greatest detail and the most delicate brushwork exists in the foreground. The movements of the brush get broader and more generalized as space moves back. Here, however, the artist has treated the entire canvas with a consistent level of clarity, or lack there of, leveling the sense of near and far. Secondly, Cézanne has understood the potential of color, as opposed to chiaroscuro and linear perspective to structure or destablize space.
Have you noticed that in the middle of the sky, just to the left of the church steeple and the tree, there is a small smudge of brown paint. It is the same ocher used to render the shadows in the road and on the roofs. What is this?! Have you ever seen a dense brown smudge just floating in the sky? I don’t think so. So what are we as the viewer to make of it? Is it a mistake? Was Cézanne a dottering old man by 1899 Paul Cézanne, Bend in the Road at Montgeroult, 1899 who accidently hit the canvas as his arms flailed about and then was too lazy to wipe it out and repaint that section? No. So what is it then? Well, when you look at the ochre smudge that visually links, because of like color, to the houses and road in the middle ground, what happens to the deep space of the sky? Do you notice how the ochre smudge refuses to sit back in deep space but instead pushes forward toward the middle plane of the houses. When seen in person, the brown paint that hangs in the sky actually brings the sky with it, denying the illusion of deep space entirely. Also, note the bright sky blues in the foreground bushes. Just as the ochre spot in the sky forces the sky forward, so the clear blues that oddly appear within the viewer’s reach, punch holes in the solidity of the foreground. The brown in the back pushes forward and the blue in the front pushes back. The result is a flattening of space or perhaps a more honest expression of the true flatness of the canvas.
Still Life
Before we move on to still life, let me describe a few issues relating to the genre itself. Think back to our early discussion of the ancien regime at the beginning of the semester. In David’s era, still life was considered the least important subject. Only the most minor artists bothered with what was then seen as the most purely decorative and trivial type of painting. The heirarchy of subjects went roughly like this:
Most important: historical & religious themes (often very large scale)
Important: portraiture (usually of moderate scale)
Less important: landscape & genre (themes of common life, usually of modest scale)
Least important: still life (small)
There had been one significant historical exception. In the 17th century in Northern Europe and particularly in the Netherlands, still life blossomed. But this period was brief and had little impact in France other than in the work of Chardin. So why would Cézanne turn so often to this discredited subject? Actually, it was the very fact that still life was so neglected that seems to have attracted Cézanne to it. So outmoded was the iconography (symbolic forms and references) in still life that this rather hopeless subject was freed of virtually all convention. Here was a subject that offered extraordinary freedom, a blank slate that gave Cézanne the opportunity to invent meaning unfettered by tradition. By the way, Cézanne would almost single-handedly revive the subject of still life and he made it an important subject for Picasso, Matisse, and others in the 20th century.
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Basket of Apples, 1893 35-12″x21-1/2″ (Art Institute of Chicago)
The image above looks simple enough, a wine bottle, a basket of fruit tipped up to expose a bounty of fruit inside, a plate of what are perhaps stacked cookies or rolls, and a tablecloth both gathered and draped. Nothing remarkable, at least not until one begins to notice the odd errors in drawing. Look, for instance, at the lines that represent the close and far edge of the table. I remember an old student of mine, in a class several years back, looking at this a shouting out, “I would never hire him as a carpenter!” What she had noticed was the odd stepping of a line that we expect to be straight. But that is not all that is wrong. The table seems to be too steeply tipped at the left, so much so that the fruit is in danger of rolling off it. Also, the bottle looks tipsy and the cookies are very odd indeed. The cookies stacked below the top layer seem as if they are viewed from the side, but at the same moment, the two on top seem to pop upward as if we were looking down at them. This is a key to understanding the questions that we’ve raised about Cézanne’s pictures so far.
Like Edouard Manet, from whom he borrowed so much, Cézanne was prompted to rethink the value of the various illusionistic techniques that he had inherited from the masters of the Renaissance and Baroque eras. This was due in part to the growing impact of photography and its transformation of modern representation. While Claude Monet borrowed from the camera the fragmenting of time, Cézanne, ever at odds with Monet, saw this mechanized segmenting of time as artificial and at odds with the preception of the human eye.
By Cézanne’s era, the camera did shatter time into tiny fragments as do modern cameras that can easily be set so that the shutter is open to light for only 1/1000 of a second. Cézanne pushed this distinction between the vision of the camera and of human vision even further. He reasoned that the same issues applied to the illusionism of the old masters, of Raphael, Leonardo, Caravaggio, etc. For instance, think about how linear perspective works. Since the Early Renaissance, constructing the illusion of space required that the artist remain frozen in a single point in space in order maintain consistent recession among all receding orthogonals. This frozen vantage point belongs to both the artist and then the viewer. But is it a full description of the the experience of human sight? Cézanne’s still life suggests that it is not.
If a Renaissance painter set out to render Cézanne’s still life objects (not that they would, mind you), that artist would have placed himself in a specific point before the table and taken great pains to render the collection of tabletop objects only from that original perspective. Every orthoganol line would remain consistant (and straight). But this is clearly not what Cézanne had in mind. His perspectives seems jumbled. When we first look carefully, it may appear as if he was simply unable to draw, but if you spend more time, it may occur to you that Cézanne is, in fact, drawing carefully, although according to a new set of rules. Seemingly simple, Cézanne’s concern with representing the true experience of sight had enormous implications for 20th century visual culture. Cézanne realized that unlike the fairly simple and static Renaissance vision of space, people actually see in a fashion that is more complex, we see through both time and space. In other words, we move as we see. In contemporary terms, one might say that human vision is less like the frozen vision of a still camera and more like the continuous vision of a video camera. Also, Cézanne faced an additional problem, the static nature of the canvas. So very tentatively, he began the purposeful destruction of the unified image.
Let me give you an example. Look again at the cookies, or whatever they are, stacked upon the plate in the upper right. Is it possible that the gentle disagreements that we have noted result from the representation of two slightly different view points? These are not large ruptures, but rather, they suggest careful and tentative discovery. It is as if Cézanne had simply depicted the bottom cookies as he looked across at them and then as he looked more slightly down at the top cookies after shifting his weight to his forward leg. Furthermore, I’m not sure that he was all that proud of these breaks that allow for more than a single perspective. Look, for instance, at the points where the table must break to express these multiple perspectives and you will notice that they are each hidden from view. Nevertheless, in doing this, Cézanne changed the direction of painting. Cézanne pushes these issues even further in his c.1895 canvas, Still Life with Plaster Cupid. Here Cézanne’s discoveries enter into the realm of Cartesian philosophy. WARNING! I am now going to launch into a wierd tangential discussion. Do not let your eyes glaze over. Do not skip or even skim over this. This material is really important and it is not difficult to understand as long as you read carefully. Okay, ready, here we go…
At the end of the last paragraph I used the word “Cartesian.” It is capitalized because it refers to the philosophy of the great proto-enlightenment thinker Rene Descartes. Have you ever heard of him? Even if you have never seen or heard the name of this great rationalist, it is likely that you will recognize one of his famous phrases such as “I think, therefore, I am.” This odd sentence is the end result of his effort to find irrefutable proof that he actually existed. Philosophers often ask odd questions that are meant to reveal fundamental truths. Can you imagine for a moment asking yourself this very question–How can I actually prove that I exist? Descartes realized an elegent solution, his very ability to ask the question was the proof of independent consciousness and therefore, of his existence.
With such questions, Descartes would raise many considerations that would shape the modern world. Sometimes these questions raised, in turn, conclusions seemingly at odds with each other such as his scepticism of both perception and of self-evident assumption. Ironically, such thoughts would eventually lead to a reappraisal of our confidence in society’s scientific empiricism. Empiricism relies upon objectiveity. You will remember that the word “objective” means a truth that is beyond personal experience. In contrast, the word “subjective” is directly linked to personal experience. Here is an example. Imagine a minor accident between a taxi and a city bus. A patrolman comes along to reconstruct the event. Does he only ask the cab driver what took place or does he also ask the passenger in the back of the cab and the bus driver and the riders on the bus? The cop’s goal is the reconstruct what “actually” happened. But if we take a post-Cartesian position we might ask whether there really was a single actual (objective) event or whether there were actually multiple (subjective) truths, each the result of each witness’s perspective.
Let’s take a more directly applicable example. Look about the room that you are currently in. It probably has six sides: four walls, a floor, and a ceiling. When an architect drew a diagram of your room he/she would have conceptually stepped outside of the space so that it could be understood in total. But is this objective view a false one? Now in the built room, you cannot see its totality in a single moment. We can only see bits and pieces of the room at any one time and must rely upon memory to understand the room as a whole. Your more subjective experience has historically been considered less important than the architect’s objective conception even though you experience directly and the architect knows the room only theoretically.
Regarding the traditional heirarchical relationship between objective and subjective, Cézanne seems to ask, “which is more true?” and his conclusion mirrors an important development of modernism. In Still Life with Plaster Cupid, it is the subjective view that constructs the space. Cézanne has placed a plaster cast (copy) of an ancient Roman sculpture of a cupid (the son of Venus) on a tabletop so that it dominates the composition as did the bather that we discussed earlier. To an artist of the 19th century such classical sculpture would refer to the great humanist triumph of the Greeks and Romans and the birth of naturalism. In fact, one of the most prominant features of such sculpture would be its contraposto (you remember this: axial shifts responding to weight borne by one leg). Actually, Cézanne’s li’l god-ling is also twisting at the waist, the body in a subtle spiral torsion.
Again, the space is odd, the floor especially, seems to rise up too steeply with the stacked canvases forming its uneven perimeter. Have you noticed that the way that the canvases that line the floor, shape the space of the room and that this shaping is related to the twisting of the cupid? Let do this point by point. The right foot of the sculpture points roughly towards us and aligns, more or less, with the receeding orthoganol of the table. The figure’s hips have turned. They are aligned with the plane of the canvas at the extreme left that is partly hidden behind the blue tablecloth. The Cupid’s shoulders are turned even further and align with the canvas that rests behind the godling’s torso. This is clearly not the objective space of the architect.
Paul Cézanne, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, c.1895 27, 1/2″x22 1/2″(Courtauld)
Cézanne has clearly sought to match the perception of space to the movement of the the body. But isn’t that what we really experience?! When you walk into a room, do you see the room as an objective whole? No. We can only see a fragment at a time. But as we’ve already established, we don’t actually see in fragements we see continuously and space is shaped by our continuous movement through it. Try it. Focus on any straight line in the room you are now in. Lean forward, and as you might expect, the angles of the room shift. In Still Life with Plaster Cupid, we see Cézanne’s attempt to render true human vision, vision that is subjective, continuous, and informed by memory.
