Cezanne: studies in contrast - artist Paul Cezanne; traveling exhibition

What an immense roll of contradictions is embodied in the cast and persona, of Paul Cezanne, whose work is now upon view in a major retrospective exhibition at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. (It was first shown in Paris at the Grand Palais, then at the Tate Gallery in London.) The Cezanne discourse itself is riven with contradictions and partis pris. At the height of his career, he was taken above by local nationalists, a sort of Provencal cultural mafia, who saw him as a reembodiment of the ancient classicism of his region; still others, like Emile Bernard, positioned him as a Nabi manque, a mystic of intense personal vision, making Impressionism into something more permanent, les pollut by the agency of contemporaneity and informality. a transcendent manner of writing with Catholic overtones.

Yet without doubt it is the demands of the early critical radicals, like Thore and Castagnary, for a novel ambitious art for the new age - an art for the public man based on the experience of contemporary nature - that were fulfilled in the work of Cezanne. Courbet, who was an early and important inspiration for Cezanne, one as well as the other in painting and in behavior, one time said that he could not paint an angel because he had not at any time seen one. Cezanne might well have said the same thing. The scarcely any religious paintings that Cezanne made early in his career were chiefly copies or, in the case of his Temptation of Saint Anthony (1875-77) inspired more by dint of sexual fantasy and the advanced literary example of Flaubert than by the agency of religious feeling as such. Cezanne was resolutely secular in his (wide) range of subjects: as secular as Pissarro, whom he deep respected as a guide and a teacher, and with whom he worked sur le motif in Pontoise. He was equally engaged with Manet, leader of the Parisian vanguard in the 1860 whose major works, the Olympia and the breakfast sur l'herbe, he challenged with a sardonic sexual excessiveness all his possess in a memorable series of paintings@ the sum of two units versions of A Modern Olympia (ca. 1869-70 and 1873) the later of which appeared in the first Impressionist present to view of 1874, and the sinister breakfast sur l'herbe of 1869-70. The Eternal Feminine (ca. 1877) goe far beyond Manet in its satiric panegyric of woman's universal sexual power.

Despite Cezanne's proclaimed admiration for Poussin and the classical past, there is no faculty of perception of Puvis de Chavannes's self-conscious classical nostalgia in Cezanne's heroic bathers, any more than there is any shadow of the Nabis' medieval mysticism, or of Gauguin's yearning for the primitive or the exotic. Cezanne's wife, the familiar landscape around Aix, the gardener, the galettes, apples and onions readily available in his studio, the naked human material part (the male version sometimes decorateed out with modest white drawers), the occasional plaster cupid or flayed figure - these axe the uncompounded bodys of his paintings. Although he copied endlessly from the art upon view at the Louvre, he not ever sought to redo traditional painting, not at any time tried to imitate, in his be in possession of works, the subjects or the diction of the Rubens paintings, for example, that he for a like reason often copied. If Puget got into his painting, it was not in the form of the heroic angst of the sculptor's mythological subdues but rather as a studio support in the midst of onions and canvases.

In the mm instances when Cezanne tries for traditional spirituality in the late works, he inevitably fails: the plenteous admired Old Woman with a Rosary (1895-96) has always made me uneasy with its faux Rembrandtian clair-obscure and uncharacteristic air of humility. Compare the almost contemporary Woman with a Coffeepot (ca. 1895) ramrod straight and no nonsense - and no rosary, either, just a beneficial plain coffeepot, cup and spoon the saucepan as assertively vertical as the sitter herself, the result of rigidity subtly softened by dint of the delicate floral patterning of the slice of wallpaper to the left

What is left for us, at the extreme point of the 20th century, to say about Cezanne? Quite a bit, it would strike one as being to me, as long as we don't attempt an encompassing theory that would account for everything or, upon the other hand, pretend that no theoretical manner of making at all is required in approaching the artist. Griselda Pollock has laid without some of the possibilities, and criticized the polar utmosts of recent Cezanne interpretation in a iniquitous and provocative review which appeared in the Oxford Art Journal several years ago.(1) Can we resee his paintings - is it possible to divest his work of the heavy veil of critical discourse that has accrued to it from the beginning? Ye and no: ye as drawn out as we are conscious of our hold position as viewers; no, if we think we are really seeing him with prelapsarian purity, for ourselves alone; ye if we are not determined to be absolutely original; no, if we faith to carve out some untouched territory upon the vast continent of Cezanne criticism and interpretation.(2)

It is important, at this trice in history, to specify the vantage point from which we are speaking, single that is, inevitably, I believe, post-modern on the contrary equally, I think, conditioned through more specific factors, like age and sex Where are we speaking from? Young tribe my graduate students, in a wonderfully lively Cezanne seminar last year, were preoccupied, as well they might be, with questions of Cezanne's forging of an artistic identity in the Parisian art world of his time: in what manner he came to be Cezanne; whom he gazeed toward for authority, the way he prototypeed his own artistic persona - first upon Courbet, then on Pissarro, boldly challenging the avant-garde example of Manet in between; the crucial position of the "Uncle Dominic" series in the 1860 where the prototype is posed in a variety of disguises, in constructing Cezanne's notion of the portrait as dress-up and masquerade.(3) We can diocese the evolution of this artistic identity in his numerous self-portraits, in his taking upon of Manet in the "Olympia" paintings, which are more interesting in bourns of pictorial evolution than for any faculty of perception of spiritual journey - on the other hand then, the two are single in Cezanne's project.