Looking at some Cezanne drawings can be an interesting but a painful experience. Often he has a very tentative touch with a crimped and adolescent result. He seems incapable of establishing contours or proportions. Having seen last year in this same museum many hundreds of Picasso drawings, and having seen last month at the Frick Collection sixty some Rembrandt drawings and etchings, as well as some knock out Goya drawings there four years ago, I realize that Cezanne is not one of the worlds master draughtsman. However! When it comes to painting Cezanne more than holds his own in the company of those other three gentlemen. And so the moral of the story is that, for all his short comings as a draughtsman, Cezanne is a painter: he achieves his effects through the manipulation of oil paint. And in order to understand his achievement you must look at his work as painting, not as filled in drawings, not as expression with mythic implications, not as anecdote, and not as a dissertation of formal values.
Looking at those paintings it is not always immediately discernable what he was doing or attempting to do. And the longer he painted the more complex his paintings became. Many years ago, one of the first responses his paintings provoked in me was the question: what was his reference?
Among the stories told about him is that of visitors to his home in Provence who had gone walking into the woods where he was known to have painted and who found in the under brush paintings that had displeased him and which he threw away rather than go on with them. Because he painted in a way like no one else it was not immediately evident to me what there was about some paintings that he liked and kept, what there was about some that he did not complete …and there are a great many of his paintings in an unfinished state…and what there was about the paintings that he decided could not be salvaged. What was his standard for making those determinations? What was his reference?
In an effort to understand his work more intimately, I have made copies of two of them, one being the Metropolitan Museum version of The Card Players. What I have tried hard to understand and discern is what he referred to as his modulation of color. Every object has a local color as well as highlights and shadows and color reflected onto it by nearby objects. Rather than light and dark he saw highlights and shadows as warm and cool. Thus: how much can one elucidate the local color and its variants without losing the truth of the local color and the identity of the object? Roger Fry says that it was this fascination with color modulation that inspired Cezanne to make painting after painting.
On yet another level there is the matter of the tonal value of color. Josef Albers has written that the ability to discern similar tonal values among different colors is one of the rarest of all visual skills. Cezanne’s paintings are masterworks of the harmonious interplay of similar and different tonal values. Renoir stated that Cezanne had an infallible eye for color tonal values.
I have also become aware that for Cezanne a painting had a dual perception: the perception of surface and the perception of depth created on the surface. The careful balance of those two created a sensation of vibration that made the surface of the painting appear to be alive. Further, there is his understanding that the left eye and the right eye saw two different things when they looked at an object and that by restating the contour lines the surface of the painting also began to suggest movement, living form in living space.
A Cezanne painting is essentially a field of colors broken into tiny brush strokes of color. Those strokes are applied side by side creating squares but not tessarea so that the look of a mosaic is avoided. As he worked into wet areas the color applied was changed with each subsequent stroke. When you copy one of his paintings or work in the same method you become aware that the application of those brush loads of color were applied in a rhythmic succession. In some of the early paintings the strokes had a relationship to the contour of the object being depicted, in later paintings the strokes are sometimes all parallel, but in the late paintings the strokes have no relationship to one another or to the contours of the object.
In his last years Cezanne lamented that he had finally found what he had been seeking to understand but that he no longer had sufficient years left to him to make use of it. One aspect of that discovery, as I understand it, was the technique he derived in which strokes of color layered over color could be manipulated to create an exciting field of color through which one can see the depths and the forms within the perception of color. When we see a painting the first thing we see is color: as we look at the world around us, the first thing we see is color. After color there is form and depth. Looking at his unfinished paintings we can see that he worked in a reverse order: depth, form, and color.
Some of those late paintings create the most electrified response in the viewer. After the visitors have seen this exhibition they should go upstairs to the Nineteenth Century European Painting Gallery and see Cezanne’s Mont Sainte Victoire, 1902-06. It is a perfect example of his late career achievement. You are dazzled by its surface and then slowly you fall into its depths: it is a sensation of the world but not as you have ever seen the world before.
One quality that all of Cezanne’s paintings have in common is that each of them is first and foremost a painting. There is never a suggestion that the format is a view into another world. The painting is always what we see on the surface of the format. And I think Cezanne is able to make that presence paramount because of his point of departure: his subject matter is never subject matter but always a motif, (he used this word often), for making a painting. He set out to make a painting and what was in front of him was the motive for the organization and development of the picture space. In his mind, all of his paintings are paintings. It was that perception that allowed him to work in all the various genres. And it was that perspective that allowed the painters who followed him to create modern art, the painting as an object in and of itself.
It is rare that a single painter is known as a master of all the various forms. Cezanne is among that rare group. He is known as a still life painter. He is known as a landscape artist. He is known for his portraits of himself, the members of his family, and a few close colleagues. He is known for his paintings using the human figure although those paintings are few and they come late in his life. (I am politely ignoring his earliest work.) And he created one series of paintings that can be referred to as genre paintings, The Card Players. That series of five paintings and some related works that are and that might possibly be studies for the paintings, are the subject of this exhibition.
An introductory gallery exhibits prints and drawings and small paintings of the French and Dutch genre schools showing us examples of the antecedents of these paintings and in the larger gallery there are three of the known five paintings of The Card Player series. There are as well drawings and oil portraits of some of the men who worked in his village or on his estate. Not shown is the Barnes Foundation Card Players: in his will Barnes prohibited his paintings being loaned to other institutions and exhibitions. He also prohibited photographic color reproductions but as reproduction techniques have become more sophisticated the Barnes seems to have been able to disregard that prohibition. (I had hoped that with the Barnes new home currently under construction that painting might have been made available.)That painting is included in the catalogue. Neither is the privately owned Card Players exhibited but it too is included in the catalogue.
There is much hypothesizing, in the catalogue, about the order in which the paintings were made. Lacking any comment or documentation from the artist, scholars and biographers have long contradicted one another as to that order. The Met takes the position that their painting came before the larger but very similar Barnes edition. I disagree. In the Met version all of the clutter in the Barnes edition has been removed …the backgammon board on the table, the shelf with the crockery jar, the gilt picture frame, and the little girl. In the Met version all four of the men are wearing hats and those shapes can be read as a visual rhyme. In the Barnes painting the man in the center is without a hat and the rhyme is broken, to the detriment of the painting. The brush work in the Met version is tighter and more “finished”; in the Barnes edition the brush work is so loose as to suggest that it was only a color sketch, albeit a very large one. The delineation of form in the Barnes version is also less sculptural: all of the forms in that painting have the same degree of development. In the Met version the figures at the table are given a pronounced suggestion of sculptural roundness and the man in the back is allowed to appear distant by giving him less roundness. Finally, the looseness and the clutter in the Barnes painting give it the quality of a rough hewn genre painting but the tightness and lack of clutter in the Met version, the more controlled sense of the brushwork, elevate it above the genre: the painting has the stature of major art, it has greater classical “repose”, it is simply more “monumental”.
I have seen the Barnes Collection and I have seen this painting there and as far as I am concerned it is a poor second to the Met version. I might be prejudiced in this view, however, as I am intimately acquainted with the Met version brush stroke by brush stroke.
The catalogue dates those two paintings to 1890-1892; the other three paintings are dated at 1892-1896. In these three later works there are only two card players. The palette changes as well, the dominant blue with brown and gold has now shifted to brown, gold, and green. The privately owned work is described as the largest of not only these in this series but of almost all of Cezanne’s other works. Again, like the Barnes painting, the brush work seems loose and somewhat meandering. (Perhaps, in the larger format, Cezanne was simply working beyond his comfort zone …his technique simply did not work for him as well at this scale, although I don’t sense that in the Large Bathers in Philadelphia.)
Of the three I would think that the large, privately owned version is the first. Technically it is more closely related to the earlier two paintings and can be seen as a bridge between the two versions whereas we can see very clearly in the Courtauld Gallery and the Musee d’Orsay paintings that Cezanne was working in his very late, post 1896, technique.
As a device to hook the audience in to the scholarly work the museum does, the curators as well seem to be questioning: what was his reference, why did he make this series, his only genre paintings? Several reasons are suggested but I think two of them are the most likely: the situation with his former friend Zola and his desire to create great art for museums.
Emil Zola, Baptistin Baille, and Paul Cezanne were boyhood friends, school fellows in Provence, known as “the three inseparables”. As overly romantic adolescents they dreamed of becoming great poets and of dominating the world of French literature. Zola was the first to graduate and go to Paris where he did indeed become an important figure in Parisian literary and social circles. Baille remained in Provence and became a minor government official. Cezanne made the decision to become a painter.
Through Zola’s encouragement Cezanne went to Paris to study painting but after several attempts to settle there he returned to Provence permanently. Eventually, despite his earlier encouragement, Zola seemed to weary of his old friend’s slow, plodding development and appears to have written him off. (On his part Cezanne, in mid life, began to see his old friend as having become a bourgeoisie.) In his novel, L’Oeuvre, the central character was a failed painter very much as he imagined Cezanne to be. As per his usual custom, he sent Cezanne a copy of that recent work. And as was his usual custom, Cezanne sent him a thank you note. But they never spoke again after that.
The following year, 1887, Zola published the novel Le Terre, a dark view of peasant life in France, and it must have seemed to Cezanne that Zola had betrayed not only his friend but his countrymen as well, the dramatis personae whose influence had contributed to the personality of the man the boy had become.
Cezanne was very familiar with the work of museums, especially the Louvre. He must have known that while there are great still life paintings and great landscape paintings and great portraits, the paintings most often referred to as the great paintings are paintings with the human figure, paintings that comment on the human condition be the subject historical, mythological, or religious. As he was as ambitious for immortality as any other painter, he was watchful for a human subject matter. As he wanted to paint nudes but did not because he was intimidated by nude models, he could turn to those around him, the workers on his estate and the men and women of Provence. I would think that Zola’s two books were a catalyst that set him to work with that material. Choosing a subject that had historic precedence, men at leisure, would relate his work to the works in museums, and summoning all of his energies, Cezanne could produce a great painting, or a series of great paintings, that would very quietly tell the world: Zola was wrong …about his countrymen …and about his former friend.
That all five of these paintings are extant tells us that Cezanne approved of them; they met his standard …so far as I know none of them was found in the underbrush or rolled up in a closet. What then is it about these five paintings, what do they have in common, that tells us that in regard to the artist finding them successful what his reference might have been? Is it that all of the pictorial elements create a harmony, a sense of balance? Is it because each stands on its own as an object in and of itself? Is it because they are as close as he was then able to make them to his personal understanding of the sensations he saw and felt.
Georges Braque said that a landscape depicts the relationship of the viewer to the subject whereas a still life depicts the spatial relationship amongst the objects: a landscape creates a desire to observe, a still life creates a desire to touch. In a Cezanne painting one shares the artist’s feeling for the atmosphere in which those relationships exist. After that time in his early career when Pissarro introduced him to the impressionist aesthetic Cezanne focused his attention on creating light and air …the atmosphere. In each of The Card Players there is an almost palpable sense of atmosphere. I wonder if the creation of that sensation might not have been yet another part of his reference.
If I have any complaint about this exhibition it is that I was promised Cezanne’s Card Players, of which I know that there are five and I am only shown three. What had promised to be a rare experience turned out to be something of a disappointment. It almost seems to be yet another example of museums luring an audience under false pretences. However, I was able to placate myself knowing that I have now seen four of the five and that the corollary paintings, some of which are wonderful, especially Peasant 1890-1892, Privately Owned, (Picasso must have swooned when he first saw this one!) had come from Paris, St Petersburg, London, and Fort Worth. The longer I live the greater the number of paintings I discover Cezanne to have made… to my great delight!
As it stands all of the material together gives us a better understanding of the antecedents and the work that went into making these paintings but the exhibition lacks a sense of eventfulness. Most of the museum going public is bewildered, even today, by Cezanne’s paintings …he is a painter’s painter …and I think that any exhibition of his work should devote a major share of its commentary to training the museum goers’ eyes toward an understanding of the complexities of his work. In the catalogue there is a discussion of his painting but it is not solely focused on his method of painting, rather on his having painted in isolation. I would love to see an exhibition in which, perhaps, photographs show us close up details of isolated areas of his brush work similar to the three examples in this catalogue.
Finally, location is everything, and this small first floor out of the way gallery, which always feels hermetically sealed and airless to me, just off the Greek and Roman galleries, too isolated from the other collections of paintings, enhances the impression that any exhibition here is a minor rather than the major exhibition it might have been.
http://www.metmuseum.org/special/se_event.asp?OccurrenceId=%7b92AB40A5-F3CB-423C-AB19-2B266B9EB362%7d
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