This
exhibition operates on two levels. One: it brings to our attention the wife of
the painter Paul Cézanne, and through a closer study in twenty four of the
twenty nine portraits he made of her, it wants to see if we cannot arrive at a
better understanding of her character, her personhood, which, for the most part,
has been left blank or has been distorted by the subjectivity in the
biographical data. Two: as these portraits …and many, many sketches…were made
over an almost thirty year period this is a wonderful opportunity for a focused
study of the artist’s development, the maturing of his technique or “style” if
you will. The catalogue has a chapter on his painting technique and one on his
drawing and his materials. They are extremely well researched and invaluable.
The Cézanne’s met in 1869 when
Hortense Fiquet was nineteen, Paul Cezanne thirty. She might have been his
model, the record is unclear. In 1872 their son Paul was born. In 1886 they were
married in the presence of the Cézanne family in Aix. We seem not to know if
her father was present at either the civil or the religious ceremonies. He was
living at the time of the marriage. (Her mother had died when she was four.)
Nor do we seem to know if he knew about or had an opinion of the relationship…the
catalogue essays have little to say about her side of the family…perhaps the
record is silent as well.
The reason most commonly given in
the biographies for the Cézanne’s not marrying is that his father was an
authoritative head of the house, a patriarch of the clan, an autocrat of the
breakfast table, a banker who had pulled himself up by his bootstraps and who likely
got his opinions from the newspapers. In the portrait that Cezanne did of his
father he is doing just that: reading the newspaper, a conservative scandal
sheet. The father, begrudgingly, and after much encouragement from the mother,
had agreed to support his son with a meager income whilst he mastered the craft
and the art of painting. (This arrangement was maintained for twenty five
years.) Paul feared and perhaps the mother concurred that should the father
find out about Hortense the stipend would be cut off.
We are left to assume that the
father’s potential displeasure with his son’s having a mistress was another
example of his frugality: he would support a son but not a son and his
mistress. Or perhaps it was his sense of moral indignation …the family was Catholic. If so hypocrisy
would be a better name for it as he was known to have availed himself of the
charms of the household staff. When he did learn the truth his response was
anticlimactic…as if he mused to himself: Like father like son. But the impact
might have been lessened by the reality that this had been a relationship of
seventeen years and, more importantly, by the pleasant discovery of his only
grandson and male heir.
Once married and as the wife of the
man who almost immediately became the head of the household upon his father’s subsequent
death, Hortense was never warmly welcomed into the family fold. The biographical
record has assumed that this had something to do with the character of Hortense
…that she was dull, cold, and aloof, or the character of the mother and the
sister who were also dull, cold, and aloof. (As is so commonly said, a man
always marries his mother.) But in all likelihood it might have had something
to do with the mores of the times. As those of us who have read our Proust
know, in turn of the century France a man was expected to have a mistress, and allowed
to have children with her, but one did
not marry his mistress. Just ask Charles Swan. It is even possible that
this social prohibition has entered into and colored the biographical accounts
of others.
The most common characteristic of the
Cezanne marriage is that Paul and Hortense rarely lived together, or for very
long periods when they did. This seems not to have been an issue for either of
them. Apparently there are no documents in the archives that explain it, but it
can readily be assumed that because he was so difficult and on many occasions
socially inept, at times bordering on serious emotional disturbance, the
respite was a necessity for her. As she was not an artist and seems to have had
no interest in art or much else other than the fashions of the day, separation
worked for him as well. It has also been reported elsewhere that Cézanne was
extremely shy around women and especially in the presence of nude models.
Perhaps having found someone who would share his bed once, he was content to
have mated for life. Perhaps she was one of those women who in giving herself
to a man gave herself for her lifetime. At the same time he was Catholic,
perhaps she was as well, and monogamy can be considered by some as a sacrament
despite its legal status. Whatever the reasons they shared a relationship of
over thirty years which could be described as respectful and, in its own way,
loving. A very good indication of this interpretation would be the father-son
relationship between Paul and Paul fils.
It has been a common experience
throughout my lifetime to have known or to have heard of a separated or
divorced couple wherein the wife has turned against the husband with such
bitterness and anger that she has demanded that her children too vilify and
abandon their father. (As in “Hell hath no fury…”). In the biographical record
Cézanne has always been pictured as a loving, doting father to his son, albeit
often from a distance, and his son has always been reported to have shown his
father obedience, respect, and love. It has always seemed obvious to me that
this attitude on the part of the son was likely the result of his mother’s
example.
I was surprised in reading the
catalogue to see the remarks made by Roger Fry to the effect that the son Paul
was nothing but a little bourgeois. (I have read these remarks elsewhere.) This
could hardly have been news. When one looks over the above cast of characters
one sees nothing but little groupings of bourgeoisies on both sides of the
divide. (Thus my surprise that the remark, dismissive of Paul fils, has been
repeated: it wasn’t his fault.) That Paul Cezanne père was born into, reared,
and lived the whole of his adult life in this milieu and that he was able to
discover, nurture, develop, and realize his genius is the noteworthy biographical
detail. How does that happen!
That she posed for her husband would
indicate that this activity had a degree of pleasure for Madam Cézanne. Under
Freud’s pleasure/pain principle …we do those things that give us pleasure, we
avoid those things that give us pain…the length of the circumstantial evidence
is a sufficient explanation.
In order to be a good model one has to enjoy
being looked at. Many, many people dislike being looked at and it might never
be apparent to them until someone asks them to pose. If a person does not like
being looked at it is almost impossible to draw them. It is as if the pencil,
the marking device, comes under the control of the model’s will. On the other
hand, if the person likes being seen, if he finds modeling a pleasant
experience, the pencil flies over the surface of the paper. In fact the best
models are exhibitionists. That Madam Cézanne posed for her husband over and
over again can only be understood as something very pleasing to her, although
so long as the record is silent, we will never know why. By contrast, how many
portraits did he make of his son, who we know from the record disliked posing
…very much.
The human personality is as
multifaceted as a rose cut diamond. With such a large number of portraits one
might think that it would be easy to deduce the personality of the sitter.
Unfortunately ascertaining the personality of this woman through these portraits
is not an easy task. Not very many of them are actually finished and in most of
them Cézanne was making a painting with a figure which is something
distinctively different from a study focused on the character of the sitter. The
mistake that has been made in the biographies is to lose sight of that and to interpret
something in a way that had not been intended. In these paintings this woman
has no more personality than any of Renoir’s laundresses or Degas’ little
ballerinas, nor was she intended to have. In his essay The Apples of Cézanne
Meyer Schapiro argues against the belief that Cezanne’s paintings were only
about painting. He claims for the apples a mythic status that inspired the
artist to take up his brushes over and over again. Indeed that might well be
true of apples but the paintings are first and foremost paintings and every
painting is first and foremost about painting: before stepping away from his
work every artist must look one last time to ascertain that this one will
survive the scrutiny of his peers and his patrons.
In only one of these paintings do we
have a sense of the personality of Madame Cézanne and of the artist’s feelings
for her: Madam Cézanne in the Conservatory, Plate 28. In this finished portrait
…but unfinished painting… the details and verisimilitude fade away from the
centered face. Surrounded as she is by suggestions of growing things we might
be tempted to say, a la Schapiro, that this is Ceres, mother earth. And she is
indeed kind and benevolent and nurturing and eternally young. (She was forty
one and looked twenty.) It is uncanny how closely Cézanne transferred those
qualities from the drawing he had made earlier, Plate 40. Uncanny in that
nothing seems to have been lost in the longer process, a process wherein
Cézanne often made changes constantly as he worked a canvass to completion. It
is one of the very late portraits, 1893, and so it is possible that Cézanne,
who was always mindful of making museum paintings, see Cézanne’s Card Players, MMA
2011,set out specifically here to make a museum portrait revealing the
character of the subject that could pass scrutiny in that genre. In fact it
might have come to his attention that there was a void in his work: almost all
of his portraits were of men. But it might also be true that he saw something
in this portrait sketch, something symbolic, that he wanted to preserve,
Otherwise the best example of Madam
Cézanne’s personality in this exhibition is the letter she wrote to her friend
Madam Choquet. It could convince you of the validity of handwriting analysis.
In the letter Madam Cézanne is all charm and friendliness and she seems a fine,
mature, worldly woman anyone would be happy to meet. But it is her penmanship
in the letter that is so revealing. This is the hand writing of a person who
was trained, perhaps in public school, to write in script and to write well, in
fact, very well. Every letter is well shaped and legible and of the nineteenth
century letters I have seen, this is perhaps one of the most beautifully
executed. The writer obviously took great pride in that talent. And even in her
middle years she continued to perform for the approval of her mentors. (At The
Morgan I once tried to read the
cramped, tiny, illegible hand of Ingres. I couldn’t.)
Despite
our desire to know her, or the museum’s desire to make us want to know her, because
the evidence remains so scanty I think we should probably accept the insight of
Karl Jaspers in his early book, Psychology, in which he states that a person
cannot be known: each of us is an experience in the process of becoming; when
we die, the only thing that remains of us is the subjective memory others have
of us. Attempting to ascertain her personality from these portraits is probably
just as subjective: very likely each person can find one portrait he likes
better than the others and, having read the biographies, will be ready to
proclaim that this one is the real Madam Cézanne. I think, given the scanty
evidence that the Cezanne’s were a good, if not a qualified good, couple who
found some measure of peace and happiness together, as we love him because of
his work so should we love her as having been kind and loving to him …whenever and
to whatever degree that was.
In
regard to the development of Cézanne’s technique …style…there is really only
very clear cut evidence here of what we have already known: that Cézanne was a
colorist, that he abhorred areas of solid color, that he sought relentlessly to
define form, that he developed a canvas all at once (balancing colors and tonal
values), and that he would redraw and restate contour lines. This is not to say
that what is presented here is tiresome. On the contrary. It is well presented
here in a succession of finished and partially finished works and preliminary
sketches.
How
was he able to maintain his interest in what the rest of us would consider a
laborious and tedious process? Plates 12 and 23 show that from the white ground
up he applied his patches of color building the forms through the modulation of
color. One might have thought that he would have started with a solid color that
defined the shapes and then filled them in in order to state the forms.
Apparently not. Through his method there is no sense of each form until much
later in the process. I’m not sure that many people have the patience for that
kind of slow development. Nor that they would have the courage to sit in front
of a blank white ground eager to go through the process all over again. What
was Cézanne’s profound interest? What drove him?
By
contrast, in his drawings we see the same technique being practiced for thirty
some years with hardly any stylistic change at all. In the catalogue we see an
early academic study, so we know he could draw differently if he chose to do
so. I think this display of similar drawings helps us to understand why Cézanne
was a painter’s painter. Certainly he was not a draftsman, in the manner of
Rembrandt or Picasso. His drawing is hardly more than a tool, a means for him
to find the right presentation of his motif. In fact in all of my years of
museum going, now in excess of fifty some years, these are the first of his
drawings that I think I have ever seen. I have seen one or two etchings which
were of no interest to me at all. I have seen many started but unfinished
watercolors. I might have seen an isolated drawing here and there …but I don’t
remember them. And it was a complete surprise to me that the Morgan Library
owns one of his notebooks. I thought I knew their inventory well enough to have
known that.
Thus
the high point
of this exhibition for me is the chance to see this group of drawings. In all
of them Madam Cézanne seems to be softer, more tender, and obviously someone he
cared for very much, someone to whom he had made a commitment of couplehood. She
seems almost the same age over that long number of years. Would this imply that
she had a symbolic meaning for him? That she was his anima, his feminine self? Seen
in the company of the paintings for which they are sometimes the preliminaries they
give me a far greater insight into his achievement than simply a repetition of
paintings. That all of this is occasioned by the presentation of his work with
Madam Cézanne and the questions this raises about their feelings for one
another, even though those questions are unanswered and will never be answered,
this meditation on that facet of his personality deepens my interest in him as
a person.
Lest
I ignore it: whenever I am in Boston
I make it a point to visit their Cézanne; Madam Cézanne in a Red Armchair. I
think the stripes in her skirt are one of the great moments in western
painting. I was in Boston
a few weeks ago (scroll down for those comments) and was sad not to have been
able to see her, but not all that sad as I knew I was coming here and could pay
my respects at that time. On every visit to the Met I pay my respects to Madame
Cézanne in the Conservatory, an unfinished painting to which nothing could be
added. Had he painted nothing other than these two portraits he would still be considered
one of our greatest painters and certainly my favorite.
I
have to say that I disliked the venue for this exhibition, in what appears to
be the overlarge lobby of the addition housing the Robert Lehman Collection.
This is a lovely modern architectural environment designed by Kevin Roche and
John Dinkeloo. But it is too much an architectural statement to host an
intimate special exhibition such as this. The space is too broken up. It would
have been much nicer to have had all of the work visible from one vantage
point, to have had an insistent presence of the subject, rather than having it obscured
by piers and voids …with the drawings in a dark nook off to the side. While
this might work for the Lehman Collection …usually featuring a magnificent
Ingres portrait in oils that dominates the entire wing… it doesn’t work for
this exhibition.
Fifty
six years ago when I first started going to the Met this space was a much
smaller room with a bay window overlooking the park. And it had a specific
function: it was a smoking lounge. Even though I love modern architecture I
have always been sorry that it was replaced. However; there are the front steps
now for a quick gasp of fresh air.
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