Cézanne's Provence
May 6, 2006
East Building Auditorium
Held in conjunction with the exhibition
Cézanne in
Provence
Slide lectures by noted scholars address Cézanne's paintings of Provence, the countryside of his childhood and greatest source of inspiration. A panel discussion will follow, with the lecturers joined by Philip Conisbee, senior curator of European paintings, National Gallery of Art; Nina Kallmyer, professor of art history, University of Delaware; and Joe Rishel, senior curator of European painting, Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Cézanne's Very Particular
Truth
Joachim Pissarro,
curator, department of painting and sculpture, The Museum
of Modern Art, New York
Shortly before his death in 1906, Cézanne said to Émile Bernard: "I owe you truth in painting, and I will communicate it to you" (Je vous dois la vérité en peinture, et je vous la dirai). Sadly, Cézanne died a few weeks later, before his promise to Bernard could be fulfilled. Bernard himself almost had a (metaphoric) heart attack as a result; he could not forgive himself for having let Cézanne die before hearing him speak the truth. He lost his chance of getting to hear "the Truth" from the artist whom Matisse called "The God of Painting" only a few months after his death.
In fact, the question of "truth" (or of the "ideal formula") for painting had long been on Cézanne's mind. This had even been the subject of a fierce battle (that almost ended in a physical fight) between Cézanne and Paul Gauguin in 1881 when the two artists were staying with Camille Pissarro and his family. Gauguin was profoundly irritated by what he interpreted as a sign of ultimate arrogance on Cézanne's part and cynically suggested that Pissarro try to "make [Cézanne] speak in his sleep" in order to find out what this famous "formula" was about.
This lecture will question what Cézanne could possibly have meant by "truth in painting" or the "ideal formula." The question is all the more perplexing as the notion of some "truth" in painting could make sense in the mouth of a seventeenth-century academicist but is much more difficult to comprehend from an artist who claimed that the essence of his art practice was his petite sensation.
In the end, Cézanne can be described as having coined a new conception of "truth," one based not so much on the classical definition of truth —the representation of something = the thing represented (ADEQUATION AD REM) —as on a novel concept whereby the truth has to reflect the inner personality of the author of the representation. Joachim Pissarro argues that this "new truth" was already not so new by Cézanne's time, since Zola himself had developed a critical and aesthetic system based on a similar conception of truth; the sources of this conception of truth originally derived from the group of Jena artists, critics, and philosophers who worked together in Germany in the 1790s (the Schlegel brothers, Novalis, Schelling, etc.).
The Distance Traveled: Cézanne, War, and Mass
Culture (1870–1871)
André Dombrowski, instructor
of modern European art and architecture, Smith College
In the late 1860s and early 1870s, when Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir made painting explicitly in sync with the new leisure industry, Cézanne proposed—in scenes of murders, orgies, loaded interiors, and eroticized copies after fashion plates—a deliberately contrary view of the surface texture and spontaneity in modern life. The "heroism of modern life" has too often been equated with the fleeting, the superficial, and the blasé—the putative texture of urban and suburban sociability—leaving little room for Cézanne's more psychological and expressive counterproposals. Pictures that do not turn on the improvised quality of leisure, the exchange of money, or the pathos of a newly emerging social uniformity, pictures that probe for deeper emotional meanings, are often relegated to the realm of the primordially passionate. Indeed, even when appropriating the very terms of the painting of modern life—in choosing to copy in paint three fashion plates from the widely circulated Parisian fashion journal La Mode illustrée—Cézanne countermanded his colleagues' disengaged focus on the surface of things and turned his sources into loaded historical narratives.
This lecture situates Cézanne's redefinition of modern-life painting firmly within the artistic and political climate of the years around 1870, emphasizing in particular his use and understanding of popular culture in times of war and revolution. The talk focuses on Cézanne's series of fashion plate copies, done in 1871 or shortly thereafter, and the changes—iconographically, psychologically, semantically—that he introduced to his sources. In this series Cézanne tested avant-garde painting's cultural and historical adaptability in a time of national crisis. For Cézanne, tellingly, chose two fashion plates that were published in Paris on July 3 and July 31, 1870, shortly before and after the outbreak of the war on July 19. The third plate was published on May 7, 1871, two weeks before the start of the Commune's bloody week. One of the important changes Cézanne made when painting the fashion prints in Provence—a fact gone unnoticed in the literature to date—was to insert a tricolor in one.
Cézanne—in contrast to Manet—has often been portrayed as an apolitical painter, escaping the draft by "hiding" in Provence, leading painting away from scenes of political actuality toward still lifes and landscapes. Dombrowski believes, however, that Cézanne thematized his very distance from politics (and from the political center of Paris) in his early Provençal appropriations of Parisian popular culture. Beside the fashion plate copies, he painted a prosaic interior scene based on Wagner's overture to Tannhäuser, turned a champagne bottle label into a mythological painting, tried his hand at an allegory of the Republic (an attempt, according to Dombrowski, that ultimately resulted in his Eternal Feminine), and was portrayed by Pissarro in front of political caricatures published during the early Third Republic. This talk will limn the outlines of this uncharacteristically political voice of Cézanne—as muted, distanced, and ironic as it may be—and show how he turned his distance from politics into a productive use of metropolitan popular culture for provincial painting.
Cézanne's Failure
Kathryn
A. Tuma, assistant professor of modern art, The Johns Hopkins
University
Throughout the letters Cézanne wrote during the last years of his life we hear a refrain that amounts to something like a lament: over and again, the painter bemoans the fact that he was failing — indeed that he had failed — and that he was sure to die before he reached his long-sought "goal" in painting. Having spent the better part of fifty years relentlessly pursuing "the study of nature," Cézanne oscillated in his last days between a crushing despair that attached itself to this conviction of failure and, alternatively, a sustaining belief that he might finally be getting somewhere. Considering the tremendous legacy that Cézanne's work leaves for the history of modern art, pictorial indications of what Cézanne might have meant by "failure" are difficult to discern. Yet Cézanne's perceived failure to "realize after nature" points toward complex theoretical questions about his artistic practice: Exactly what was it, for Cézanne, that his work was failing to do? What was the "goal" to which he alluded in letters and conversations during the last decade of his life? What was the nature of "the dream of art" that he had pursued his entire life that he believed he had not yet succeeded in reaching?
This talk explores the conceptual implications of Cézanne's resolute declarations of artistic failure. First, it proposes that what is most intriguing about what, for instance, the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously called "Cézanne's Doubt" is the other side of what is suggested in the logical structure of Cézanne's complaint: in order for Cézanne to have been so certain that he had failed, or that he had not yet reached his "goal" in painting, there must have been just as firm a conviction that there was in fact something very specific to be achieved. This talk pursues such questions in the context of an examination of the artist's late work, a period when Cézanne was increasingly outspoken about issues relating to his "method" of painting. The language he used in passages discussing his work was frequently laced with a scientistic vocabulary. The recourse to scientism is consistent with the positivist philosophical ideology that dominated the Third Republican culture within which the artist's practice developed. Can Cézanne's notion of success and failure be understood within such a theoretical framework?
Cézanne
and Puget
Theodore Reff, professor emeritus of art history,
Columbia University
Cézanne's interest in Nicolas Poussin, epitomized by his reported (and often misunderstood) remark about wishing to "redo Poussin from nature," is of course well known, as are the few copies he drew after the Shepherds of Arcadia. Less well known is the admiration he expressed for the volatile Provençal personality and the naturalistic, highly dramatic style of the seventeenth-century sculptor Pierre Puget, whose monumental figures and groups he copied all his life, not only in the Louvre but from casts in the Trocadero Museum as well as a cast in his studio. Consistent with this taste was Cézanne's equal admiration for two artists who were in turn important influences on Puget: namely, Michelangelo and Rubens. So strong were their affinities that Puget was often called "the Michelangelo of France" and "the Rubens of sculpture." All three artists, along with Eugène Delacroix, another of Cézanne's favorites, were celebrated by Charles Baudelaire, his favorite poet, as "beacons" in the history of art. These indeed were the masters who, more than Poussin, appealed to Cézanne's romantic imagination and whose works he returned to throughout his career, both as objects to copy after and learn from and as models for figures in his own compositions, in one memorable case even representing statuettes then attributed to Puget and Michelangelo in the same painting.
This lecture seeks to identify the entwined and mutually reinforcing influences on Cézanne of Michelangelo, Rubens, and above all Puget, whose Provençal origin and temperament held an additional appeal for him. As part of this effort, Reff will interpret Cézanne's reported remarks on Puget in the light of his own practice in painting portraits and landscapes and will explore why specific aspects of the subject matter, form, and content of Puget's sculptures appealed to Cézanne and how he incorporated them into his own work.
Cézanne in the Wild
Richard Shiff, professor
of art history, University of Texas at Austin
Wildness often connotes lack of control. The mechanisms of control violated by a wild artist may well be thoroughly artificial cultural constructs. A culture of romanticism, even a culture of classicism, tolerates the violation of artificial controls and a return to "the wild." Wildness is a natural state of being; living in "the wild" is natural.
In many respects the appreciation of Cézanne as both a naturalist-impressionist and a symbolist-expressionist depended on his being perceived as wild. His art broke from the constraints of its culture. Some of his contemporary observers regarded his technical manner of recording his sensations as if it were as abstract as it was representational. Cézanne's art became "abstract" in several senses: one feature was its material abstraction — its release from the constraints of culturally specific forms of representation as the painter's mark reverted to a state of wildness. Gauguin, foremost among others, perceived wildness in Cézanne's mark; and his sense of the artist was crucial for the future of representational practice in the twentieth century. Shiff's concern is to articulate the quality of wildness as perceived in Cézanne's art at an early stage in its reception (as well as, perhaps, some wildness that was not perceived).