Vol. 160 / No. 1379
Vol. 160 / No. 1379
In his portraits Paul Cézanne avoided all the accepted
attributes of the genre as it was understood in the late nineteenth century. His
aesthetic programme ruled out attempts at ‘getting a likeness’, even if his
images may be ‘like’ his sitters. One remembers here his comment to Ambroise
Vollard of the ‘horrible resemblance’ of most conventional art as seen in the
‘Salon de M. Bouguereau’. He had no interest in social context; there are
almost no telling settings for his figures; and he had no desire to flatter or
to give an exaggeratedly ‘public’ characterisation. This refusal underscores
his complete independence. His subjects are sitters – just that, nearly always seated;
they rarely look directly at us in the usual manner of engagement. Cézanne
forensically explores their visual presence as though he had never seen them
before, like a detective examining a body. Yet many of them were well known to
him – his family members and restricted circle. His paid models are seen with
an inviolable reticence, even though several must have been very familiar through
their prolonged sessions in the studio and their roles in his domestic world.
For Cézanne, this was their point.
The exhibition, at the National Portrait Gallery, London (to
11th February) and later at the National Gallery of Art, Washington (25th March
to 1st July),1 which includes some of Cézanne’s cardinal works, might well
disappoint those visitors still tied to the given genre of portraiture, just as
a show of, say, Boldini’s portraits would grate Cézanne’s manner of presenting
his sitters as impassive, even dull, is exactly what makes them so compelling
to us. One consideration should not be overlooked in any ‘reading’ of Cézanne’s
sitters: sitting for a portrait to a ‘slow painter’ can frequently induce a set
expression, not exactly of boredom, but of a slumped introspection. In the
catalogue, John Elderfield and his fellow writers do their best to glean any
possible psychological and social content from the people portrayed, although
Elderfield rightly warns against such ‘meddling’.2 For the most part, the
sitters are mute conduits, their silent endurance ensuring their immortality in
paint. The exceptions to this are shown at the beginning, where these early
works carry an intensity of feeling of a more overt nature. They include the
trapped sensitivity of Antony Valabrègue (1866; National Gallery of Art,
Washington; cat. no.3.2), the grave and tender Achille Emperaire (1867–68;
Musée d’Orsay, Paris; no.4.2) and Antoine-Fortuné Marion (no.1.2; Fig.15), an
outstanding work of 1870–71 and a truly modern portrait in its nervous
intimacy. The use of the palette knife in these works cuts out any possible charm.
Cézanne’s increasing objectivity reduces it even further.
When we reach Madame Cézanne in a red armchair (no.7.1;
Fig.14) we have arrived in true Cézanne country and are faced with one of the
great works in the exhibition. Nearly half the painting is taken up with the
sitter’s vertically striped skirt, a miraculous tour de force; she leans to her
right in the penumbra of the red, tasselled armchair. Her marmoreal head is
flushed with near-Fauvist colour, the eyes looking out, yet expressionless. The
painting is both intimate and monumental, internal rhythms, long and short,
locking the whole design together. We are here in the early stages of Cézanne’s
new and radical synthesis of visual experience where there was no room for
empirical representation. One brushstroke or patch of colour determined the
next – in the density or lightness of tone, the shape, rhythm and conceptual velocity
of the whole – for Cézanne could be quick as well as slow.
Through small-format portraits and self-portraits,
displaying Cézanne’s continual experiments in the application of paint, we are
reacquainted with Mme Cézanne (as Hortense Fiquet formally became in 1886). Four
head-and-shoulders images are shown, culminating in the exquisitely mournful painting
from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1885–86; no.11.4) in which, unusually, Hortense’s
hair is loose and unattended, emphasising the tilt of her head to the right. It
is worth mentioning here the recent so-called rehabilitation of Mme Cézanne’s
reputation from a sourpuss clothes-horse, not in the least interested in her
husband’s work, to the devoted sitter for nearly thirty portraits. All is
speculation, either way. There is little documentation of her character or the
couple’s relationship, although in letters some of Cézanne’s old friends are cattily
ill-disposed towards her. There is no objective witness to confirm – or deny –
the dissatisfied, withdrawn and even irritated look that seeps through
Cézanne’s portrayals; nothing to compare with, for example, the documented shrewishness
of Mme Pissarro.
Hortense’s position as the unwavering star of the exhibition
is confirmed by the wall devoted to three large portraits of her wearing a red
dress (1888–90; Art Institute of Chicago; no.14.2; 1888–90; Museu de Arte de
São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand; no.14.3 and 1888–90; and no.14.4; Fig.16).
Undoubtedly the finest is the last in which the threequarter- length figure is
embroiled in an extraordinary push-and-pull of surrounding features – looped
curtain, chair back, dado, frame and stove. All these compete for advance or
recession on the picture plane, a strategy that both immobilises Hortense yet curiously
liberates her. Cubism lurks in the wings.
Thereafter, a succession of masterpieces detains the
visitor, evidence of the whole panoply of Cézanne’s continuing discoveries. Save
for the magnificent Gustave Geffroy (1895–96; Musée d’Orsay; no.17.1), whose complexity
holds us in astonished suspense, it is perhaps the simplicity and ordinariness of
pose and setting that allowed Cézanne to make those discoveries. He was not
afraid of the obvious. A man at a table smokes his pipe; a woman sits beside a
cafetière; a boy in a red waistcoat stands against a curtain (the only standing
figure in the show); an elderly gardener rests in the sun. The monolithic is
achieved without recourse to grandiosity; no sentiment shows through Cézanne’s
rigorous and almost irascible grappling with his perceptions of the figure that
confronts him.
Given the multiple pressures involved in obtaining loans,
the exhibition is a triumph, although it may well be richer at its Washington showing.
The last room in London is weakened by the absence of two late portraits in the
series of the gardener Vallier and a similarly posed seated man (National
Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; no.R943); all three will be in Washington. There are
one or two works that add little to what is on view elsewhere, the lumpen Girl
with a doll (c.1896; private collection, New York; no.19.1) – is she a girl? –
and the unrewarding head of Mme Cézanne (1886–87; Musée d’Orsay; no.13.1). Of
course there are omissions, for whatever reason: the bullish portrait of
Gustave Boyer in a straw hat (c.1879–71; Metropolitan Museum of Art), for
example, and the extremely sensitive head of a young peasant (1890s; National
Gallery of Art, Washington), despite its being in the collection of one of the
host venues of the show.3 The catalogue is scrupulous and well organised with a
refreshed chronology of Cézanne’s life by Jayne S. Warman and pertinent notes on
many of the sitters by the late, lamented Alex Danchev.
By Richard Shone
1 The exhibition was first shown at the Musée d’Orsay,
Paris, 13th June to 24th September 2017.
2 Catalogue: Cézanne Portraits. By John Elderfield with Mary
Morton and Xavier Rey and contributions from Jayne S. Warman and Alex Danchev.
255 pp. incl. numerous col. ills. (National Portrait Gallery, London, 2017),
£24.95. ISBN 978–1–85514–731–7.
3 This painting was beautifully analysed by Bridget Riley in
‘Cézanne in Provence’ in this Magazine, 148 (2006), pp.621–27, fig.47.