In
the summer of 1995 I wrote this paper for an Art History class while
finishing my art degree at Sam Houston State University. My computer
crashed later and I thought it was lost forever. Then I found a hard
copy recently, and was still proud of it, and amazingly, it fit right
into the studies with which I am presently occupied, since the
discovery of the “Pinkerton Tintypes”... So here it is edited by
twenty years of wisdom, and some of those never-before-seen tintypes!
Cezanne
Cezanne
The Primitive
of His Own Way
“I had grown up
virtually in the same cradle as my friend, my brother, Paul Cezanne,
in whom one is only now beginning to discover the touches of genius
of an aborted painter.” These are the words of Emile Zola, the
famous writer and boyhood best-friend of Cezanne. They were words
written for public scrutiny in the twilight of Cezanne's career and
words that surely devastated Cezanne personally and professionally.
An intellectual and patron of the arts, Zola frequently and avidly
promoted the works of other artists while almost ignoring the one
artist whom he knew and loved personally.
Emile and Alexandrine Zola as newlyweds
The issues surrounding
Zola's treatment of Cezanne are most telling and help raise an
important question about Paul Cezanne, considered by many, for
generations as a misunderstood genius and perhaps the father of
Modern Art. Was he really, or was he merely a well-understood
regional celebrity whose significance in history has been
misunderstood by latter-day scholars who have sought a clear,
artistic figurehead to stand in the gap between the era of realism
and the era of abstraction?
It is my purpose to allow
Cezanne and the people who knew him best to set the record straight.
Through the observations of Zola, Joachim Gasquet and others close to
this giant of modern art, it is possible to consider his place in art
history and understand why his fame may have been the result of the
times, rather than a result of historic accomplishment.
Paul Cezanne: Self-Portrait
Paul Cezanne, like many
artists after him, enjoyed a phenomenon posthumously that is the
direct opposite of most others in public life. That is, the tendency to
aggrandize and eulogize the artist's significance and his works far
above his status while living.
Nevertheless, Paul Cezanne
still suffered many years of sarcasm and obscurity in spite of his fame and popularity today. There are some clues as to why he was ignored or
maligned most of his life, and how he miraculously ended up in
history books as a major link in the development of modern art, even
though he had no mentor and no apprentices.
Emile Zola- (VERY young!) A longtime friend of Cezanne's, virtually ended their relationship with his honesty.
Cezanne's old friend Emile Zola
must have been truly frustrated. Although he enjoyed considerable influence
on French sensibility, he dared not risk it in order to benefit
Cezanne. In fact his boyhood companion, perhaps even the one who
entertained his earliest artistic fascinations, must have been a
great disappointment to him. No doubt everyone in Cezanne's small
artistic circle respected his passion to paint, but few would
publicly defend the results of his brush.
Camille Pisarro, one of the most respected of the French Impressionists.
Camille Pisarro, the veteran
commercial prodigy of the Impressionists, spent painstaking hours
with him, painting plein air, trying to help him “find his method.”
Both ultimately experienced frustration from their collaboration.
Actually the son of Portuguese Jews, Cezanne's painting partner Pisarro was arguably one of the most successful landscape painters in France.
Cezanne had painted most of his adult life. In his sixties, he finally
wrote, “I am on my way to learn to draw.” He sketched every day
as a matter of discipline even though he suffered tremendous anxiety
while trying to do basic skills in art. His friend and biographer,
Joachim Gasquet, wrote many observations of Zola's “aborted
painter...” “He went at it furiously, angrily, with clenched
fists. He wept in front of his mutilated dream.” Painting had been
a lifelong obsession for Cezanne, a frustrating daily battle for
personal achievement, and an elusive quest for personal satisfaction.
Cezanne's creative path was painful and unrewarding, and yet he
pressed on. What could have compelled him?
Paul Cezanne: The Cardplayers
To Gasquet, Cexanne's act
of painting became his religion. Unfortunately, it was an unforgiving
one. Descriptions by his contemporaries sound less like heavenly
artistic bliss and more like an endless wandering in a self-imposed
hell of a hopeless wanna-be. Still, his need to paint satisfied some
intangible need, for he enjoyed little monetary or artistic rewards.
It was strictly a personal battle left on countless canvas
battlefields. Cezanne contributed to the society of new artists,
almost a beloved mascot, as they all sought acceptance and museum
status in the French art world. But Camille Mauclair saw Cezanne as
the outsider in a group of outsiders. “Although Cezanne aspired in
his confusion to give Impressionism a kind of classical stylization,
he nevertheless succeeded in only creating paintings characterized by
brutal, barbaric gaudiness.”
Paul Cezanne: Five Bathers
Tormented by rejection and
his own perceptions of failure, Gasquet wrote that Cezanne
“barricaded himself in his studio... strange, haunted, half-beast,
half-god in pain... all the while producing atrocious sketches,
studies and paintings.”
Banished in1882 from the
Salon, the country's most prestigious art venue, his twisted and
bloody sexual allegories became the object of cruel satire and public
humiliation. Once his rejected entry to the Salon exhibit ended up
in the hands of art students, who paraded around with it like a comic
banner of a fallen enemy, and hung it in effigy like a hilarious
joke.
If crudeness was the
issue, even Cezanne admitted that “I am the primitive of my own
way.” In other words, if he had a certain way or a style, he was
merely the innovator and in fact a primitive beginner of that style.
Gasquet, a young writer whose father knew Cezanne as a child and
introduced him to the artist, was a friend to Cezanne first and his
biographer later. So it is possible that Gasquet, unlike Zola,
interpreted Cezanne through a filter of romance and sentimentality.
Much of his account of their times together reflect this bias. Yet
even idealistic and worshipful Gasquet was blunt about Cezanne's art
and the way he felt about it. He explained in his book how Cezanne
pined for recognition so that he would not die and be remembered as a
“fraudulent old dreamer.”
Art historians seemed to
have been determined that the tired old hermit would never be
remembered thus. In due time Cezanne would be lifted out of his
living hell, and its lackluster results, and his works delivered to a
shore he could never reach on his own.
Still, it is a miracle he
even reached post-mortem recognition, with so few finished works.
Seeing most of his paintings as mere exercises, he thought nothing
of piling them up in a corner, never to be considered again, except
maybe to be conscripted to serve as a studio floor mat. Each
painting, as Gasquet concluded, was just another “inarticulate leap
towards the formula that he was never to complete.” The more
frustrated he became, the wilder the results. Unfortunately, Gasquet
noted “He exaggerated his lack of ability by exaggerating his
methods.”
Cezanne painted many portraits of his longsuffering model Marie, whom he finally married. They often appeared to be falling out of the canvas.
And this was the germ of
progress that set modern art into motion! Whether genius or delusion,
or outright insanity, Cezanne became the schizophrenic link between
two art movements which had little in common. His one asset in this
role was not talent or vision, but plain old persistence.
If Cezanne was primitive
in art, he was savage at social skills. Insecure of his own genius,
he was often overtly jealous and distrusting. His many failures made
him paranoid of would-be patrons who “might be seeking to take
advantage of him.” They might just continue the inner pain he
struggled with since that pivotal betrayal by Zola. Perhaps they were
trying to make money off of his peculiarity, and were just going to
write another expose, or were only patronizing him to get a free
painting, a bizarre relic to take home and entertain their
associates. Even loyal Gasquet succumbed to his unfounded
suspicions, and they parted under a dark cloud. Gasquet later mused
that “Cezanne has no friends, except trees.”
Similarly, there was no
love lost between Cezanne and his public. Gasquet once observed a
heckler yelling at the humble old man while he painted outdoors.
“Line him up against the wall, they should shoot painters like
him!” Perhaps these were the drunken teasings of a confidant, the
kind of outlandish banter enjoyed by fellow artists. But so pitiful
were his outdoor sketches that Gasquet once witnessed a younger, yet
more accomplished landscape artist stopping to assist him. The artist
seemed unable to get through to Cezanne. He just took his brushes
away and fixed the hopeless mess. Cezanne respectfully humored the
well-intentioned would-be mentor. When the session was finished, he
calmly scraped the results of the free lesson off of his canvas.
The experiments continued.
Fontainbleu contended that he never ceased declaring that he was not
making pictures, but that he was “searching for a technique.”
Meanwhile hapless Zola was
maligned by Henry Rochfort for foisting a daubster like Cezanne on
the public.” As careful as Zola had been, someone had to be blamed
for such a travesty!
If the art world was
through with Cezanne, history was just getting started. Through
perseverance and longevity, Cezanne found an audience in the younger
psycho-set, a new counter-culture in search of a mentor. They saw
genius in his distortions and unmuddied colors. His subjects of
colossal nudes and irreverent remakes of popular classics like his
version of Manet's “Luncheon on the Grass” appealed to their hunger for
more sensational, earthier statements. He was either crazy or the
genuine article. Bearded and passionate, the social outcast took on
the appearance of a prophet to them; an overlooked sage who had a
monumental sense of purpose.
Cezanne often created in terms of spoofs or tributes of famous art. He was a huge fan of Manet, and offered his own "Luncheon on the Grass."
Money had surely never been his goal,
yet recognition was paramount. An unappreciated iconoclast finally
found his offspring in the rebellion and naivete of youth. They would
gladly finish the deconstruction which he had unwittingly begun.
Art History often credits
this fumbling under-achiever with pioneering Fauvism, and inspiring
Cubism and other “isms” which featured distortion, deconstruction
and primitive art styles with counter-cultural overtones. In time the
counter-culture became THE culture... until Cezanne's “way” was
just an unnoticeable blip on the screen.
But now Cezanne could die
with his status in tact. It is unfortunate that he chose to talk the
talk, after meager recognition for his lengthy journey. As Rewald charitably observed, “Consistency was not
the greatest virtue of his remarks.”
In fact the old searcher
could not resist a few final salvos. He especially loved to
philosophize with his admirers, especially the young and uninformed.
He childishly maligned his contemporaries, even those who graciously
had engineered his “discovery.” He would quickly withdraw when
inquiries became too pointed or scholarly. When told that his works
were to be displayed at the Louvre, he replied, “The Louvre, yes.
Just the same the jurists are all swine.” Cezanne was not only a
primitive painter, he was notorious for primitive behavior. He was petty and ungrateful. Even
vengeful.
“The Louvre should be
burned down,” he once told Gasquet. As with many of the
persecuted, Cezanne became the worst kind of persecutor.
Many critics have tried to
understand Paul Cezanne under different lights and through different
colored lenses. He defied this. He once pronounced, “The world
does not understand me, and I do not understand the world.” These
were words of a prophet or a miserable malcontent.
One of Cezanne's more successful attempts to capture Marie.
Marie Cezanne
While art historians began
to write his eulogies and study his grand designs, his wife explained
humbly what many who knew him already agreed upon. After his death
she seemed impatient with his admirers. They still did not get it.
Mrs. Cezanne had been his patient partner for decades and was
determined to set them straight. Perhaps she remembered how he hid
her and their child from his father for years, so that he would not
be cut off from his inheritance. Perhaps she thought about all the
time and money spent on trips and art supplies with little left to
feed her household; or waiting patiently for a scrap from him during
his passionate lifelong search for recognition. Perhaps she
remembered all the attention he had received from countless
benefactors, all to no avail. “Cezanne didn't know what he was
doing.” She insisted. “He didn't know how to finish his
pictures. Renoir and Monet, THEY knew their craft.”
Monet was the undisputed master of his craft.
Scores of critics had
trashed Cezanne as impotent, primitive, naive, brutal, even criminal,
and now the one person that stood to gain the most from the Cezanne
myth refused to perpetuate it. Stacks of his unfinished paintings had been left
behind every season when he changed his habitat. They could be a gold
mine now with the right promotion. Perhaps she did not know, or did
not care that his paintings had begun to catch on with speculative
investors who had already begun to gather up his works at every
opportunity.
Incredibly, Cezanne's
paintings were bringing premium prices at Impressionist auctions.
Once when the price seemed extraordinary, 6750 francs. The crowd
demanded that the buyer be revealed, if there truly was one. “It
is I, Claude Monet” said the proud bidder. Sure enough, Monet had
become aware of his own influence, and in an historic if not
sentimental gesture, was inadvertently legitimatizing Cezanne's art.
Claude Monet
Having once made his living doing cheap portraits, Monet could capture a likeness, a good indicator of his talent. One the left is a tintype in my collection, on the right Claude Monet's portrait of Camille, his first wife.
Patricia Mainardi has
written a very informative book about the French Salon and its
demise. Her explanations concerning the forces in battle over French
art and its market create a perfect environment for historic change
and cataclysm. In “The End of the Salon,” Mainardi weakens the
common paradigms of Modernism. She contends that “Modernist
theory, insofar as it has been formalist has impoverished our
understanding of art by looking only at aesthetics.” Mainardi goes
on to reveal the many important factors that bred a revolution in the
world art scene, and especially the economic factors.
For two hundred years, a
very fragile symbolic relationship had been cultivated between the
state and the art community. In France, the government, the Art
academy, the Salon Exhibit, the collectors, and of course the
artists, all fulfilled their essential roles and together built one
of the great art movements in history.
All of this attention to
art only bred more and more aspiring artists, until the Salon show
could no longer function without rejecting most artists who desired
to participate. As Zola noted, “The worst of it is that today
there is still not a single person satisfied. We continuously find,
both among those exhibiting and those refused, malcontents who demand
reforms.”
One of the biggest gripers about the Salon was Edouard Manet, (center) who always threatened not to show, but always did, forsaking his Impressionist buddies. This RARE image shows Emmanuel Chabrier (left) and Manet and his brother Eugene.
Most artists today would
envy the French and their situation, but then the circumstances
seemed to breed jealousy and pettiness and a corrupting environment
of politics and greed. Artists in control of the Salon were
territorial and self-serving. The younger generation felt wisely
that they were competing against a stacked deck. Sub-groups and
manifestos sprung up from every studio, and the Impressionists were
just one such group who found the system unfair and stagnant.
It is no surprise that the
Salon organizers claimed that they were the guards of artistic
standards of excellence and integrity, and were determined to old
their torch high and out of reach of the “battalion of mediocre
artists” as the director phrased it. Ironically it was the Salon
that saw itself as the guard against commercialism of art, with the
supposed “champions of artistic freedom” clamoring at its gates
for fair exposure and the lucrative benefits locked up within the
Salon.
The rise of the
middle-class during the Industrial Revolution not only provided more
art buyers, but also more would-be artists. But their lack of
artistic sophistication shocked the Salon as it tried to uphold
tradition and French values. The result was a political meltdown.
Education was the answer
they told themselves. Art appreciation. But at the same time an
uncultured throng was arriving at French shores which would make any
general enlightenment impossible. American tourists were bringing
their own tastes and sensibilities to the world art market.
The crude and unrefined
efforts rejected by the French art aristocracy were juicy beefsteak
to the bourgeoisie heathen from America. While the Salon sought the
impossible task to educate, art dealers determined to lubricate the
French economy with American dollars. The money would also help
encourage a whole new generation of French artists. Unfortunately, it
would also embolden them against art appreciation.
Swiftly Capitalism raised
its ugly head and devoured the revered French art system. The Salon
became irrelevant. With Yankee money supporting the new entrepreneurs
of art, art dealers began to not only make art history but to write
it. Durand-Ruel. the Cassirers and others unashamedly began to
interpret the historical importance of their inventories for the
uneducated masses. The rest is history.
Paul Durand-Ruel
The collapse of the government-sponsored French
art system and the Salon ended most of the whining among the artists
but left a gigantic hole in the French economy. No
longer was the issue of art and freedom of self-expression, instead
it became art and the world of power and profit. When the Salon faded into
history, remembered mostly for who it excluded, the free market
moved forward and amazes us still with what it included.
Art export revenues from
France went through the roof, as did the reactions of French art
experts. The art pie got even bigger and so did art profits.
American money greased the world art wheel and soon New York became a
world art center. Department stores, book dealers and museums jumped
into the lucrative American art market, which was built around French
art and its talented American imitators.
America led the way in
consuming the new Modernism. Controversial artists with flawed
character seemed to hold a special esteem. In Marketing Modernism,
Robert Jensen tells how “Americans rescued the Parisian Modernists
by being among the first to buy their art at high prices and in
volume. Americans were indiscriminate and voracious and equally as
generous upon their return to the States, bequeathing their
collections of French art to fledgling museums, fulfilling Cezanne's
goal of credibility for the Impressionists.”
The new gallery system
which filled the French market depended on several factors. The end
of the Salon, the excitement of art history in the making, as
Modernism was born, and an unlimited supply of cheap art to export.
The last factor being the most important. Strategies were implemented
to market new products; Retrospectives and one-man shows with an
emphasis on the cutting edge of “Modernism.” Ever since it has
been difficult to discern which was more important in art, the
intrinsic craftsmanship or the novelty of it. Jensen points out that
“Avant Gardism” arose out of the historical movement in which
Modernisms... divided heretofore indivisible Modernisms into
factions. These isms... haunted by the need for originality.. by the
desire to get a piece of the market share.” (I apologize for this
editing, to maintain a degree of coherence!)
In less than thirty years
many “isms' exploded on the scene. Before this market competition
took over, an ism might last twenty to fifty years. Goaded by the
galleries, who were the beneficiaries of this constant making of
history, art has been flying at a dead run for one hundred years,
with countless isms and revolutions and revivals and re-definitions
of what it means to be “modern.”
Compared to the rest of
his associates known today as the Impressionists, Cezanne was a
peculiar duck. They were all so middle-class and stuffy and mired in
self-importance. Cezanne began the parade of stereotypical modern
artists as weird and beyond social norms. And each has had to out-do the
other. The artist as “personality” became an important
ingredient to art marketing. An artist's temperament or “oeuvre”
was discussed as much as his craftsmanship. Brochures, printed
reproductions, and show catalogs became tools of the trade. It took
an American to pioneer this new approach to success. James McNeill
Whistler took Europe by storm with his flamboyant one-man art shows
that historians still talk about.
James McNeill Whistler
Whistler saw that
exhibiting art was an art in itself, and with all the cunning of P.
T. Barnum, he painted, promoted and propagandized his way into art
history. He anticipated that the middle class audience wanted more
than pictures, they wanted a personality to identify with. They
wanted their artists to be tangible, accessible celebrities. Whistler
played this to the hilt, while his art was strictly mundane if not
mediocre.
The famous art critic Ruskin excoriated Whistler as a
contemptible charlatan. The more Ruskin protested, the more the American celebrity
preened himself. Whistler depended so much on controversy that he
actually published Ruskin's attacks and distributed them at his
exhibits all around Europe like a “broken butterfly” seeking sympathy. Whatever his
artistic talent, his marketing was sheer genius. Every artist since
has had to compete with that.
James McNeill Whistler: Symphony in White
Ruskin took art very
seriously, and took Whistler to court twice, trying to expose him as
a fraud. But Whistler used the whole drama to lay the groundwork for
the new art world, the art market, a dealer-critic system where
clever promotion of the art established its historical importance,
before history could write itself. As one artist friend of mine has
explained, “it does not matter what people are saying, as long as
they are talking about you!” Shy, quiet types please step to the
rear.
The dealer as ideologue
and instructor was convenient to the novice collector, and convenient
to the dealer as well. Impressionism had been a minor part of the
market up until the 1880's. Commercial savvy learned from marketing
artists from the Barbizon school led dealers to start speculating in
the more daring pools of the avant garde. Paul Durand Ruel led the
way. After learning to capitalize on the American market with the
works of Millet and other Barbizion painters, he saw a need for an inexpensive, yet plentiful commodity. Theo Van Gogh, Vollard
and others watched and learned as he bought up Impressionists work
cheaply and then sold it for respectable profits. He almost
single-handedly launched Monet and Renoir and Morisot and others.
Berthe and Edma Morisot
No one can argue that it
was Durand-Ruel's marketing genius which scooped up apparently minor
works and transformed their historical importance through his amazing
promotional strategies. His successes gave birth to much criticism,
including suspicions of dealer-managed art conspiracies.
Durand-Ruel explained to his collectors that he too was a collector
and that “commerce was an unfortunate sideline” to his efforts.
The cagey dealer was not afraid to rub shoulders with intrigue and
even deception, capitalizing on his clients with all that modern
invention provided. He created a directory of artists and their
works, and made photographic copies to document the art. He
masterminded a network of galleries that would work collaboratively
to promote the artists as they “made history.” As the French art
market was collapsing, he took his wares abroad. In the process,
Durand-Ruel may have changed art forever, and may have postponed the
death of art we are seeing today by one hundred years. Caught in a
similar collapse, today's dealers and artists must take the show on
the road again to survive. But where is the new America?
The pundits like Zola were
appropriately concerned, but they could never have provided solutions
to this massive cultural drift. Zola lamented that art “middlemen were
concerned more with profits than art and artist's welfare, always
depending on the amateur American collectors.”
In fact Americans
shouldered the load of supporting Modernism financially until the
turn of the century and beyond. Art dealers had sprung up in New
York and Berlin and London. They became a veritable machine of
self-dictated art history. And the machine fed only on the avant
garde, to keep stretching the values and whims of the buyers and to
keep changing what was fashionable and “historically important.”
Durand-Ruel's secret was
to invest early in unknown or disenfranchised artists. The dealer
circle was capable of making anyone significant in order to fill
their inventories and sell to the unschooled. The more galleries
there were, the more pressure to find new “masters.” Soon the
Cassirers were applying his methods in Berlin.
Uncannily, many noted
artists following Cezanne reflect a commonality in that they were
social rebels, “les miserables,” reaping the whirlwind from poor choices in life. Suicidal,
self-destructive, excessive, radical and even psychopathic. Their
lives and lifestyles have made amusing copy for writers and
historians for a century. But the question should have been asked as
to why, against all odds, were so many of the major artists of this
period representative of the fringe element? While most of them were
treated with ambivalence during their lives, they somehow became
artistic giants with purpose upon their deaths.
Vincent VanGogh
Could there have been
among art critics an overwhelming desire to establish art as the
billboard of social conscience, and Freud as the high priest of the
artist's subconscious?
Might the emergence of
art “dealer-critics” who gladly developed a stable of the avant
garde, hand-picked for their marketability towards neophyte
middle-class tastes have affected the outcome of art history? Could
it be that only artists that fit into this grand design were
perceived to be more significant, ie. historic, in the “Modern”
scheme of things? During this hotbed of controversy where the
intellectually inclined loved to dabble in psychoanalysis and dream
analysis, might there have been an obsession with those who spoke for
the most evocative element in this psycho-sessive society?
Perhaps the violent, the
depressed, the socially uninhibited had more of interest to reveal to
the the psycho-set than some mundane family man with no apparent
aberrant social behavior.
With this concept advanced
Courbet, Degas, Lautrec, VanGogh, Gaugin and Cezanne, as well as many
others became a select group, a chain of counterculture that was
significant, not so much because of their attentions, but rather the
world's attention to them. What made them popular was not their
artistic prowess, but rather their lifestyles, their “oeuvre.” As
art became more susceptible to promoters and charlatans and with the
the introduction of the middle class and their ignorance into the
market, and as fascination with Freud and his studies spread, it
seems natural that the public would focus on the most sensational art
available. Apparently, inquiring minds have always wanted to know.
This was the beginning of
art as entertainment, a phenomenon Picasso later candidly
articulated.
Pablo Picasso: Houses on the Hill. No leaning here. Even the master cubist used a plumb line to create depth and perspective.
The Cassirers did four
shows for Cezanne in ten years. One can imagine the gold rush
mentality after Cezanne's death in 1906. The jealous local critics,
who did not have any of Cezanne's paintings to sell, accused the
Cassirers of marketing the studio leftovers of an obscure and
deceased painter. They must have noticed that the works were not
even signed. According to the artist who made them, most were mere
experiments. They were steps, mostly missteps in his search for a
technique, left behind like wood chips in a lumberyard. Nobody knows
how much money was made, but with Madam Cezanne's attitude, there
was plenty of room for a middleman. Not to be outdone by the Germans,
these sales set off a chain reaction of Cezanne fans in France.
It does not take much
imagination to conjure the final product of the convergence of the art history racket, the psycho-set, and the
birth of American capitalism and arrive at a fairly accurate feel for
the environment in which Cezanne ultimately flourished. Follow that
with later artist's fascination with Freud and primitivism and Voila!
Cezanne appears comfortably seated between two major art worlds.
But was Cezanne really a
link between the two? Historians would say yes without hesitation.
His art was after all distinct from his contemporaries and
wonderfully different from anything before. He was the one who
bravely broke away from artistic convention, in fact hundreds of
years of tradition.
Still, I challenge
Cezanne's place with my own observations. IF he was such a
pathfinder, why did he spend all of his career retracing his own
steps? He was chronically backtracking, painting in circles, never
reaching his destination. Perhaps never even visioning it. Cezanne
never exhibited the growth and maturity of, say Monet or Picasso. It
is more likely that Cezanne lost his way, and countless ungrounded
artists followed him.
Rather than inventing
something, Cezanne was forever a student of the past, wrestling with
the standards set before; Always comparing his works, even mimicking
the great tradition-bound masters of the past. All he ever mentioned
as far as artistic style was humbly trying to combine Classicism with
Impressionism. Yet neither style would have claimed him.
A genuine trendsetter
would never have suffered the contempt of the critics year after year, stuck in a
veritable intellectual black hole. And he would never have cared if
they rejected him, and never lost so much sleep or self-esteem. A true
iconoclast knows what he is and relishes in it. And he is very good
at what he does, which gives him the leverage to be different. He
expects some rejection from a world that can only follow him. Yet
Cezanne was consistently tormented by his nameless struggle.
Joyce Medina admits that
when it comes to fleshing out this artist's intentions, his motives
and reasons are up for grabs. “For today's interpreter, the
greatest critical problem to be solved arises from the fact that
spokespersons for Cezanne (Bernard, Denis, Gasquet, Vollard, Geffroy,
etc.) have often redefined Cezannism to suit their own aims.”
Cezanne has been adopted and branded
by so many schools that if he were a cow, his hide would look like a
Jackson Pollock painting. Classicism, Impressionism,
Post-Impressionism, Primitivism, Symbolism, Romanticism, Cubism,
Fauvism, and yes even Realism. Medina also confesses that “the
opposing schools of Cezanne scholarship that arose from the
multiplicity of interpretations of Cezanne's expressive forms appear
irreconcilable.” Whereas Monet and Picasso knew what they were and
what they were not, and likewise we know too, Cezanne only left
behind confusion and ambiguity.
Paul Cezanne: Still Life
Pisarro denied, no matter
how much he admired him, that Cezanne was an Impressionist. “Cezanne
is not an Impressionist because all of his life he has been painting
the same picture.” He winsomely described him as a “refined
savage.”
Still many scholars have
claimed and still claim that Cezanne is the father of Cubism. Rewald
had no problem refuting this myth which was certainly encouraged by
the Cubists. Rewald insisted that “in Cezanne's work, however, one
finds neither cylinders or cones, nor parallel and perpendicular
lines. The line never having existed for Cezanne. One might
thus be permitted to see in this theory an attempt to express his
consciousness of structure beneath the colored surface presented by
nature... But nowhere in his canvases did Cezanne pursue this
abstract concept at the expense of his direct sensations. He always
found his forms in nature and not in geometry.”
In
fact, Cezanne's actual comments about cylinders and cones merely
reflected his innocent and elementary approach to analyzing form,
like any struggling drawing student.
An
honest study of Cezanne's work would place him too Classicist for the
Fauves, too Fauvist for the Classicists. He really was the “primitive
of his own way.” And Cezanne never claimed to have found his own
way. Bernard and Gasquet drilled and probed him and forced him to
verbalize, perhaps for the first time, what his ideas about art were.
And no wonder they seem inconsistent. Artists evolve and grow and
even change over the decades. Still, Cezanne never really passed
down one consistent train of thought. His thoughts were still
searching, just as his paintings were. It would be foolish to
interrogate any researcher in the middle of his experiment, and try
to come away with a conclusion. And Cezanne never finished his
research, never published any conclusions. He rarely ever finished
and signed one of his works.
Promoters
used Freud and existentialism to explain this man in mortal combat
with his personal view of art and his ultimate failure to develop his talent and to finish the
fight. If Cezanne was anything, he was primitive. Like Rousseau,
doing his thing, trying to improve, his attempts admired by the
schooled and unschooled. If he inadvertently became the father of
Modern Art, he did it painting in his own private hell. What irony.
What sweet justice. Any counter-culturalist would love that.
Rochefort
put it so well: “all the diseased minds, the topsy turvey souls,
the shady and the disabled were ripe for the coming of the Messiah of
Treason.”
George
Heard Hamilton insists that although many great artists were
convinced that Cezanne was just a naive painter, and certainly an
accomplished one, he nevertheless should be considered a great
initiator “in spite of his incompleteness.”
Joyce
Medina proposes that perhaps he was like an unwitting spiritual
medium through whom “Modernism thought itself through him.”
Let me translate that for you. Modernism in art evolved through spontaneous combustion... inside of Cezanne's mind. ;)
These
are all latter-day rationalizations. Perhaps Cezanne was a perfect
instrument, working, searching, suffering along, through whom a whole
generation could, vicariously, channel their beliefs and convictions. But it would
be wise to make no claims concerning Cezanne that he failed to make
himself. That does not mean that we necessarily can believe all of
his claims. Once when being probed and poked by a young writer,
Cezanne offered his best advice;
“Do not be an art critic, but paint. Therein lies salvation.”
“Do not be an art critic, but paint. Therein lies salvation.”
Messiah
of treason? No. A prototype for the “peintres maudits”? Perhaps.
But the father of Modern Art? Probably not. Maybe the eccentric
cousin of Impressionism with no heirs. Nevertheless a cousin whose
assets were rich and yet ambiguous enough to be useful to the next
generation of fatherless searchers. And that, my brother Paul
Cezanne, still counts for something.
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Thank you for sticking your finger into the fire...please drop your thoughts into it!