This is a catalog for an exhibition that took place in the J. Paul Getty museum in 2004. Unfortunately I did not visit it but I have been lucky to attend another one dedicated solely to Cézanne.
The Thyssen-Bornemisza museum holds currently Cézanne Site/NonSite. I have also been attending a series of lectures by its curators and plan to participate in a two day Symposium on Cézanne this coming week.
http://www.museothyssen.org/en/thysse...
Carol Armstrong, one of my favorite Art Historians, curated the Getty exhibition and authored its catalog. I am familiar with her work on Degas
Odd Man Out: Readings of the Work and Reputation of Edgar Degas and have her book on Manet
Manet Manette waiting for my attention. Armstrong will participate in the Symposium and I am looking forward to hear her talk on Cézanne’s Gravity.
The current exhibition in Madrid explores many of the topics already raised in the Getty show, although it concentrates further on one of them. With the title Site/NonSite the Thyssen is borrowing a concept from the American artist Robert Smithson and examining in Cézanne’s works the concept of space: those spaces where the artistic inspiration and conception were born--the Site, and where they were realized--the studio or NonSite.
This concept and some related ones were already tackled in Armstrong’s stunning essay for the Getty catalog.
The Californian museum organized the exhibition itself like a Still-Life. One main object, a Cézanne Still-Life watercolor, served as the center of gravity around which all the other objects, the other works, were arranged.
In her essay Armstrong proceeds to examine that watercolor as she walks through its Still-Life components and develops her argument along these four chapters: The Biography of Objects; Landscape and Still Life; Picture and Sketch; Pencil Lines and Watercolors.
Cézanne’s objects belonged to his biography. His private space was always elusive and on the run from the public. His homey Provence versus the very public Paris; his secret lover and child out of wedlock versus the world of his father the banker; his studio versus the art galleries; and his studio again versus his, later somewhat estranged, wife and grown up son.
And in this private and secluded world his objects have a formidable presence. Armstrong sees a similarity in some of Cézanne drawings of his son and the way he depicted his apples. And there is this lovely study on a double Hortense – his flower and his wife.
For Cezanne’s objects lived in the studio and in his paintings. But before their representation, they lived in his mind and so we should not be surprised to see echoes of his beloved Mont Saint-Victoire in a tablecloth, or tables that simulate rocks, or blocked paths that mimic the finite walls of his studio, or gardens evoked by the floral wallpapers.
In these nature mortes there is no human present, but there is a human presence as the objects imply their use in the kitchen or in the dining room, or, daringly, and as Rilke remarked
Letters on Cézanne, insinuate themselves anthropomorphically, as seen in this sensual "coquille".
Armstrong proceeds to illustrate further what she calls the self-reflexibility of the Still-Life with an exquisite comparison between Fantin-Latour’s Still Life with Torso and Flowers and Cézanne's Still Life with Plaster Cast. This section is a tour de force in her study. Fantin-Latour addresses explicitly the competition between painting and sculpture, traditional in the visual arts, showing the lively, colorful and delicate flowers together with the plaster cast, a painting within the painting: color and freshness and evoked fragrance versus inanimate monochrome volume.
While Cézanne’s version goes further by not only painting a sculpture but also adding a painted painting of a sculpture, creating not multiple mirrors, since there are no reflected mirages, just multiple representations in a baroque manner. And in so doing he also welds the objects, with resting and floating pieces of fruit, with floors and walls that extend into and out of paintings but which remain in the actual painting.
And if the Still Life owes part of its shapes to observed nature, his observed Provence, Cézanne also brought his studio to the outside. As Armstrong says, if the Impressionists moved away from the established tradition of genres by inventing new ones, Cézanne opted for redefining the edges of the existing ones conflating or blurring their limits. He treated genres as he treated the edges of his objects and spaces. He explored their ambiguity. And the Thyssen exhibition explores precisely this fluctuating delimitation of the outdoors and indoors, always redefined in the spaces, represented, of his canvases. Indeterminate territories.
The centerpiece of the Getty Still-Life/exhibition, is not an oil, but a watercolor. Pondering about this technique Armstrong expands on the also shifting concepts of the finished and unfinished and the various categories of “sketches” (croquis, études, ébauches, esquisses). This allows her to reconstruct some of Cézanne’s practices by following the steps of creation in reversed order. The Thyssen also devotes a room to this concept.
For Cézanne arranged first his Still Lives, fastidiously, using tilting aids, and then rearranged them again on the canvas. They were twice composed. He worked in stages with his brushstrokes building up, letting each touch dry before proceeding, with little mixing in the palette. This is the natural way in watercolors but not in oil. Except with Cézanne. Armstrong calls his method, adroitly, kaleidoscopic.
By observing the way he tackled the whole range of possible types of “sketches”, Armstrong finds that even those that can be considered as stages in the process of large tableaux were neither conceived nor executed serially. They were separate workings of an idea that had kept Cezanne’s inner eye busy and which he sometimes also realized in finalized canvases (for example the large four Bathers canvases). But sometimes not. And watercolors in particular stand as independent conceptions in which the lightness, delicacy, faint coloration, and ambiguity of the space and/or paper, are part of the realized vision.
In this Cézanne showed again that he stood apart from the Impressionists who did conceive of series as a whole to be looked at as one looks at a landscape or a façade, along the passage of time. Armstrong calls this cinematic. But he did share with his friends the coloristic approach even if in his drawings of ideas he was approaching the goals of the Symbolists.
And Armstrong in her final section proceeds to explore those lines with an archaeological approach, carefully observing from up close each one of the building traces. In her analysis she certainly uses tools that Cézanne, the architect, did not have, and makes her and our eyes, so very powerful. Tracking the drawing of outlines, for each object has several outlines, with brush and blue paint, she also unveils how central an unpainted area of paper is for the (represented?) whiteness of a tablecloth.
She finishes then her examination of the Still Life created by the exhibition by stepping back and looking again at the initial watercolor afresh and whole. And we can then see how indeed this one piece is so very rich in its composition, colors, drawings, conception and how it offers us a slice of Cézanne’s inner artistic space.
I hope to do justice with this review to this very acute analysis of Cézanne’s work. Armstrong is so very careful and so very conscious of the charms and limitations of rendering the visual with words. This review can only be seen as a timid invitation to leaf and read and look at the catalog directly.
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P.D. -- The Conference on Cézanne finished, I can also now add that out of the four lectures, Carol Armstrong was the most daring and fascinating. I was glad to learn that her talk corresponded to the book that she is currently writing on this painter. I am looking forward to its publication.
