In his pseudo-intellectual film Manhattan, Woody Allen said he couldn't go through life without Paul Cézanne's famous pears and apples. Cézanne himself confidently knew he could make something special out of inanimate objects. "I, only I," he once bragged to Camille Pissarro, "know how to paint a real red." But the National Gallery's exhibition Cézanne Portraits, curated by John Elderfield, shows the curious layman the artist's struggle to take his unique, constructive method of painting and apply it to living, breathing subjects. It is the first exhibition concentrated on the artist's portraits since 1910. And it's about time.
Of the thousand paintings Cézanne produced, only about 160 are portraits. None of them are commissions, but come from Cézanne's own motivation, born of a struggle to imprint in two dimensions the physical and psychological dimensions of the subject. He painted his family, friends, servants, models, townspeople, and himself. Yet his portraits often miss the mark in accurately showing the personality and even the appearance of the subject. They become instead a further showcase of his rebellious technique. He reconstructs the face the way he reconstructed mountains, using geometric, colorful strokes, raising the question of what the purpose of a portrait actually is. Is the end result meant for the satisfaction of the sitter or for the freedom of the painter?
Cézanne's background, combined with his proud and solipsistic personality, made his answer to that
question clear. He came from wealth and did not have to worry about making money from his art or by satisfying clients. He was born in Aix-en-Provence in 1839, and died there at 67 years old of pneumonia in 1906. He spent most of his life at the estate he inherited from his father in 1886. Cézanne favored the traditional lives of its townspeople—he even loathed the new electric street lights in Marseille, saying it ruined the twilight.
What we do not see in the show is that many of Cézanne's earliest portraits of the 1860s were heavily influenced by Carravagio, using chiaroscuro to highlight emotional, fiery faces against an inky black background. With this in mind, it is interesting to see how Cézanne slipped from one style to the next. In doing so, he went from choosing to focus on an evocative stare or the personality of the subject, to later passing over psychological subject matter to concentrate on brushwork and color.
The National Gallery displays two techniques Cézanne used in his development as a portraitist. The first we see is impasto, used in his portraits of his Uncle Dominique and sister Marie from 1866-67, their faces swirling with thick paint laid down with a palette knife. Despite the heavy paint, the subjects' features are easily recognizable. Marie's silvery face shows the luminosity of an El Greco engraving, and Dominique's face appears over and over again in different costumes, but with the same stalwart composure.
Not all of Cézanne's portraits were flattering, however. His childhood friend Antony Valabrège, whom Cézanne also painted with impasto, confided in their mutual friend, the Realist novelist Emile Zola, that he didn't understand Cézanne’s work. "Every time he paints one of his friends," he said, "it seems as though he were avenging himself for some hidden injury."
Cézanne took up a new technique, ditching the palette knife to take up the brush once more, often
thinning his paint with turpentine. Small patches of canvas peak through many of his paintings. His portrait of the art critic Gustave Geffroy (1895-96) is further proof that Cézanne did not paint for his subjects or his critics, but for himself, as he would abandon the paintings in an unfinished state. It is his most ambitious portrait: Books frame Geffroy's hunched figure, and his face is only vaguely suggested, to the sitter's disappointment. But Geffroy found the result satisfying anyway. "Everything is first rate … with incomparable harmony," he said. "He had only sketched in the face and would always say, 'We'll leave that for the end.' Sadly there was no end." It is a mystery why Cézanne did not return to it.
The same mystery is raised by his unfinished painting of his boyhood friends, "Paul Alexis Reading a Manuscript to Emile Zola" (1869-70).
This painting depicts Alexis reading to his mentor Zola in the Batignolles neighborhood of Paris, where the artistic counterculture thrived. Zola is seated on a cushion, his face frozen in concentration. The manuscript itself is quickly rendered in zig-zags of white paint, an indication of the incomplete nature of the painting. Cézanne was forced to abandon it at the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War.
Cézanne was known to take 20 minutes between each brushstroke, strategizing the composition and meaning of his work. The painting of his father from 1866 may hold somewhat of an inside joke for Cézanne. The banker disapproved of his son's decision to pursue painting. Cézanne shows him seated in a chair reading L'Evenement, the journal in which Zola published his attack of academic painting and official art policies that led his friends to be rejected in the Salon of 1866. Cézanne’s father disapproved of Zola, but Cézanne stood with his friend. He wanted art to become more than just realistic or rococo copies of landscapes or people.
Instead, he preferred to master certain subjects with his own style, whether it be an apple, a mountain, or a face. Nearly a whole room in the exhibit is dedicated to Cézanne’s most prominent subject: his wife, Hortense Fiquet. He painted her more than anyone, and 14 of the nearly 30 portraits he made of her hang in the show.
Hortense evokes a stoic, internal power from her plush throne of an armchair. Whether she is at a domestic task like sewing, or simply lost in thought with her hands folded neatly in her lap, the portraits of Hortense seem to bristle with more energy than all those shown in the exhibit. Through the years, however, many critics vilified Hortense for not being more beautiful and for having a sullen expression. The National Gallery’s Mary Morton writes that "Cézanne’s refusal to make the gestures traditional to the genre of female portraiture unleashed one of the more startling strains of misogyny in art history." One critic called her "that sour-looking bitch." Another said she evoked "stunned stupidity."
But Cézanne paints her with more care than he appeared to give anyone else. Each deliberate stroke in
"Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair" (1877) knits together to form the most striking painting in the exhibit. A bookbinder turned seamstress, Hortense probably made the dress she is wearing, which her husband carefully rendered in strokes of ochre, blues, greens, taupe, purple, and turquoise. Her relaxed bearing, pouty lips, and taut bun suggest a composure of a patient nature. She must have been patient: It took 17 years before Cézanne asked her to be his wife. He kept their relationship a secret from his father for fear he would lose his allowance, and he spent a lot of their relationship apart from her, seeking new places and people to paint.
Cézanne concentrated on making a painting uniquely his own, and the evidence that this strategy was a success is seen in his legacy. He was perhaps the greatest influencer of his era, as he paved the way for cubists and expressionists: Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso called him "the father of us all." No matter what common technique he used, or how many times he painted a subject, Cézanne interpreted what he saw in his own way, a selfish way, a true artist's way.