Looking at Cezanne
National Gallery London - May 2007
Cezanne’s look, his ‘petit sensation’, has been so intellectually successful, so much resonating with the tenor of the culture that followed, so much become implicit in our current way of seeing, that it is almost difficult to see him afresh. However so pervasive has his influence become, extending (or at least resonating) so far beyond visual art itself that it is perhaps possible to approach him as much in relation to a general epistemology, as from a specific visual sensation.
What accounts for Cezanne’s power?
He resonated or articulated some core features of the empirical tradition. His way of looking is so emblematic of inductive reasoning, with this theory of perception and the relationship between observer and nature. His paintings are firstly empirical, that is they depend upon intensive close observation of natural phenomena, and are impossible to imagine outwith such close attention. The attention is not arbitrary. The phenomena of nature are not used for some ulterior purpose, nature does not provide simply material for some other expression or fantasy. Rather the process of looking itself is the point. He looks closely and, as he starts the painting, he makes responsive marks. As he builds the painting, the painting moves towards rather than away from the observed reality. Also to be emphasised in this is the sensuous contact he makes in paint with colour and form – the wonderful sensitivity to colour and texture and light.
Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904.
However, here it is also more complex. As he builds the marks and his responses to the observed, these marks are made in a way that is patterned. The main impulse here is on making a representation with deep internal coherence. As he tightens the picture, pushes the marks forward, and builds the inter-relationships on the canvas, it is these inter-relationships that become the most important feature. They grow in intensity, both in terms of form and colour, while never losing contact with the observed reality, the representation constructed has its own life. It is the life of the observer observing.
Paul Cézanne, The Grounds of the Château Noir, ca. 1900.
Paul Cézanne, Hillside in Provence, ca. 1890.
An interesting issue is the focus or goal towards which this patterning or intensified relationship is pushing. As it intensifies and deepens, as the texture becomes more complex, the tenor of the painting, the emotional resonance becomes clearer and simpler. Cezanne said that he wished to make nature again after Poussin, or to classicise romantic sensation. It is of course this classicising formal tradition that drives the powerful way that the images coalesce around itself. But, different to Poussin, this is a classicising not referring to the classics, this is a classicising referring to internal states of mind. The increasingly internally coherent representation becomes a representation of the observing self. The tenor of this is that, as it proceeds, the emotional intensity becomes both simpler, more profound and more stable. He wished to divine stable perception, stable structures - the ‘eternal’. This is not far from what science tries to do, at least in a metaphorical sense. It accounts for the closeness of Cezanne to the tradition of empiricism and naturalistic observation. What is interesting is this quietening of the emotionality as it becomes more stable, as if the intensity of observation breaks through into a kind of meditative state, tapping into hugely resonant areas of a deep and static experience.
His portrait of an old lady resonates in this way. One of the greatest painted.
Paul Cézanne, An Old Woman with a Rosary, ca. 1895.
The emotional state achieved is not that of some dynamic despair or transient emotion, but a more stable inward unchanging consciousness. One imagines that this is the kind of meditative state that he reached through long observation. A state where a restless mind is stilled and perception coheres in maximal meaning and solidity. A state of being held and being free simultaneously. There is no question that this oceanic stable held state is where his painting took him and was what he achieved through his long years of disciplined observation and representation.
National Portrait Gallery - Feb 2018
Is there anything new to say on this?
In the new National portrait Gallery exhibition we have some new and interesting information about the progress of Cézanne’s technical development leading up to the great breakthrough into style – but what exactly was that breakthrough?
The sequence of portraits of Uncle Jacques, done with the “ballsy” technique wholly using a palette knife gives a transition between the early expressionist//romantic work and the later development.
Paul Cézanne, Uncle Dominique, 1866.
These are serial works: by using the same subject he makes clear that the focus is not on the subject itself but on the technical method of painting it - thus increasingly epistemological. These paintings because of their crude method of execution with a palette knife lay down blocks of colour or paint, almost like tiles, which sometimes describe planes and sometimes colour juxtapositions. They are followed by a period in which the same kind of technique is reproduced using brush culminating in a really beautiful portrait of a close friend. But all these works are essentially descriptive in the old style: one looks through the technique to the subject, the technique is the means through which the subject is described or expressed – a means to an end, and the end is the descriptive topic. The change happens apparently suddenly in 1877 within the National Portrait Gallery exhibition with Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair.
Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne in a Red Armchair, ca. 1877.
This is an amazing painting, justly celebrated, not least by Rilke in a famous letter to Clara Wishcop – that represents the breakthrough into style. The change is that instead of the technique being a means to an end beyond itself, window through which something is seen, the technique becomes the end and itself the topic. So that the painterly relationships are the first consideration. It is with this shift that the focus becomes on the canvas surface and the meaning within the painting structure. But there is another turn on this: it is not just that the focus has shifted away from the external world onto the painterly relationships in some internalising move, it is the essentially classical idea that it is only through the relationships on the canvas that the external beyond it can be truly referenced or inferred. It is not that the external is left behind; it is referenced but not as it were transparently. The visual perception of the external, the real, is arranged on the canvas into an aesthetic dimension, which has to do with the process of perception as much what is perceived. Only Seurat of the contemporary painters did anything like this and even that is not really comparable. So much so that at their best these paintings take us into a totally different realm to that of objective reality. We are into a highly formalised aesthetic space with, yes, an external referent, but with the key action of the painting within the painting itself, in the juxtaposition of its colours and relations. Hence the all-over-ness in these works – the meaning is in the painting and not the referent. What makes this so strong though is that it is allied also to a highly empirical impulse to be true to perception. This shift is difficult to put into words but it is about an attention to the process of seeing and processing seeing, the psychological process of looking, the experience of looking (in anticipation of phenomenology). The process of looking and its processing - its veracity.
The psychological shift with which Cezanne achieved this reorientation is properly highly private, Cezanne never really talked about it, but it must have taken an acute and huge intelligence. To realise the thing in itself was more salient than the thing referred to came to be thought by Cezanne as a classisizing impulse “doing Poussin after nature”. He must’ve come to sudden awareness that what was happening on the canvas was where the meaning actually lay not just a means to an external reference. Two pieces of paint together were actual and not descriptive – in their resonance was the art and the music. So the elements resonating make the music; the subject is just the context, and yet the fact of that external referent is crucial to anchor the canvas to a topic (JM Rawson’s great formulation). That tension being the foundation of modernist painting that followed.
National Gallery – Oct 2020
Les Grandes Beigneuses at the National Gallery. Such a well-known and yet mysterious painting – an intense draw on the eye and yet initial bafflement.
Paul Cézanne, Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses), ca. 1894–1905.
Yes, it seems architectonic, and yes somehow like a cathedral in its Gothic curves– yes, acutely serious and immovable and solid in its presence – and yet the curious ungainliness of it, the frankly crude quality of some of the painted passages, particularly the awkwardness of the body modelling. People say that like Turner, Cezanne could not paint figures; of course this is untrue, his oeuvre is full of wonderful figure painting and portraits. But it’s in the clumsiness, the effort fullness of it somehow that it feels so right.
So how to explain this paradox of ungainliness and sublimity?
The ungainliness reflects the radicalism – the radicalism of a total commitment to plastic values, digging into the depths of the classical language and dynamic, and yet with new tools and a new sensibility to strip away the veneer and the trite. The ungainliness of the figure modelling is the clue indeed to his intention and his dogged persistence over many years to get this painting how he wanted it. To start with the central diagonal figure - key, front and central, to the painting - sweeping from bottom right into the central space but also sweeping away into the distance with hands pointing forward to the caesura in the foliage beyond, which is the key point of fracture and focus. This ungainly figure as it’s painted seems spread across lateral space with multiple outlines inching it and flattening it beyond what it can plastically hold. With this lateral disconnection of the actual plastic body form one sees the commitment to the formal structure of the painting – as often in Cezanne the distortion is the key point at which his real intent becomes clear.
So, take the right-hand lateral side of this diagonal figure and the group of five figures which it partly delineates. This group of five is a circular dynamic and where it starts to betray its formal meaning is when one compares it to the symmetrical group of five on the left. On the right this group betrays itself as a kind of inside-out, or opening out type form – when one looks at it more closely it is indeed like an opening flower in its expansive lines– Notably springing up in the curl to the figure turned with head looking straight at us - a figure who itself is all at one with the massive tree trunk that curls up from the top of the head to the top of the painting. This figure is curiously reminiscent of the mysterious female Saskia-like figure in Rembrandt’s Night Watch but also the figure of Rembrandt himself staring out at us in the same painting. There is an engagement to the look as well as a movement up and away as if drawing is in and out and beyond all in the same time. This figure up and out and away is framed on its right by the large maternal holding seated figure who is busy with both hands with something out of our sight just behind the large diagonal nude – perhaps she is peeling fruit or preparing something for the feast – gently and calmly preoccupied in her own activity. And then on the other side of the figure looking out on us what I think of as the orange twins, extraordinary creations, in some ways the heart of the painting to me, who pitch out away from us into the distance following the gesture of the diagonal nude’s outstretched hand towards the foliage; characterised in their awkwardly painted backs with a colour and linear expansive flow which ends in the two orange heads – but heads really painted like flowers with no “top”, no closure over the top of the head as if their orange hair is opened out into the sky. This lack of closure on top of their heads is important for the dynamic of the painting because the movement forward and up and out is so strong; it also links their painting with patches of foliage painted in a similar fashion to the side of them beyond them which links their heads therefore into the more distant foliage on the paintings surface. And to the left of these figures is the outstretched form of the main nude her head held back and sturdy, looking forward behind those outstretched hands into the distance. I say hands - in fact it is not just one hand but spread in the painting as it were smeared as an image latterly so that in fact it looks like two hands, one beside the other; an echo one of the other with one painted a little bit more substantially than the other. These hands are so critical in the painting and something about the lateral spread emphasises the forward motion. So this right-hand group of five works formally like an expanding inside-out flower or opening out display, which links to the firm strong arc of the big heavy dark blue trunk stretching out up into the right-hand corner of the painting.
Then on the left side of the diagonal figure the second symmetrical knot of five – but here crucially outside-in: the figures closed in on each other leaning in on each other like a more closed bud, or a roseate form. What we see from this group is the outside with the inside concealed – juxtaposed with the group on the right side exploding outwards. Then the lighter tree trunks flowing up from this left-hand group also curving up in a Gothic arch towards the centre of the painting – an unbalancing structural form that needs as we will see the crucial 11th figure on the right to balance it.
Standing back therefore to look at the structure as a whole with this in mind we see a dynamic system of circular energy on the right feeding through into the leftwards and outwards forwards dynamic of the central nude. But this dynamic motion as it were spiralling off centrifugally that right-hand form gathers momentum from the knot on the left so that the forward motion of the central nude is as it were accelerated through the two figure groups out into the distance following her outstretched arms towards that caesura, that dark gap in the foliage beyond which she is pointing and which forms clearly the way ahead and through. Out and to what? The dynamic structure of the painting revealed in this way contains massive momentum and power which belies the apparently monumental and static surface of the painting when first looked at. This dynamic rhythm of course echoes many painting structures in Poussin, in Titian even going back further in Piero - if one looks at how the figure groups and the trees intertwine. Cezanne recreates this familiar dynamic momentum but in a new fashion; new form stripped of past veneer, and rediscovered within the language of a new abstraction and empiricism. This brings to mind to me Beethoven’s late music, in its rediscovery of classical forms only the better to subvert use them as an armature with which to articulate the future. What on earth is the symbolic meaning of this work for Cezanne? To me this rediscovery of classical form within a new abstracted monumentality is probably the key thing. If he wished to ‘remake Poussin after nature’ in his famous phrase, this is where most completely he does it, with these echoes of formal classical structures and tropes from the past.
Which brings us to the mysterious beautiful elegiac moving separate interned figure on the right. Structurally essential to balance the painting’s dynamics, to hold against the right leaning heavy trunks and echoing the left with the diagonal dynamic of the central nude. But this figure is a different kind of manifestation; separated from the rest of the figures, quiet, wrapped in his or her own world moving through the forest. I can’t think of anything else like this figure in Cezanne’s art. It has almost a symbolist resonant grace, as if in Redon. It carries the resonance of the picture into a different dimension; of introspection juxtaposed with the formal momentum of the main figure groups and indeed their collegiality, their human group dynamism. This figure on the right – solitary and inturned – a thoughtful compliment in the night.
Coming out for a final view the painting now. The static monumentality as first seen becomes a dynamic formal story, utterly intense in its momentum and formal structures – completely committed to revealing its dynamic power within the possibilities of painting and of imagination. In this painting Cezanne goes beyond his empiricism to nature, he goes back through his early romantic explosions of imagination but disciplined now through formal structures into a pure abstracted future in which he has come through to a kind of dynamic mysticism within the painting process. The next person to work in this kind of dogged completely committed formal way, 10 years later in the middle of the First World War, is Matisse in his great Bathers in Chicago. Matisse takes this on a step but in his painting process has the same radical seriousness and ambition of this late Cezanne towards a goal that is in the end beyond words - something that can only be portrayed within the visual imagination and transcendent intuitions.
Just like Beethoven, in the Grosse Fuge for instance, Cezanne in his reworking of classicism and his effort to transcend and dig into himself, has created structures that reach way out beyond into the future and provide a pulse that echoed through the following century – and one can still pick it up today in front of the canvas, like a pulsar deep in space-time coming across to us to jolt our sensibility. The question in the painting and perhaps for the painter is what lies beyond the caesura in the foliage – but in the end maybe that’s just unknowable. What we do now is the humanity of the texture, the comfort of the forms that are visible in front of us in their harmony preoccupations and relationships - and how they hold themselves and us together in their art.
Letter to LRB - Nov 2020
Tim Clark (Oct 2020) pleads for Pissarro’s depth with an interestingly elegiac tone. He delicately characterises the achieved ‘thereness’ or ‘immediacy’ in Pissarro’s paintings; the unity of light and atmosphere in a socially shared world (that latter seems the point). It’s an interesting turn then to suggest that Cezanne was unable, technically or temperamentally, to share that world and so stumbled from that ‘failure’ into style. “Modernity is loss of world” Clarke says, elegiacally again. But I can’t see it like that.
Cezanne surely came to work with Pissarro as, yes, a kind of crucial empirical discipline, but really as a staging post from his past to his future. His copy of the Pissarro gives the evidence: by contrast to Pissarro’s out-thereness, in Cezanne’s painting the meaning shifts despite itself to the plastic relationships on the canvas - look at how the rose leaves on the left of the tall trees hum against the inside of the bulwark and the light around the figures! This is the formal language that explodes into his art over the next few years; what he thought of as his classicising impulse, a particular type of deep coherence on the canvas, yet always totally tied to the serious empirical discipline of looking ‘till my eyes bleed’.
In bypassing one world he opened up so many others - even politically. I may be repeating a modernist trope, but in the end it’s Clark’s elegaic tone in this piece that interests me….what does he feel we have lost?
Jonathan Green
Subsequent letters to TJ Clark –
On Sat, Nov 21, 2020 at 9:02 PM Jonathan Green
Dear Tim Clark,
I love your work and was absorbed by your recent piece in LRB on Cezanne and Pissarro – and its subtext.
I wrote a letter to the Editor in response that they may or may not publish! Here it is anyway below for your interest in case they don’t…….! I’d love to have your views and response.
I also take the liberty of sharing some my own reactions to close looking at Cezanne over the years. These were not written for publication and I’m not an art historian (although I did an Art History Tripos in Cambridge with Virginia Speight in the 70’s). I am a practicing painter as well as an academic child psychiatrist and they come from that perspective. Plus a more general piece I have published professionally on ‘Form and Mental State’. You may find they chime or not with you – and I’d love to know!
Thank you for your work.
On Sun, Jan 17, 2021 at 9:40 PM Jonathan Green
Dear Tim,
This comes with all good wishes for your New Year.
Well, I’ve looked out for my letter in subsequent LRBs but no show!
I guess time’s out now for that – but in any event it would be lovely to pick up the dialogue with you that we started below,
So if you have the time, it would be great to hear from you.
All best wishes,
Jonathan
Dear Tim,
Many thanks for sending me the Basel exhibition programme essay. I used this as another opportunity to address the challenges and questions thrown up for me by your LRB piece. I take the risk here of speaking freely…risk because not knowing you, but taken because I must trust your sympathy!
The Pissarro you focus on (Côte des boeufs) I have to admit I find pedestrian. I have tried! I think one thing that kills it for me is the presence of the figures emerging down the path; done and located in a way within the picture that comes across to me as a cliched genre trope. What is interesting to Pissarro does seem indeed to be the reality of what is there; the house is there in a position in the landscape lovingly set out. Taking into account the history of his anarchism, the historical churn at the end of the 19th century, fears to the threat of community life and practice posed by industrialisation, yes these can be located here in the tenderness with which he portrays the real. But in terms of the painting as painting I can’t make it more than pedestrian; it doesn’t seem to be telling me any more about painting as such or as a painting. I can see that your Champ de Choux, highlighted in the LRB article as well, is indeed a beautifully charged atmosphere – but in this one I don’t receive that sense of atmosphere; more something plain and more descriptive.
(But I do care enough about how you describe paintings to have gone at this! I got a copy of your ‘End Of An Idea’ and the chapter on ‘We field-women’. This makes me realise that I haven’t ever properly looked at Pissarro (no doubt because he didn’t jump out at me formally in my many visits to the C19th century rooms in Gallery spaces around the world – I tend to follow by default Clive Bell’s described habit of initially walking quickly around and seeing what speaks…). Your wonderful description of the surface and the light depicted there makes me realise with a pain how long its been since I’ve been able to look at a painting in the flesh and not through reproduction – so I should reserve all judgement till I’ve really seen him in the flesh…and at that in the right lighting atmosphere of a New York afternoon! I can completely see the possibility of a very subtle nuanced atmosphere here lying within what I can see you say as his risky proximity to cliché…there’s something here I won’t understand until I can stand in front of it for a decent time).
The Cezanne (La Côte des boeufs à l’Hermitage) is immediately graver, more serious, more intense, incomparably! I would say on a different plane. The way it’s done, and the fizzling out of the path towards us that you mention for instance, I see as having the effect of drawing the eye into the nexus of form in the middle of that forest. In a sense everything else is setting and context for the work that went on into the middle of the painting. As in so much of Cezanne’s mature method it is a sequential tightening, focusing, reflecting, and abstracting as he goes deeper into the painting process. Indeed, in this painting perhaps a little unusually the focusing in question is concentrated in that central area with the vision much more relaxed all the way round the outside, which gives the thing kind of hypnotic intensity in drawing one in. It’s hard to express exactly what’s been conveyed here except a ratcheting up of the intensity of attention; the working out the vision at an extreme level until one has a sense, lets say, of personality being fully expressed and realised. This painting becomes about Cezanne’s looking more and more, his own exploration of artistic language and visual percept. As one follows him in, at least to this viewer, one is drawn into a world of aching feeling and precise intellect; one is held emotionally and intellectually by the rightness of it, the stress and release, organisation and freedom, a kind of result that one knows could only be achieved by intense and sustained effort – no shortcuts, no cliché, no flanneur, no posing. This is work where every moment and every stroke and every piece of looking is newly minted, newly invented and tested against the highest standards of what feels real. It is that precision perhaps which he got to at the core of his painting activity.
The real, what the world looks like; it must be clear that the painting isn’t anything like that. But it’s about what was the real in Cezanne’s vision in front of the real. In a sense the evidence for this assertion can be adduced in the painting –– the out of focus foreground and similarly the relatively scumbled lateral sides of the painting speak to the process of attention and vision; how, as we focus visual attention, other aspects of the visual field become blurred. Not all Cezanne’s are like this, but here in particular his focusing in the central area is most apparent, and yet done with such freedom and sensitivity that it doesn’t feel forced. So the import of the painting is not the subject, it is the process of looking and the capturing of that is with precision as well as freedom. It has something to me for instance of the quality of Husserl’s phenomenology which was to come a few decades later.
What is exciting about the Cezanne is yes what it is but also what it leads to. There is something in the quality of attention and thought and working out in precise visual language that happens here that liberates the painting language from one of representation. In other words it liberates the mind to imagine other correspondences, other thoughts liberated from the particular – it does what thought can do which is to liberate imagination from beyond particular into something further suggestive and potent. It’s true that if this style of thinking is completely disengaged from the locality, the percept (as is in pure abstract painting) then different problems arise. What makes Cezanne’s moment so potent I feel is this presence in the particular and hugely empirically linked to the particular; but at the same time as liberated from it; the huge power of the abstract/not abstract moment. His classicising impulse is to take seriously the meaning of getting that work on the picture plane just right, in other words the work on the language of painting as painting. I found Philip Rawson’s beautiful book on drawing very help to get a language for this – his notions of ‘Topic’, ‘Tenor’ and formal organisation of the gamut.
Whenever I walk around any Gallery anywhere in the kind of Clive Bell way above, and there’s a Cezanne on the wall, its like I’m hit always by a thunderbolt of formal feeling; there’s hardly ever any other painting in the room after that point!
How’s your Cezanne book going, or gone? Incidentally, I pigged out and got ‘The Sight of Death’ too – because I love that Getty space and absolutely love Poussin; the National Gallery Annunciation, as a formal expression of the giving and receiving of revelation, has been in my study for decades. This is a wonderful book I must say! The daring of giving ‘looking’ this time and space and loving attention is just liberating and speaks to my own experience of painting unlike much else if anything has done before. As you can tell, I could go on.
Thank you.