When things fall apart, you can see what they’re made of. “Cézanne: Portraits,” a retrospective of some sixty portraits by Paul Cézanne, at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is the most instructive show of the artist I’ve ever seen, because it’s so lurchingly uneven. Wonderments consort with clunkers, often on the same canvas: credible figure and woozy ground, or vice versa. Portraiture was the genre most resistant to Cézanne’s struggle—the inception of “difficulty” as a notorious feature of modern art, needing specialist explanation—toward new ways of transposing the world’s three dimensions into the two of painting. There are about a hundred and sixty portraits among the thousand or so paintings that he made between around 1860 and his death, of pneumonia, in 1906. They lack the knitted density of his landscapes and figure groups and the stunning integrity of his greatest works, the still-lifes with apples like succulent cannonballs. Those apples prompted D. H. Lawrence, in a classic essay from 1929, to hail Cézanne for establishing like no other artist a recognition that “matter actually exists,” independent of human self-regard. That essay—recommended to me by the distinguished curator John Elderfield, who, together with Mary Morton and Xavier Rey, co-curated the National Gallery show—vivifies the ascetic passion of Cézanne: an awkward man of turbulent, half-strangled emotions, known to pause for twenty minutes between one brushstroke and the next, who set benchmarks of rigor and authenticity for artists ever after.
Lawrence saw Cézanne as striving to objectify the “appleyness”—the thing in itself—of people, too, yet without much success because, the writer decided, they were beyond his ken. He came closest, Lawrence believed, in the twenty-eight or so portraits of his lover, Hortense Fiquet, whom he met in 1869 and married seventeen years later, “making the universe slip uneasily about her,” Lawrence wrote, her presence not static but “come to rest.” But not even there, Lawrence thought, could Cézanne entirely overcome convention—Hortense still being somewhat of an image as opposed to sheer quiddity. Lawrence’s summary judgment of Cézanne is pretty severe: “After a fight tooth-and-nail for forty years, he did succeed in knowing an apple, fully; and, not quite as fully, a jug or two. That was all he achieved.” But Lawrence allowed—or ranted, in the way that he had of pounding any given nail until the hammer broke—“I can think of nobody else who has done anything.” I’d assess the artist more charitably. But precisely by faltering in an obsessive quest, Cézanne’s portraits tell me the most about him—while precious little about his subjects. He had strange, and strained, perceptions of others. But he kept having at them: Hortense and their son, Paul; himself, in the mirror; certain family members and friends; the occasional model; and farmhands, workers, and servants at his banker father’s estate, in Aix-en-Provence, where Cézanne spent most of his life, and which he inherited in 1886.
None of the portraits were commissioned. Cézanne’s family wealth freed him from the art-world scramble. In the eighteen-sixties, he made an abortive run at fame in Paris with crudely vehement works—privately including wacky erotica, perhaps influenced by Gustave Courbet but mainly expressing stymied lust—in palette-knife-slathered paint. Examples in the show from his time in Paris include small, sportive portraits of an uncle and, from 1866, a life-size, heroically clunky one of his father reading a leftist newspaper—which the starchy patriarch would not have liked. Cézanne himself tended toward the right, embracing pious Catholicism in his last decade, and though not overtly anti-Semitic, like Degas and Renoir, nevertheless siding with them in the Dreyfus Affair. Despite stalwart support from his boyhood friend Émile Zola, until the two became estranged, in the eighties, Cézanne made next to no headway in a Parisian scene that found him a delectable target for ridicule. He did not have a solo show in the city until 1895, when he was fifty-five and a mighty influence on younger painters. (He loathed one of them, Paul Gauguin, whom he accused of stealing his style.)
After 1870, Cézanne largely stopped painting portraits for a number of years, a period during which he was mentored by the avuncular Camille Pissarro in refinements of the techniques of open-air Impressionism. (His relations with others in the cohort were touch and go; the urbane Manet deemed him distressingly uncouth.) Cézanne absorbed the movement’s commitment to optical truth while gradually eliminating its blushes of light in favor of defining objects with patches of close-toned color, alternately warm and cool. He then increasingly holed up on his family’s estate. There he pursued a radical ambition, saying, “I want to make of impressionism something solid and lasting, like the art in the museums.” This entailed wedding sight to touch, alert for any hints of solidity in rocks and buildings, apples and heads, as—bit by bit, stroke by stroke, with hope but no compromise with respect to over-all coherence—they met his gaze. Each daub can seem to record a discrete look, at a moment isolated in time. Sometimes the eyes in a portrait peer in different directions, evidence of the discontinuous process. Picasso and Braque adapted the effect to create Cubism: visual reality fragmented in fealty to how our eyes take it in before our brains compose the illusion of having seen it whole.
But Cézanne didn’t want a system, which would have become just another habit of picture-making. Allergic to cliché, he made one-man war on conventions. Now it’s hard to register this fact, after generations of art experts have folded him into one or another scheme of progressive modernism. Lawrence noted the distortion with reference to the formalist theories of the Bloomsbury critics Roger Fry and Clive Bell: “the critics stepped forth and abstracted his good apple into Significant Form, and henceforth Cézanne was saved.” You must fight through what you are supposed to think of the work to what it looks like: indeed difficult, and rather weird in its compulsive attentiveness to details that don’t add up; they multiply. As a result, with the exception of the more postcard-congenial of his still-lifes, or his sun-drenched Mediterranean views, or his late, monumental scenes of bathers—and despite some smoldering and now and then combusting glories of color—Cézanne’s fate has been to be revered more than enjoyed.
Once, at the Metropolitan Museum, I counted dozens of people clumped in front of several paintings by van Gogh while one or two or none paid a whole room of Cézannes cursory attention as others walked through with passing glances. I empathized. A glance at his work warns of slow going ahead. That’s because he didn’t paint for the pleasure of other people but for his own, always elusive satisfaction. I’m used to feeling lonely when looking at his work—as humanly unconsidered as Hortense, who, through hours and days and years, displays not the slightest flicker of happiness. In a few small portraits from around the time of their wedding, she looks a mite distraught. (I believe it.) At best, wearing a red dress in several gorgeous paintings from 1888-90, she radiates a sort of alien majesty—appleyness, more or less. Cézanne’s most ambitious portrait, of a supportive art critic, Gustave Geffroy, from 1895-96, is unfinished. After months of regular sittings, the artist had strongly rendered the bookshelves and other objects in Geffroy’s office but despaired of ever resolving the face and hands. Only the rustic men in his late works flash much in the way of personhood; I suppose because he could comfortably condescend to them.
Cézanne’s art tells no stories, so we are left to invent stories about it. I love the one by Lawrence, though it overbears in projecting the writer’s sensualist ethos. Less helpful, albeit grand, is “Cézanne’s Doubt” (1945), a famous essay by Maurice Merleau-Ponty that applies existentialist and phenomenological theories to the artist’s procedures. Most on target is and, I think, always will be Picasso, who, in 1935, cited “the drama of the man.” He said, “What forces our attention is Cézanne’s anxiety.” Cézanne made his troubles our troubles. For the better part of a century, this could be taken as a challenge to modernizing progress in art. That myth is defunct now. The National Gallery show traps us in the present tense of efforts to get something right—an absoluteness not just of seeing, but of being—which happens not to be possible. ♦
