Cezanne: Fantasy and Imagination

Abstract

Cézanne: Fantasy and Imagination Charles Harrison (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 1. Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, circa 1894-1905. London, National Gallery. The original motivation for this paper was bathetic in the extreme. I wanted to explain to myself a single small detail in Cézanne’s late painting of bathers in the National Gallery, London, known as The Large Bathers, 1894–1905, V.721 ( fig. 1): the half-described, half-connected foot of the figure lying on its stomach at the right that constitutes the nearest object to the picture plane. 1 What besets me, like many other spectators no doubt, is the sheer incorrigibility of its awkwardness. I have tried, as I imagine Cézanne must have done, and I have looked at this painting over and over again, but each time it’s the same. I pull on this loose end, meaning to tidy things up a bit, and there’s that dreadful sinking feeling as the whole painting starts to unravel in my hands. This time perhaps it will be different. I will try to be more careful. [End Page 1] I open this paper, therefore, with two interrelated conjectures. I claim no originality for either of them. If this paper has a contribution to make it is simply in putting them to work in tandem on the art of Cézanne. I shall not attempt to argue for the conjectures themselves. I shall assume that their power to focus attention on some aesthetic properties of Cézanne’s paintings may be taken as a relevant test of their validity. The first conjecture goes like this. As regards the first phase of what we have come to think of as modernism in its artistic form, say from the early 1860s onward for about fifty years, the problem of how women look may be thought of as a significant factor driving change in painting. I do not mean to suggest that the only paintings that matter are those that represent women as being looked at, or that represent women looking, or that represent women looking self-conscious as a result of being looked at, though it is certainly true that a highly informative—and no doubt controversial—exhibition could be constructed along such lines. My contention is rather that a problem-ridden involvement with the representation of women may be connected at some level to those changes in the conceptualization of the painted surface that we have learned to identify with modernism. Foremost among these are changes in the character and functions of figure-ground effects. These changes are telling, for [End Page 2] the effects in question are the principal means by which objects of attention are represented as such within pictorial contexts. They are crucial deciders of significance in painting. The important point, then, is this: though these changes may be most easily explained by reference to pictures of women, and though they may have been first practiced in such pictures, once initiated and seen at work they have consequences that are determining upon conditions of aesthetic success and failure in paintings other than those in which women are pictured. Another way to put this would be to say that implementation of the changes in question becomes a condition of modernism in painting generally. And as these consequences are confronted in landscape and still life, feedback from work in these other genres comes in turn to change the perceived character of the problem field, though the problem itself does not cease to be besetting. It is a symptom of this state of affairs, clear from the work of Manet, of Degas and of Cézanne himself, that the genre of the nude offers no secure refuge from the modern problems of picturing women. On the contrary, as the decorum of the classical breaks down, the unclothed woman returns disturbingly to the present. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 2. William Bouguereau, Bathers, 1884. Chicago, Art Institute. Click for larger view View full resolution Figure 3. Paul Cézanne, Three Bathers, circa 1880. Paris, Musée d’Orsay. I’ll try to clarify these points by means...