Cézanne at the National Portrait Gallery
We don’t hear quite as much about Paul Cézanne these days. He is still a meganame, but the once-automatic assumption that Cézanne was the most incisive and influential figure in that impressionist and post-impressionist generation that turned art around in the last years of the 19th century – an artist who exerted a hold over the development of modern art beyond even that of Monet or van Gogh – has rather been lost.
Still, the prospect of seeing 50 of Cézanne’s portraits in one place – in what is the first exhibition of such works since 1907 – must get the neck hairs prickling of anyone even slightly interested in art. Cézanne is perhaps most famous for his paintings of Montagne Sainte-victoire near his home in Provence, works that have become synonymous with the pursuit of the essence of a single subject. His portraits are no less single-minded, focusing on his wife, whom he painted 29 times, various relatives, friends, servants and, not least, himself.
The son of a banker, Cézanne trained as a lawyer before becoming a pupil of Camille Pissarro, though an inheritance allowed him to go his own way from relatively early in his career. His early paintings tend to be seen as a gauche prelude to his mature style, as Cézanne lards on his pigments with a palette knife, with an emphasis on black, in a style he called “couillarde” (literally, “ballsy”). If a portrait of his friend Antony Valbrègue (1866) looks like a slightly amateurish response to the elder statesman of impressionism, Édouard Manet, a series of portraits of his uncle Dominique, all painted in 1866-67, feel extraordinarily modern in the way they appear to consciously develop as a single work.
In a second portrait of Valbrègue (1869-70), we see Cézanne’s approach, in which he set out to make of impressionism “something more solid and durable” evolving. The typical impressionist “patches” of colour are here used to denote the accents of form around the sitter’s cheeks and forehead – an approach to painting that’s become so pervasive it’s difficult to imagine how radical it must have seemed. Far from appearing rigid and mechanical, Cézanne’s application of the lustrous blacks, greys and fleshtones keeps the surface fluid and vital.
In a self-portrait of 1875, the highlights around Cézanne’s burning eyes, his unkempt hair and thick beard feel alive with a furious energy, while the positioning of the figure on the canvas gives it a heroic force worthy of the Old Masters. At this point, Cézanne still clung to the traditional notion of the portrait as an amalgam of physical appearance and inner personality. It was when he abandoned the latter interest, looking at the human face and body as a purely physical, monumental structure, that his art – and indeed the exhibition – began to take off to another level.
The effect of three large portraits of Cézanne’s wife, Hortense, in a red dress, all painted in close succession around 1888-90, is stunning. The rendering of the dress on the central painting is clearly unfinished – Cézanne, apparently, felt he had said what he wanted and simply stopped painting – but the form of the figure is so palpably present it’s as if the folds of Hortense’s garments are being carved out of the picture space before our eyes. Yet having succeeded in his aim of giving impressionism a greater solidity, he then set about breaking down the traditional distinction between subject and background, so that the figure in the painting and the surrounding curtains and picture frames all seem to sit equally close to the surface of the painting, interacting in a way that looks directly forward to the breakthroughs of cubism and futurism some 20 years later.
Cézanne refines Hortense’s long, oval-shaped head into an ever more simplified sculptural form, strongly bringing to mind Picasso’s cubist portraits, which are generally seen as inspired by African sculpture, though the influence was clearly much closer to home. If these portrayals are hardly “attractive” in the conventional sense, and Cézanne has been accused of “cruelty” in his painting of his wife, with whom he had a difficult relationship, he would no doubt have painted her in exactly the same way had the pair been in the first flush of romance, such was his obsession with pure form and shape.
In contrast, two rather quiet and patient studies, again of Madame Cézanne, this time in blue, remind us of Cézanne’s role, not only as the starting point for the most radical artistic developments of the 20th century, but as the progenitor of schools of dogged observational painting, typified by the quasi-mathematical realism of British painters such as William Coldstream and Euan Uglow.
This is a show that must be seen for the way it highlights Cézanne’s influence, and for the sheer power of the paintings. If Cézanne claimed to paint bodies rather than souls, the soul would, he conceded, “shine and blaze through… if the body is well painted”. The people here are brought before us with force: the blue-bodiced figure in Woman with a Coffee Pot has the sense of scale and presence of a mountain, while psychology seems to reassert itself in the anxious sideways glance of A Man with Crossed Arms.
Exhibitions of French painting often disappoint because our institutions don’t seem to have the clout to get the critical works. However, this show, which originated at the Musée d’orsay and will be moving to the National Gallery of Art in Washington, has enough masterpieces to tell a powerful story about Cézanne’s portrait painting. Not only does it put Cézanne back in historical pride of place as the father of modern art, it gives us the most dynamic, penetrating and plain brilliant painting we’ll see this year – which still looks not just fresh, but radical nearly a century and a half after it was created. Show of the year? I do believe so.
He would have painted her in the same way had the pair been in the first flush of romance, such was his obsession with form