Monday, July 3, 2017

Flatness in Cézanne

Camille Pissarro
Portrait of Paul Cézanne
1874
oil on canvas
National Gallery, London

Paul Cézanne
Self-portrait with hat
ca. 1890-94
oil on canvas
Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo

Paul Cézanne
Portrait of Madame Cézanne in blue
1890
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Paul Cézanne
Portrait of Madame Cézanne in red armchair
ca. 1877
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul Cézanne
Portrait of Madame Cézanne
ca. 1890
oil on canvas
Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

Paul Cézanne
Portrait of Madame Cézanne
ca. 1890-92
oil on canvas
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Paul Cézanne
Woman with coffeepot
ca. 1895
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

"Flatness in general in Cézanne had always been at root a metaphor for materiality  for the painter's conviction that in a world made up of matters the being-in-the-eye of an object is also its being-out-there-at-a-distance, known to us only by acquaintance."

"This seems true of Cézanne.  I agree with all those who have written about him that somewhere at the heart of his (and Pissarro's) epistemology is an idea of knowledge built out of singular, equivalent units  events that happen in the eye, and which the dab of paint will analogize precisely.  We are back to the wording of Freud's "Project for a Scientific Psychology":  "The intention of this project is to furnish us with a psychology which shall be a natural science: its aim, that is, is to represent psychical processes as quantitatively determined states of specifiable material particles and so to make them plain and void of contradictions."

"The body may never take place anywhere once and for all; but what it is made of  what our imagining of it is made of  will take place, and take on its own consistency.  Its place is the picture surface.  And the kind of consistency it has is hard for us to deal with  that is why we retreat into the world of the imaginary  just because it is ultimately inhuman, or nonhuman, or has humanity as one of its effects." 

"Modernism, I am convinced, would not anger its opponents in the way it seems to if it did not so flagrantly assert the beautiful as its ultimate commitment.  And if it did not repeatedly discover the beautiful as nothing but mechanism, nothing but matter dictating (dead) form.  This is a horrible proposal, and I understand and sympathize with the wish to retrieve the human, the social, and the discursive on the other side of it."

 from Freud's Cézanne, chapter three in T.J. Clark's Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism (Yale University Press, 1999)

Paul Cézanne
Pond
ca. 1877-79
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul Cézanne
Terrace in the garden at Les Lauves
ca. 1902-06
watercolor
Morgan Library, New York

Paul Cézanne
Still-life with kettle
1867-69
oil on canvas
Musée d'Orsay, Paris

Paul Cézanne
Fruit and jug on table
ca. 1890-94
oil on canvas
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Paul Cézanne
Milk-can and apples
1879-80
oil on canvas
Museum of Modern Art, New York

Paul Cézanne
Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir
ca. 1904-06
oil on canvas
Bridgestone Museum of Art, Tokyo

Paul Cézanne
Mont Sainte-Victoire
ca. 1902-06
oil on canvas
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City