Cézanne Portraits

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How strange to see in just a few days two compelling exhibits of portraiture!



The Cézanne blockbuster at the National Portrait Gallery encompasses some 50 paintings, and I find myself struggling (as I did with Soutine) to determine how much these paintings reveal of their subjects and how much they show us the painter’s distinctive way of seeing a confusing, baffling world.



Or perhaps I’m the one who’s baffled. There’s so much to respond to in this exhibition, from the thick palette work of early portraits (which he quite wonderfully called his manière couillarde, or “ballsy style”) to the subtle way he builds clothing and faces out of a seemingly infinite palette of browns and blues in the later portraits.



But there’s something opaque and unknowable about his subjects, most tellingly in the paintings of his wife, Hortense. By most accounts, theirs was a long and unhappy relationship. (His comment that “my wife cares only for Switzerland and lemonade” speaks volumes!) But she seems to have shown infinite patience in sitting for 27 (28? 29?) portraits, of which eleven or so are in this exhibit.



I find these portraits of Hortense compelling, somewhat the way a crime or accident scene is compelling. How to interpret the blank stare: boredom? resentment? stupidity? Or as an abstract shape that fascinated Cézanne, something like the African masks that would fascinate Picasso?



The critic from The Arts Desk challenges the conventional view that Cézanne’s relationships with people were emotionally stunted, and she maintains that the painter’s attachment to his wife was greater than we think:

"What comes across is a striking emotional attachment, an affection growing organically from his determined gaze, his effort to get down what he saw. He is not a graceful painter but markedly persuasive."



I’m not completely convinced, but I’m ready to consider the possibility. I’m reminded of a scene in the movie Ladybird. The nun played by Lois Smith, after reading Ladybird’s college essay, observes that she obviously loves Sacramento. We audience members are as startled as Ladybird is by the comment, but she responds, “I guess I pay attention.” The nun suggests, “Don’t you think they’re the same thing—love and attention?”



Cézanne is paying attention, all right, but is he paying attention to his wife? Or is she the vehicle at hand through which he pays attention to the forms and patterns that constitute the real subject of his paintings?

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Comments

[Gordon Bugbee]

Portraiture and cathexis
Thanks for the blog and the pix. What an interesting juxtaposition, Soutine and Cézanne. As someone who has painted portraits, if I want to get the face (or any other body part) right, whatever that means, I have to focus on the forms and lines and let the person emerge. I believe we are so accustomed to looking at faces that we don't actually see them. We apprehend them in an intuitive scan, a Gestalt (if I'm sing the term correctly). It is why it is so hard to draw a face. We don't have much experience seeing the specific forms and differences. It's why art teachers will ask people to draw forms up-side-down, so they can suspend what they think know and see. Saying that, it raises the really interesting question, what was Soutine or Modigliani or Picasso, for that matter, "seeing" when they draw what seem to be such "distorted" figures. Thanks for the provocative posts. Hope you are enjoying the balmy weather! I finally figured it out, we saw Soutine (and those Renoir's that turned me off) in the basement of the Musée de l'Orangerie.

[Coxtravels]

Re Portraiture and cathexis
Thanks for these helpful comments, Gordon. You're right about the Orangerie: there are two Soutines in this exhibit from the Orangerie. Also one from the Pompidou, but nearly all the others are from private collections or quite small museums.