The Faces of Cézanne

The American Interest

Paul Cézanne was prematurely bald, and impressively so. In the first room of the National Gallery of Art’s new exhibition “Cézanne Portraits,” the post-Impressionist master has applied his trademark honesty to his own image.

Painted when he was 36, Cézanne’s self-portrait is dominated by a smooth dome on the forward charge. It erupts from a low crown of dark hair, as if to lead his sunken features into battle. Daubs of gold, rose, and gray build momentum across the skull’s expanse, while a solid charcoal outline anchors its august volume. As far as depictions of baldness are concerned, it is strikingly forthright. When Rainer Maria Rilke saw the canvas, he noted that Cézanne had the “unquestioning, matter-of-fact interest of a dog who sees himself in a mirror and thinks: there’s another dog.”

For the first time since Cézanne’s death, the National Gallery of Art (NGA) in Washington, DC has set out to rehabilitate an often-overlooked corner of the artist’s oeuvre. Painted in the waning years of France’s second empire, the traveling collection of 60 paintings marks the largest grouping of Cézanne portraiture ever assembled, with the NGA the sole American venue. A joint project of the NGA, London’s National Portrait Gallery, and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the exhibition will travel on to Paris after completing its DC run in July. The exhibition’s chief curator is John Elderfield of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, along with Mary Morton from the NGA, and Xavier Rey, formerly of the Musee d’Orsay. A catalogue accompanying the exhibition, authored by the curators, is exceptionally engaging with a balance of formal analyses and explorations of Cézanne’s personal relationships.

Why has no museum attempted a major exhibition of Cézanne’s self-portraits in the last 108 years? The post-impressionist known for his vibrant fruit and sunbaked hills left a body of portraiture that might charitably be defined as “experimental.” Over a career spanning 44 years, Cézanne pursued many styles and techniques simultaneously. The challenges that plagued him early in his career—including mask-like faces, unseeing eyes, and ill-proportioned figures—are never fully resolved in his later canvases. Yet he did succeed in developing a highly original body of work that is striking in its earnestness. In Cézanne’s hands, portraiture did not enhance the sitter’s personal identity, but instead revealed his human dignity by stripping away all artifice.

While his artist peers were attempting to infuse natural landscapes with human sentiment, Cézanne was concerned with the inverse: how to endow the human form with the absoluteness and permanence of a mountain. At the time, his perspective on the human form made him an outlier. He abhorred the grand nobility of neoclassicists like Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (going so far as to paint a mocking tribute to Ingres’ “Napoleon I on his Imperial Throne”), and never fully embraced the Impressionists with their heady celebration of life. Yet the century since his death has strengthened Cézanne’s unique legacy as one of the first painters to distill an object’s mass and volume as its key features. This approach brought a solidity and brilliance to his still lifes and landscapes, yet when applied to the human figure, yielded problematic results. Cézanne divorced his sitter’s physical form from their personality, an uncomfortable compromise for most. But as part of the settlement, the artist was able to focus fully on the physical form of his sitter, imbuing his portraits with an immediacy that is striking to this day.

To modern eyes that are saturated with the Snapchat aesthetic and its over-stylized filters (dog ears, anyone?) the exhibition is a restorative tonic for the senses. With bracing patches of color, minimal ornamentation, and frank honesty, Cézanne brings us back to a fundamental reality that is obscured in our hyper-ornamented and augmented daily lives.

Resolutely conventional in his personal views yet wildly inventive in how he conveyed them, Cézanne was the provincial outsider among the Impressionists. While Emile Zola remained a lifelong friend, Cézanne was less inclined to adopt the socially rebellious mannerisms of his peers. He exhibited in the 1863 Salon des Refuses, established by Napoleon III to exhibit the works rejected by the annual juried exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. And while he participated in several of the early Impressionist shows, later in life he submitted exclusively to the official Salon (a single painting was eventually accepted, a full-length portrait of his father on view at the National Gallery). While his peers catalogued the indulgences of modern life and café society, Cézanne complained of how the newly-installed street lamps ruined dusk. As other painters explored informal group portraits set in dance halls, Cézanne embraced a formal sitting pose in his studio. While Renoir and Monet were focusing their attention on beautiful models in fashionable dress, Cézanne painted his wife in the housedress she would never be caught wearing in public. As he aged, he became more committed to his Catholic faith and moved from Paris to his family estate in socially conservative, rural Provence.

From the beginning of Cézanne’s artistic career, he painted friends and family with a brave helping of indifference. Among the first to be pressed into service was Dominique Aubert, Cézanne’s maternal uncle, whose portraits fill the first room in the exhibition. Painted in 1866 when Cézanne was 27 years old and living with his family near Aix-en-Provence, each of the five portraits features Dominique’s glum visage, occasionally topped with a turban or Phrygian cap. The artist used a loaded painter’s trowel to lay down a thick impasto layer, with unblended streaks of color building a sense of frenzy and fluidity. In a letter to a friend, Cézanne notes that most of the Uncle portraits took him less than a day to complete. The youthful, unburdened energy of his early portraiture would shift to a more deliberate rhythm over his career. Cézanne’s art dealer Ambroise Vollard claimed that Cézanne required 115 portrait sittings, three hours each, to complete his portrait.

The young artist was unsparing in his depictions of Uncle Dominique, invariably pictured with a jutting lower lip and a bulbous nose. The series reveals a trend that is consistent across Cézanne’s portraiture—an objectivity that portraitists often spare their sitters. “Every time he paints one of his friends, it seems as though he were avenging himself for some hidden injury,” his friend Antony Valabrègue observed.

While Cézanne eschewed idealization, neither did he resort to the sharp-edged caricature popularized by Honoré Daumier and common at the time. Cézanne approached his uncle’s strong features as if they were elements of a composition, just as a still life might be composed of a pear, apple, and milk jug. And just as a milk jug rarely invites emotional judgment, Cézanne painted his uncle’s features with a purposeful acceptance that has its own quiet grace.

The raw objectivity of Cézanne’s developing style found a regular focus in his wife, Hortense Fiquet. A bookseller and part-time artist’s model, she was known as “the little dumpling” by Cézanne’s friends and “Queen Hortense” by his family. Theirs was a lifelong yet fraught relationship, resulting in one son and lasting 37 years until Cézanne’s death. A grouping of these portraits at the National Gallery provide an unrivaled opportunity to “read between the canvases” of Cézanne’s artistic method. With narrowed eyes, lips pressed tightly closed, and a body that might have been modeled on a sack of grain, Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense are inelegant at best. Yet Cézanne devoted an extraordinary amount of time to painting her, with 29 portraits over 30 years, nearly one-fifth of his total portraiture output.

In a series completed in the years before Cézanne’s first solo exhibition, Hortense is shown in a formal, seated pose, upright in a yellow chair with her hands resting in her lap. While her pose is the same in each portrait, her appearance varies, as if Cézanne emancipated her features from her personal identity. In a portrait on loan from the Fondation Beyeler, Hortense’s features are a patchwork of black, blue, and vermillion invoking the raw Fauvist style of generations of artists after Cézanne. In another portrait from that same period, on loan from the Art Institute of Chicago, Cézanne uses a wildly different approach. Using subdued tones and brushwork, Cézanne gave Hortense the smooth features of a Noh mask, with narrowed eyes set into an oval form. In these portraits, Cézanne is experimenting with physicality and establishing a path that would lead future artists out of the tinted haze of Impressionism.

Cézanne depiction of Hortense’s rosacea, the most homely of details, provides a key to understanding his motivations. The skin condition endures across Cézanne’s many portraits of his wife. It’s a curious feature, one the artist could have omitted in favor of unblemished skin. Instead, Cézanne seems preoccupied with the challenge of cataloguing its many forms: a splash of vermillion on her cheek bone, or a crimson dash across her jawline. It was an elemental feature to study and to understand, not unlike the blush of an apple or the planes of his own bald head. In Cézanne’s hands, the rosacea adds a lively, beguiling element to the portraits, balancing the blue and yellow tones of her skin while echoing the rosy hue of her lips.

Like a dour Mona Lisa, Hortense’s enigmatic features reveal little to gallery viewers trying to understand Cézanne’s personal life. Art historian Susan Sidlauskas points out that Hortense’s “absence of beauty is matched by a pointed lack of [Cézanne’s] painterly virtuosity.” While the portraits may not be characterized by empathy, there is acceptance. Cézanne painted Hortense more frequently than any other individual, including himself. Despite the estrangement that marked the couple’s relationship, it is hard to deny the attentive focus and fascination with which Cézanne viewed his favorite sitter.

Cézanne embraced Hortense’s imperfections without the need to recast her as a paradigm of beauty, seduction, or morality. A rebellion against the strict conventions that governed female portraiture at the time, Cézanne’s “slipping away from conventional terrain was, and remains, quite radical,” notes co-curator Mary Morton. Cézanne insisted on painting his own family with the bluntness and rigor that he levels at himself. Yet in the process of refining his double-edged talent, he gave Hortense something more precious than false beauty, a sense of vitality and authenticity. While it’s easy to dismiss the flattering portraits of yesterday’s court royalty and today’s selfie culture, Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense will endure.

As opposed to today’s carefully composed self-imagery, Cézanne eschewed the impulse to condense one’s family and friends in a series of publicity stills. He might scoff at the state of self-representation today. Any glimpse of social media will convince us that our friends spend their lives in a perpetual state of farmers’ markets, scenic vineyards, and uncrowded beaches. Instead, Cézanne depicts Hortense as we might see our own partner in the midst of a Sunday afternoon, excising the leaf muck from the gutters. Reality, and its occasional lack of charms, is sanctified through Cézanne’s devoted attention.

Cézanne painted his portraits with an expansiveness of spirit missing in our modern self-conceptions. In life, Cézanne embraced his own contradictory impulses. In art, he never forced the mantles of politics, culture, and class on his subjects. The inherent humanity and physicality of Cézanne’s subjects (himself included) provided more than enough material to keep him satisfied. By contrast, the modern self-image doesn’t seem to exist unless its manipulated, staged, or steeped in personal manifesto. Fueled by our current protest culture, we mistake personal styling for political participation, and begin to interpret others by the same criterion.

For the modern museum-goer, Cézanne’s portraits offer a refreshing foil to the hyper-stylization that dominates self-imagery today. Cézanne achieved this level of candor, in part, by avoiding the financial pressures of commissioned portraiture. He painted whomever he pleased, at one point abandoning a portrait of George Clemenceau after two sittings on account of finding the gossiping politician “as malicious as a wasp.” Yet Cézanne made time, again and again, to paint his elderly gardener. He had no patron, no one to please beyond himself, and took full advantage of that freedom to create distinct and rich depictions. When a large percentage of social media posts revolve around pricy products or experiences, we can only envy his independence from commercialism.

Cézanne felt that he could “paint for a hundred years, a thousand years without stopping and I would still feel as though I knew nothing.” One hundred years later, we are still learning from the portraiture left to us. Johnathan Elderfield’s curatorial gamble has paid off, with an exhibition that re-humanizes one of Western culture’s most lionized artists.

Published in The American Interest, May 18, 2018