Lot Essay
A self-portrait is always the work of art in which the artist bares his soul to the viewer. In this striking Autoportrait of circa 1866 Cézanne stakes out his own position as a fiercely independent creative force who is about to challenge the smug Paris art establishment of the period. The picture is a clarion call, a self-declaration to which he has uniquely affixed his own identity with the aid of bright vermilion capitals P. CEZANNE in the manner that that other great revolutionary artist Picasso was to do thirty years later with his Yo Picasso. The style and conception of this self-portrait jusitifies John Rewald seeing it as the portrayal of Cézanne "as an inspired creator".
In this picture Cézanne establishes the prototype for the extraordinary series of analytical self-portraits he created throughout his career. But it is above all the style of paint application in this picture, ferociously worked in a manner reflecting his temperament and circumstances, which heralds a new direction in modern art. Lawrence Gowing writes, '1866 is the first of the dates that Cézanne offers us which we may, if we wish, call the beginning of modern art...This phase was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment. But beyond this Cézanne was the first man in the group, perhaps the first man in history, to realise the necessity for the manner in which paint is handled to build up homogenous and consistent pictorial structure. This is the invention of forme in the French modernist sense - meaning the condition of paint that constitutes a pictorial structure. It is the discovery of an intrinsic structure inherent in the medium and the material. Unlike Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, who were adapting Courbet's method to sensuous or atmospheric purposes in the relatively polite kinds of picture that went with ultimately conformist inventions, Cézanne was intensifying Courbet's least acceptable peculiarity, making it obstrusive, systematic and obsessional' (Cézanne, The Early Years, London, 1988, p. 10).
It was admiration for Courbet, as Gowing observes, that led to Cézanne's palette-knife pictures of the 1860s. "The palette-knife pictures were exceptional. Looking at them stacked against his studio wall thirty years afterwards, Cézanne called them une couillarde - and the coarse word for ostentatious virility suited the crudity of the attack with which the palette-knife expressed the indispensable force of temperament for a few months in 1866" (ibid). Cézanne in this group of 1866 portraits forsakes the brush in favour of his palette knife, building up the image with violent swatches of pigment that create an almost three-dimensional sculptural effect. There is a fiery vehemence of application that achieves a grandeur of conception through its very simplicity. Lawrence Gowing again remarks, 'The characteristic achievement of the middle sixties, the palette-knife pictures, most of them portraits, were not at all baroque, neither linear nor in any way historicist...The units of style were the tonal slabs out of which the images were built. The whole astonishing group of pictures, of which seven heads, including the first mature self-portrait in the pose which later became habitual...would seem to have been painted between August 1866 and the following January. Cézanne is described as finishing each of the heads in an afternoon; it was an extraordinary testimony to his abilities" (ibid).
The picture attracted Roger Fry's attention in 1927 in his survey of the Pellerin collection. "He has melodramatized himself, exaggerating the protrusion of his brow and the menacing expression of the eyes, giving to it the truculence of his own mood. The defiant mood persists even to the signature, which is in flaunting vermilion capitals. The colour is generally sober with rich yellow and red ochres playing against blacks and greys. And in all, in spite of the saturation and richness of the tints, he keeps full luminosity by the frankness and directness of his handling" (R. Fry, Cézanne, a study of his development, London, 1927, p. 21). The picture is remarkable for the sheer exuberance and enjoyment Cézanne exhibits in the application of paint on canvas, perhaps to a greater degree than at any other stage in his life.
From contemporary accounts it is obvious this Self-Portrait truly captures Cézanne's appearance in 1866. Antoine Guillemet wrote to Zola on 2 November 1866 of Cézanne "His exterior is if anything more beautiful, his hair is long, his face exhales health and his very dress causes a sensation." John Rewald has amplified this as he relates, "Cézanne, approaching thirty, was tall and thin, 'bearded, with knotty joints and a strong head. A very delicate nose hidden in the moustache, eyes narrow and clear...deep in his eyes, great tenderness. His voice was loud'. At this period he wore 'a battered black felt hat and an enormous overcoat, once a delicate maroon, which the rain had streaked green. He was a little stoop-shouldered and had a nervous shudder which was to become habitual. He planted himself in laced boots and his short trousers revealed blue stockings. Thus Zola depicted him several years later when creating the character of the painter Claude Lantier in Le Ventre de Paris published in 1873. In Cézanne's studio there was complete disorder. It was only swept once a month 'for fear that the dust might cover his fresh canvases'. A thousand things were strewn on the floor, and ashes piled up there. The sole big table was always littered with brushes, paints, dirty plates, a spirit lamp, etc. Unframed sketches hung on the wall all the way down to the floor, where they were piled up on a heap of canvases'" (J. Rewald, Paul Cézanne, London, 1948, pp. 51-2).
Emile Zola was the first owner of this picture and the relationship between the two was so close at the time that it is most probable that Cézanne presented the painting to Zola. The appearance of the picture is so close to Zola's description of the artist Claude Lantier in his novel L'Oeuvre that one is tempted to speculate that, hung on Zola's wall, it would have been a ready inspiration for the writer. Cézanne and Zola were fellow Aixois and met as early as 1852 at the Bourbon College in Aix. They became close friends and correspondents until the publication of L'Oeuvre in 1886 in which the already successful Zola gave his central character, the failed artist Claude Lantier, all the characteristics of Cézanne. Cézanne was so appalled and affronted that he severed all contact with Zola. However, as Götz Adriani writes, "The friendship between Cézanne and Zola was based on a mutual affection as friends, rather than a mutual respect as artists, and each saw the incarnation of his own youth in the other. Although alienated by success or the lack of it, and by the conviction that the other was unable to fulfill the ideals of their youth, they were bound throughout their lives by their shared memories. The decisive factor in the formal split between the two may have been the unique position of Cézanne, which enabled him more than any other to recognise in Zola's novel details and episodes from the youthful years that the two had shared" (G. Adriani, "La Lutte d'Amour", Notes on Cézanne's early figure scenes", in Cézanne, The Early Years, London, 1988, p. 52).
Before the split, Zola used his privileged position as an acclaimed Parisian writer and critic to champion Cézanne's career. In October 1865, Zola became the art critic of L'Evènement (the journal Cézanne depicted his father reading in the great palette-knife picture Portrait de Louis-Auguste Cézanne lisant L'Evènement, (Venturi 91) also formerly in the Pellerin collection and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). Zola's articles in L'Evenement defended the young avant-garde artists whose works were rejected by the Salon. His spring 1866 pamphlet, Mon Salon, was dedicated "à mon ami, Paul Cézanne". Zola encouraged Cézanne to see his "attack on the officially endorsed cultural dictatorship [of the Salon] as the only opportunity of asserting his originality and of generating the publicity that might even persuade his father in distant Aix of the significance of his work. The "artistic" overpainting of reality by the Salon painters was to be countered by artless expressiveness. Cézanne set about the revaluation of current aesthetic and moral standards with great vigour, intentionally rejecting the received notions of painterly deftness and formal perfection" (Adriani, op.cit., p. 43). Thus when Cézanne presented his violent palette-knife pictures to the Salon jury it was with the express intention of having them rejected. He wanted to force the artistic establishment to accept his pictures on his terms and it was in this revolutionary mood that he wrote to the Superintendent of the Beaux-Arts, Monsieur de Nieuwerkerke, after his pictures were refused for the 1866 Salon, "I cannot accept the unauthorized judgements of colleagues to whom I myself have not given the task of appraising me" and called for the Salon des Refusés to be re-established.
The present Self-Portrait captures exactly this mood of 1866, the violence of the palette-knife technique, the artist's unkempt appearance, Cézanne's personal struggles and his revolutionary fervour. Reviewing the Royal Academy exhibition Cézanne, The Early Years, which he had helped to present, Norman Rosenthal wrote, "It was a revolution from the very first, a revolution of thought and technique that took place virtually in private and therefore outside the public forum even of avant-garde art. The overwhelming impression of even the very earliest works is one of intensity and technique that marked them out for greatness...painting itself defines the essential emotional truth rather than being another illusionistic trick based on chiaroscuro or careful modelling. These paintings are like expressionistic sculpture that go towards abstraction...He stared alienation in the face in a way that only very few artists in this century, let alone in the past, have done' ("Cézanne: The Early Years", in Modern Painters, vol. I, no. 3, London, 1988, pp. 53-4).
In this picture Cézanne establishes the prototype for the extraordinary series of analytical self-portraits he created throughout his career. But it is above all the style of paint application in this picture, ferociously worked in a manner reflecting his temperament and circumstances, which heralds a new direction in modern art. Lawrence Gowing writes, '1866 is the first of the dates that Cézanne offers us which we may, if we wish, call the beginning of modern art...This phase was not only the invention of modern expressionism, although it was incidentally that; the idea of art as emotional ejaculation made its first appearance at this moment. But beyond this Cézanne was the first man in the group, perhaps the first man in history, to realise the necessity for the manner in which paint is handled to build up homogenous and consistent pictorial structure. This is the invention of forme in the French modernist sense - meaning the condition of paint that constitutes a pictorial structure. It is the discovery of an intrinsic structure inherent in the medium and the material. Unlike Monet, Renoir and Pissarro, who were adapting Courbet's method to sensuous or atmospheric purposes in the relatively polite kinds of picture that went with ultimately conformist inventions, Cézanne was intensifying Courbet's least acceptable peculiarity, making it obstrusive, systematic and obsessional' (Cézanne, The Early Years, London, 1988, p. 10).
It was admiration for Courbet, as Gowing observes, that led to Cézanne's palette-knife pictures of the 1860s. "The palette-knife pictures were exceptional. Looking at them stacked against his studio wall thirty years afterwards, Cézanne called them une couillarde - and the coarse word for ostentatious virility suited the crudity of the attack with which the palette-knife expressed the indispensable force of temperament for a few months in 1866" (ibid). Cézanne in this group of 1866 portraits forsakes the brush in favour of his palette knife, building up the image with violent swatches of pigment that create an almost three-dimensional sculptural effect. There is a fiery vehemence of application that achieves a grandeur of conception through its very simplicity. Lawrence Gowing again remarks, 'The characteristic achievement of the middle sixties, the palette-knife pictures, most of them portraits, were not at all baroque, neither linear nor in any way historicist...The units of style were the tonal slabs out of which the images were built. The whole astonishing group of pictures, of which seven heads, including the first mature self-portrait in the pose which later became habitual...would seem to have been painted between August 1866 and the following January. Cézanne is described as finishing each of the heads in an afternoon; it was an extraordinary testimony to his abilities" (ibid).
The picture attracted Roger Fry's attention in 1927 in his survey of the Pellerin collection. "He has melodramatized himself, exaggerating the protrusion of his brow and the menacing expression of the eyes, giving to it the truculence of his own mood. The defiant mood persists even to the signature, which is in flaunting vermilion capitals. The colour is generally sober with rich yellow and red ochres playing against blacks and greys. And in all, in spite of the saturation and richness of the tints, he keeps full luminosity by the frankness and directness of his handling" (R. Fry, Cézanne, a study of his development, London, 1927, p. 21). The picture is remarkable for the sheer exuberance and enjoyment Cézanne exhibits in the application of paint on canvas, perhaps to a greater degree than at any other stage in his life.
From contemporary accounts it is obvious this Self-Portrait truly captures Cézanne's appearance in 1866. Antoine Guillemet wrote to Zola on 2 November 1866 of Cézanne "His exterior is if anything more beautiful, his hair is long, his face exhales health and his very dress causes a sensation." John Rewald has amplified this as he relates, "Cézanne, approaching thirty, was tall and thin, 'bearded, with knotty joints and a strong head. A very delicate nose hidden in the moustache, eyes narrow and clear...deep in his eyes, great tenderness. His voice was loud'. At this period he wore 'a battered black felt hat and an enormous overcoat, once a delicate maroon, which the rain had streaked green. He was a little stoop-shouldered and had a nervous shudder which was to become habitual. He planted himself in laced boots and his short trousers revealed blue stockings. Thus Zola depicted him several years later when creating the character of the painter Claude Lantier in Le Ventre de Paris published in 1873. In Cézanne's studio there was complete disorder. It was only swept once a month 'for fear that the dust might cover his fresh canvases'. A thousand things were strewn on the floor, and ashes piled up there. The sole big table was always littered with brushes, paints, dirty plates, a spirit lamp, etc. Unframed sketches hung on the wall all the way down to the floor, where they were piled up on a heap of canvases'" (J. Rewald, Paul Cézanne, London, 1948, pp. 51-2).
Emile Zola was the first owner of this picture and the relationship between the two was so close at the time that it is most probable that Cézanne presented the painting to Zola. The appearance of the picture is so close to Zola's description of the artist Claude Lantier in his novel L'Oeuvre that one is tempted to speculate that, hung on Zola's wall, it would have been a ready inspiration for the writer. Cézanne and Zola were fellow Aixois and met as early as 1852 at the Bourbon College in Aix. They became close friends and correspondents until the publication of L'Oeuvre in 1886 in which the already successful Zola gave his central character, the failed artist Claude Lantier, all the characteristics of Cézanne. Cézanne was so appalled and affronted that he severed all contact with Zola. However, as Götz Adriani writes, "The friendship between Cézanne and Zola was based on a mutual affection as friends, rather than a mutual respect as artists, and each saw the incarnation of his own youth in the other. Although alienated by success or the lack of it, and by the conviction that the other was unable to fulfill the ideals of their youth, they were bound throughout their lives by their shared memories. The decisive factor in the formal split between the two may have been the unique position of Cézanne, which enabled him more than any other to recognise in Zola's novel details and episodes from the youthful years that the two had shared" (G. Adriani, "La Lutte d'Amour", Notes on Cézanne's early figure scenes", in Cézanne, The Early Years, London, 1988, p. 52).
Before the split, Zola used his privileged position as an acclaimed Parisian writer and critic to champion Cézanne's career. In October 1865, Zola became the art critic of L'Evènement (the journal Cézanne depicted his father reading in the great palette-knife picture Portrait de Louis-Auguste Cézanne lisant L'Evènement, (Venturi 91) also formerly in the Pellerin collection and now in the National Gallery of Art, Washington). Zola's articles in L'Evenement defended the young avant-garde artists whose works were rejected by the Salon. His spring 1866 pamphlet, Mon Salon, was dedicated "à mon ami, Paul Cézanne". Zola encouraged Cézanne to see his "attack on the officially endorsed cultural dictatorship [of the Salon] as the only opportunity of asserting his originality and of generating the publicity that might even persuade his father in distant Aix of the significance of his work. The "artistic" overpainting of reality by the Salon painters was to be countered by artless expressiveness. Cézanne set about the revaluation of current aesthetic and moral standards with great vigour, intentionally rejecting the received notions of painterly deftness and formal perfection" (Adriani, op.cit., p. 43). Thus when Cézanne presented his violent palette-knife pictures to the Salon jury it was with the express intention of having them rejected. He wanted to force the artistic establishment to accept his pictures on his terms and it was in this revolutionary mood that he wrote to the Superintendent of the Beaux-Arts, Monsieur de Nieuwerkerke, after his pictures were refused for the 1866 Salon, "I cannot accept the unauthorized judgements of colleagues to whom I myself have not given the task of appraising me" and called for the Salon des Refusés to be re-established.
The present Self-Portrait captures exactly this mood of 1866, the violence of the palette-knife technique, the artist's unkempt appearance, Cézanne's personal struggles and his revolutionary fervour. Reviewing the Royal Academy exhibition Cézanne, The Early Years, which he had helped to present, Norman Rosenthal wrote, "It was a revolution from the very first, a revolution of thought and technique that took place virtually in private and therefore outside the public forum even of avant-garde art. The overwhelming impression of even the very earliest works is one of intensity and technique that marked them out for greatness...painting itself defines the essential emotional truth rather than being another illusionistic trick based on chiaroscuro or careful modelling. These paintings are like expressionistic sculpture that go towards abstraction...He stared alienation in the face in a way that only very few artists in this century, let alone in the past, have done' ("Cézanne: The Early Years", in Modern Painters, vol. I, no. 3, London, 1988, pp. 53-4).