Lot Essay
This painting will appear as no. 586 in the late John Rewald's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of Cézanne's paintings being prepared in collaboration with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman.
Over a period of three decades, Cézanne painted or sketched close to forty self-portraits. Among the most striking examples were realized in the later 1870s and 1880s, at a time of relative calm and isolation in Cézanne's domestic life and artistic career. Portrait de l'artiste of circa 1885 is a moving portrayal of a middle-aged man entering into his full artistic maturity.
During the years 1883-1885, Cézanne lived in Aix-en-Provence and L'Estaque with his companion Hortense Fiquet, whom he would marry in 1886, and their son Paul, born in 1872. Although he remained in contact with his Impressionist colleagues, including Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and he occasionally visited Paris, Cézanne worked in relative seclusion. This was a period of artistic consolidation for the artist. He had few opportunities to exhibit his work in public, and received scant notice in the critical press. It was not until 1895, when Ambroise Vollard organized Cézanne's first one-man show, that Cézanne's work became available to a wider public, and his critical fortunes began to change. George Heard Hamilton observes that before the Vollard exhibition, Cézanne had publicly exhibitied only 23 paintings, of which 16 were shown before the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. ("Cézanne and His Critics," Cézanne: The Late Work, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 140).
Described by Emile Bernard as "a mystic precisely by his scorn for any subject, by the absence of material vision"; by Gustave Geffroy as "a scrupulous observer, as anxious for the truth as a primitive"; by Charles Camoin as "the primitive of open-air painting"; and irreverantly labeled by Salvador Dalí a "Platonic brick-layer," Cézanne was alternately viewed as a naïve, sincere, and intellectual painter. His work seems to invite these varying interpretations, as it is often strangely contradictory and unsettling. Portrait de l'artiste is a case in point.
Cézanne depicts himself in three quarter profile, his back partially turned to the viewer. Anchored to the lower left corner of the picture, in full possession of the pictorial space, he twists his body awkwardly to meet our inquisitive gaze. The considerable torsion of his pose belies the monumentality of his presence; Cézanne appears at once commanding and vulnerable as he returns our gaze with suspicion. This suspension of certainties is maintained in the formal structure of the painting. Unlike many of the self-portraits from this period, including the magnificent example of 1880-1881 in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1), Cézanne represents himself en plein-air. While this allows him to study nuances of color and light with greater objectivity, the natural setting is also distorted and spatially ambiguous. The simultaneous proximity to and distance from the viewer that the artist's posture establishes is echoed in the way in which he collapses the space of the painting; the green mass of trees extends from the lower right hand corner of the composition into the background, just as the horizontal band of the golden meadow encourages us to read the ambient space as a field of planes stacked vertically, rather than receding into depth. Here, we have a rudimentary example of the opening of contours and spatial discontinuities that Cézanne began to explore in his celebrated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire of the same period (fig. 2), a practice which Picasso and Braque would exploit more fully a generation later.
The visual tension that results from these innovative structural devices makes it difficult to accept the early formalist position that Cézanne was indifferent to the objects he painted (including his own image). Roger Fry's description of the National Gallery portrait in his 1927 monograph on the artist today appears overstated:
He poses to himself as he wished his sitters to pose,
"as an apple," and he looks at his own head with
precisely the same regard that he turned on an apple
on the kitchen table. But with this renunciation of
all parti pris how much more eloquent and vital
is the presence revealed to us (R. Fry, Cézanne:
A Study of his Development, Chicago, 1989, p. 53).
It is not that Cézanne sought to impose an objective measure on the world of sensation. Rather, in his quest for stability and control he attempted to sublimate--but could not entirely erase--the turbulence and passion that had been so visible in his early work. Cézanne's insistence on the analogy between apples and human beings points to the erotic force that lies beneath the veil of formal rigor in his art.
This is not to say that Portrait de l'artiste is a picture of great psychological depth and interiority, the way Rembrandt's self-portraits are. Here, the emotional force of the sitter is held in check by the artist's logical mind and his desire to communicate the physical and tactile experience of objects in space. This tendency extends to Cézanne's rejection of modeling from dark to light in favor of modulating areas of complementary color, a practice that Gauguin and later Matisse would take up. For if light dissolves form, as the Impressionists discovered, Cézanne refuses to betray the experience of perception as a physical encounter with the material world. The even texture of hachures with which he defines the planes of his forehead and cheek points to Cézanne's struggle to bridge the gap between vision and touch in painting.
Portrait de l'artiste was sold through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Known for its large stock of Impressionist and nineteenth-century academic painting, the gallery agressively marketed contemporary art as well. Between 1903 and 1920, the critic Felix Fénéon directed the contemporary art department, and oversaw exhibitions of works by Matisse, Utrillo, Dufy, and Vlaminck, among others. One of the most powerful and prestigious of the Right Bank galleries, Bernheim-Jeune employed a shrewd marketing strategy, in which the trade in modern masters of the nineteenth-century worked to legitimate the historical position of contemporary art by stressing its links with the recent past (M. Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930, New York, 1981, pp. 71-73).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Portrait de l'artiste avec papier peint, 1880-81, National Gallery, London
(fig. 2) Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, vu de Bellevue,
1882-85, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Over a period of three decades, Cézanne painted or sketched close to forty self-portraits. Among the most striking examples were realized in the later 1870s and 1880s, at a time of relative calm and isolation in Cézanne's domestic life and artistic career. Portrait de l'artiste of circa 1885 is a moving portrayal of a middle-aged man entering into his full artistic maturity.
During the years 1883-1885, Cézanne lived in Aix-en-Provence and L'Estaque with his companion Hortense Fiquet, whom he would marry in 1886, and their son Paul, born in 1872. Although he remained in contact with his Impressionist colleagues, including Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, and he occasionally visited Paris, Cézanne worked in relative seclusion. This was a period of artistic consolidation for the artist. He had few opportunities to exhibit his work in public, and received scant notice in the critical press. It was not until 1895, when Ambroise Vollard organized Cézanne's first one-man show, that Cézanne's work became available to a wider public, and his critical fortunes began to change. George Heard Hamilton observes that before the Vollard exhibition, Cézanne had publicly exhibitied only 23 paintings, of which 16 were shown before the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. ("Cézanne and His Critics," Cézanne: The Late Work, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1977, p. 140).
Described by Emile Bernard as "a mystic precisely by his scorn for any subject, by the absence of material vision"; by Gustave Geffroy as "a scrupulous observer, as anxious for the truth as a primitive"; by Charles Camoin as "the primitive of open-air painting"; and irreverantly labeled by Salvador Dalí a "Platonic brick-layer," Cézanne was alternately viewed as a naïve, sincere, and intellectual painter. His work seems to invite these varying interpretations, as it is often strangely contradictory and unsettling. Portrait de l'artiste is a case in point.
Cézanne depicts himself in three quarter profile, his back partially turned to the viewer. Anchored to the lower left corner of the picture, in full possession of the pictorial space, he twists his body awkwardly to meet our inquisitive gaze. The considerable torsion of his pose belies the monumentality of his presence; Cézanne appears at once commanding and vulnerable as he returns our gaze with suspicion. This suspension of certainties is maintained in the formal structure of the painting. Unlike many of the self-portraits from this period, including the magnificent example of 1880-1881 in the National Gallery, London (fig. 1), Cézanne represents himself en plein-air. While this allows him to study nuances of color and light with greater objectivity, the natural setting is also distorted and spatially ambiguous. The simultaneous proximity to and distance from the viewer that the artist's posture establishes is echoed in the way in which he collapses the space of the painting; the green mass of trees extends from the lower right hand corner of the composition into the background, just as the horizontal band of the golden meadow encourages us to read the ambient space as a field of planes stacked vertically, rather than receding into depth. Here, we have a rudimentary example of the opening of contours and spatial discontinuities that Cézanne began to explore in his celebrated views of Mont Sainte-Victoire of the same period (fig. 2), a practice which Picasso and Braque would exploit more fully a generation later.
The visual tension that results from these innovative structural devices makes it difficult to accept the early formalist position that Cézanne was indifferent to the objects he painted (including his own image). Roger Fry's description of the National Gallery portrait in his 1927 monograph on the artist today appears overstated:
He poses to himself as he wished his sitters to pose,
"as an apple," and he looks at his own head with
precisely the same regard that he turned on an apple
on the kitchen table. But with this renunciation of
all parti pris how much more eloquent and vital
is the presence revealed to us (R. Fry, Cézanne:
A Study of his Development, Chicago, 1989, p. 53).
It is not that Cézanne sought to impose an objective measure on the world of sensation. Rather, in his quest for stability and control he attempted to sublimate--but could not entirely erase--the turbulence and passion that had been so visible in his early work. Cézanne's insistence on the analogy between apples and human beings points to the erotic force that lies beneath the veil of formal rigor in his art.
This is not to say that Portrait de l'artiste is a picture of great psychological depth and interiority, the way Rembrandt's self-portraits are. Here, the emotional force of the sitter is held in check by the artist's logical mind and his desire to communicate the physical and tactile experience of objects in space. This tendency extends to Cézanne's rejection of modeling from dark to light in favor of modulating areas of complementary color, a practice that Gauguin and later Matisse would take up. For if light dissolves form, as the Impressionists discovered, Cézanne refuses to betray the experience of perception as a physical encounter with the material world. The even texture of hachures with which he defines the planes of his forehead and cheek points to Cézanne's struggle to bridge the gap between vision and touch in painting.
Portrait de l'artiste was sold through the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune. Known for its large stock of Impressionist and nineteenth-century academic painting, the gallery agressively marketed contemporary art as well. Between 1903 and 1920, the critic Felix Fénéon directed the contemporary art department, and oversaw exhibitions of works by Matisse, Utrillo, Dufy, and Vlaminck, among others. One of the most powerful and prestigious of the Right Bank galleries, Bernheim-Jeune employed a shrewd marketing strategy, in which the trade in modern masters of the nineteenth-century worked to legitimate the historical position of contemporary art by stressing its links with the recent past (M. Gee, Dealers, Critics, and Collectors of Modern Painting: Aspects of the Parisian Art Market Between 1910 and 1930, New York, 1981, pp. 71-73).
(fig. 1) Paul Cézanne, Portrait de l'artiste avec papier peint, 1880-81, National Gallery, London
(fig. 2) Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, vu de Bellevue,
1882-85, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York