.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
This work will be included in the forthcoming online catalogue raisonné of Paul Cézanne's watercolours, under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, David Nash and Jayne Warman.
‘There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.’
Paul Cézanne
‘The most seductive element in art is the artist’s own personality.’
Paul Cézanne
Emerging from the array of rapidly executed, deftly assured pencil lines, the arresting head of Paul Cézanne appears, his intense gaze and commanding features dominating this extraordinary early self-portrait of around 1875. With his unkempt hair, beard, and characteristic jacket – the garment he portrayed himself in in countless self-portraits – this work on paper is among the earliest works of this kind that demonstrates the artist’s move away from his early, impulsive style to the lighter, more modulated handling that was at this time inspired by Impressionism.
Cézanne painted self-portraits throughout his career. Like Rembrandt, who also engaged prolifically in this practice, Cézanne’s portraits of this type serve less as explorations into the self, and more as fundamental autobiographical markers as the artist passed from a rebellious and unconformist young painter in the 1860s, to, at the end of his life, a stately, deeply contemplative great master of painting. Similarly, Cézanne’s self-portraits demonstrate the artist’s gradual shifts in style across the entire arc of his career. While his early Portrait de l’artiste (circa 1866, Private collection, New York) embodies the artist’s early gestural, vigorous style in which he applied dense layers of paint using a palette knife, a work from much later in his career, Portrait de l’artiste à la palette (circa 1888-1890, E.G. Bührle Foundation, Zurich) embodies the artist’s mature style, the constructive strokes, and gentle modulations of colour the encapsulation of his desire to distil the world around him into painterly form.
The present work marks one of the most important stylistic shift in Cézanne’s work. At the time that he executed the present work, Cézanne had begun to develop the ‘constructive’ strokes that would become, by the end of the decade, one of the defining features of his practice. He likely used a mirror to capture his likeness, the direct gaze of the eyes indicating that he created this image from his reflection. Using groups of short, parallel lines in compact groups, he has conveyed the tonal changes of his physiognomy, seen particularly in his beard, forehead, and on the bridge of his nose. Utilising the white of the paper in his construction of form, this self-portrait, as Wayne Andersen has written, ‘signals new refinements in Cézanne’s graphic process’ (W. Andersen, Cézanne’s Portrait Drawings, Cambridge, MA & London, 1970, p. 17). This work is undoubtedly related to an oil of the same time, Autoportrait (circa 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Here, the artist looks out with a slightly less frontal gaze, his head turned to outwards slightly to meet the gaze of the viewer. However, a notable difference is the background of these two works. Whereas in the oil, a landscape painting (by the artist’s friend of the time, Armand Guillaumin) fills the setting, in the present work, an image perhaps of a still-life flanks the scene, the prominent outline of a glass dominating the sketchily-rendered background.
With his wild, disheveled hair, characteristic beard, and his startlingly intense, dark eyed and direct, unflinching stare, this self-portrait exudes a sense of youthful vitality, confidence and assuredness, and also conveys a sense of the rebelliousness for which Cézanne was renowned at this time. At the time that he drew this self-portrait, Cézanne had settled in Paris, frequently associating with the nascent Impressionist group, though remaining decidedly distinct from this group. At this time, the artist consistently positioned himself as an outsider, his work antagonizing both the Salon juries and the conservative critics of the art world. While this biographical detail can be tied to aspects of the self-portrait, these personal elements of Cézanne’s depiction of the human figure, including himself, have long been the subject of great discussion. As with all his portraits of people, the inner, psychological state of the sitter is always difficult to fully read.
Many have come to regard Cézanne’s portraits as extensions of his still-life paintings; literal objectifications of his sitters in which he treated figures ‘as if they were apples’, turning them into geometric forms, rigid, resolute and expunged of any psychological or individual bent. Yet, there is, despite the seemingly inscrutable, mask-like visage with which he depicted his sitters, and indeed himself, always an undeniable sense that something lies beneath the surface, a dormant yet unmistakable flash of humanity. As T.J. Clark has written, ‘Cézanne is not in the least “detached” from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them’ (T.J. Clark, ‘Relentless Intimacy’, in London Review of Books, 25 January 2018). It is this same concept that lends Autoportrait such a quiet yet resonant power. Through the hurried array of pencil lines, one can sense in the ferocious, dark eyed stare of the artist, the ambition and drive that would see Cézanne become one the greatest artists of the modern era.
‘There are two things in the painter, the eye and the mind; each of them should aid the other.’
Paul Cézanne
‘The most seductive element in art is the artist’s own personality.’
Paul Cézanne
Emerging from the array of rapidly executed, deftly assured pencil lines, the arresting head of Paul Cézanne appears, his intense gaze and commanding features dominating this extraordinary early self-portrait of around 1875. With his unkempt hair, beard, and characteristic jacket – the garment he portrayed himself in in countless self-portraits – this work on paper is among the earliest works of this kind that demonstrates the artist’s move away from his early, impulsive style to the lighter, more modulated handling that was at this time inspired by Impressionism.
Cézanne painted self-portraits throughout his career. Like Rembrandt, who also engaged prolifically in this practice, Cézanne’s portraits of this type serve less as explorations into the self, and more as fundamental autobiographical markers as the artist passed from a rebellious and unconformist young painter in the 1860s, to, at the end of his life, a stately, deeply contemplative great master of painting. Similarly, Cézanne’s self-portraits demonstrate the artist’s gradual shifts in style across the entire arc of his career. While his early Portrait de l’artiste (circa 1866, Private collection, New York) embodies the artist’s early gestural, vigorous style in which he applied dense layers of paint using a palette knife, a work from much later in his career, Portrait de l’artiste à la palette (circa 1888-1890, E.G. Bührle Foundation, Zurich) embodies the artist’s mature style, the constructive strokes, and gentle modulations of colour the encapsulation of his desire to distil the world around him into painterly form.
The present work marks one of the most important stylistic shift in Cézanne’s work. At the time that he executed the present work, Cézanne had begun to develop the ‘constructive’ strokes that would become, by the end of the decade, one of the defining features of his practice. He likely used a mirror to capture his likeness, the direct gaze of the eyes indicating that he created this image from his reflection. Using groups of short, parallel lines in compact groups, he has conveyed the tonal changes of his physiognomy, seen particularly in his beard, forehead, and on the bridge of his nose. Utilising the white of the paper in his construction of form, this self-portrait, as Wayne Andersen has written, ‘signals new refinements in Cézanne’s graphic process’ (W. Andersen, Cézanne’s Portrait Drawings, Cambridge, MA & London, 1970, p. 17). This work is undoubtedly related to an oil of the same time, Autoportrait (circa 1875, Musée d’Orsay, Paris). Here, the artist looks out with a slightly less frontal gaze, his head turned to outwards slightly to meet the gaze of the viewer. However, a notable difference is the background of these two works. Whereas in the oil, a landscape painting (by the artist’s friend of the time, Armand Guillaumin) fills the setting, in the present work, an image perhaps of a still-life flanks the scene, the prominent outline of a glass dominating the sketchily-rendered background.
With his wild, disheveled hair, characteristic beard, and his startlingly intense, dark eyed and direct, unflinching stare, this self-portrait exudes a sense of youthful vitality, confidence and assuredness, and also conveys a sense of the rebelliousness for which Cézanne was renowned at this time. At the time that he drew this self-portrait, Cézanne had settled in Paris, frequently associating with the nascent Impressionist group, though remaining decidedly distinct from this group. At this time, the artist consistently positioned himself as an outsider, his work antagonizing both the Salon juries and the conservative critics of the art world. While this biographical detail can be tied to aspects of the self-portrait, these personal elements of Cézanne’s depiction of the human figure, including himself, have long been the subject of great discussion. As with all his portraits of people, the inner, psychological state of the sitter is always difficult to fully read.
Many have come to regard Cézanne’s portraits as extensions of his still-life paintings; literal objectifications of his sitters in which he treated figures ‘as if they were apples’, turning them into geometric forms, rigid, resolute and expunged of any psychological or individual bent. Yet, there is, despite the seemingly inscrutable, mask-like visage with which he depicted his sitters, and indeed himself, always an undeniable sense that something lies beneath the surface, a dormant yet unmistakable flash of humanity. As T.J. Clark has written, ‘Cézanne is not in the least “detached” from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them’ (T.J. Clark, ‘Relentless Intimacy’, in London Review of Books, 25 January 2018). It is this same concept that lends Autoportrait such a quiet yet resonant power. Through the hurried array of pencil lines, one can sense in the ferocious, dark eyed stare of the artist, the ambition and drive that would see Cézanne become one the greatest artists of the modern era.