Sublimely at Odds

Can a Painter Be Both a Rebel and a Traditionalist? Yes, if He's Cezanne

"Art is a Harmony" "All Placed in Perpective" "Form Is at Its Fullest"

"It is universally recognized that Cezanne was one of the greatest and most influential artists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries," says the foreword to the catalogue of "Cezanne in Provence," an exhibition that opens today at the National Gallery. That foreword is being modest.

In fact, what's closer to being universally recognized is that Paul Cezanne may be the most profound, interesting, rewarding and perplexing painter in the history of Western art. He's also universally worshiped -- and yet practically no one claims to have a final take on what makes him so essential. Cezanne's fiendishly compelling pictures can make even their very greatest competition -- subtle masterpieces by Titian, Velazquez, Rembrandt, Goya, maybe also Manet and Picasso -- look like straightforward stuff.

The show includes 117 paintings, brought together to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the artist's death. You might never see a more inspiring show, of Cezanne or any other artist.

Cezanne, you could argue, is the culmination of everything done in art up to his day. He pushed the grand European tradition to its limits.

Or you could go the other way: You could argue that Cezanne is a kind of James Brown figure -- the Godfather of Modern Art, a lunatic who burned the rule book and cleared the ground for all the lesser radicals who followed.

Really, it's both. Maybe that's what makes Cezanne so great and so complex, and so confusing, too: He managed to set himself up as both the greatest of all traditionalists and the fiercest of all rebels.

This was partly a matter of deliberate pose and public persona -- of how he chose to bill and sell himself. (Read on for a close look at three of his most famous artistic pronouncements, and at three pictures they impinge on.)

But the opposing principles of conformity and rebellion also inform almost every picture he painted. That's one reason his paintings are so unfathomably great: A single Cezanne canvas can assert both one thing and its exact opposite. As your reading of the painting shifts, it can become its antithesis.

Cezanne began his career in art on the radical side of things. In the early 1860s, he left law school and the bourgeois banker's life his father led in sleepy, southern Aix-en-Provence for Paris, where he established himself as one of the art world's more bohemian figures. He wore his beard absurdly long, put on the impenetrable accent of his native Provence and had the manners and hygiene of a bear. Claude Monet liked to tell of an encounter between Cezanne and Edouard Manet, a leader of the Paris radicals who was also a famous dandy: "I don't offer my hand, Monsieur Manet," said Cezanne. "I haven't washed in a week."

His early art was just as deliberately unprepossessing. The portraits and self-portraits painted in the 1860s and 1870s come close to being caricatures. Cezanne dumped so much oil on them that he might as well have painted with a trowel instead of a palette knife. It seems that he submitted these pictures to the great Paris Salon fully in hopes of seeing them refused by its jury. His hopes were fulfilled. One jury member felt that Cezanne's 1866 portrait of his friend Antony Valabregue, a highlight of the first part of this show, "was painted not only with the knife, but with the pistol."

Even the intimates who sat for the young Cezanne felt there was an edge to what he did. Valabregue said "every time he paints one of his friends, it seems as if he were avenging himself for some hidden injury."

He was and intended to be the Wild Man of Aix.

But by the end of his days, after decades of settled existence living on a stipend in the Provencal countryside, he had become something more like l e Sage du Midi -- the Southern Sage. (In French, "sage" connotes both "wise" and "well behaved.")

His late paintings weren't much tamer than before; they were sometimes even more extreme. (His art was always too strange for the market; it took until 1895, when he was already 56, for a dealer to give him a solo show). But an older and wiser Cezanne took care to link his pictures to the great art and artists of the past, and to cast himself in that same light. "To my mind," he said in 1905, "one does not put oneself in place of the past, one only adds a new link."

The piece de resistance he worked on in his last few years, the "Large Bathers" series, was built around a traditional framework: The pictures showed a group of bathing beauties in the woods, like a nymph-filled scene by Titian or Rubens. But there's provocation in almost every detail of these pictures -- in their wildly distorted anatomy, in brushwork that seems arbitrary, in unlifelike color that verges on the garish.

One English painter who made the pilgrimage to the Sage's studio described being shown "a perfectly beastly picture . . . a huge thing . . . women rather like trees, and the trees rather like women. Very large, very miserable." In one sense, the Englishman was right: The "Bather" paintings reject everything that once counted as "normal" picturemaking -- they happily conflate women and trees. But they had just enough links to the past to proclaim themselves, and soon be accepted as, an updating or capstone to a glorious tradition rather than a break from it.

From the very start a picture such as Cezanne's "Bathers" was meant to be both beastly and a masterpiece at the same time.

The young rebel had brandished a pistol, but the Sage carried it concealed. By the time of his death, and ever since, Cezanne's groundbreaking works could represent a massive force that hid its threat.

"Art Is a Harmony That Runs Parallel to Nature."

Cezanne's statement has all the building blocks of classic talk about pictures: It puts "art," "harmony" and "nature" into a single rhetorical package. But beyond that, it's very hard to know what it could mean. "Parallel" is such a vague term that there's not much it could rule out.

What Cezanne has done is more or less assert that any harmony that he creates in his painting will somehow "reflect" -- run in parallel with -- the harmony that's bound to be everywhere in nature. (When was the last time you saw a bit of nature you could say was unharmonious?)

Which is another way of saying that if a picture looks harmonious and good, for whatever reason, it also counts as giving a "realistic" take on harmonious nature -- the classic goal of classic art.

In Cezanne, this isn't simply double talk used as camouflage for arbitrariness -- though there's some dash of arbitrary stuff in almost everything he paints. He has worked up an idea that lets him use his painter's craft -- his skill at making pleasing pictures -- to build pictorial harmonies into a scene that might not in fact have had them by the bright light of day. And then we're likely to read those pictorial harmonies, the good looks of his picture, as reflecting something that was in the scene all along.

An example ought to make the process clear.

In Cezanne's "Road in Provence," painted in the early 1890s, the fields parceled out across the land in the picture's background are painted so that they visually parallel (that word again) the rocks in the foreground. Those rocks are shown to be fractured along the same square grid that governs the layout of the fields behind them. Squint, and it's hard to tell what's rock and what's field, what's rearing up in front and what's laid out behind.

When you're in direct contact with nature, it takes hard work to notice such parallels and harmonies. As any psychologist will tell you, human perception is beautifully tuned to notice differences between things as we move through the world -- to tell that one object lies far behind another; that something is big and far away rather than smaller and nearer; that a field is horizontal and a rock face is vertical; that there's in fact little in common between this rocky foreground and that plowed background.

But Cezanne's tradition-based idea of "harmonious parallelism" lets him override all that. It lets him work up a harmonious gridded surface in his painting, and make that also count as capturing a harmony in nature -- even if that harmony doesn't much exist beyond the way he has chosen to paint the world.

Typically for Cezanne, he makes radically willful pictures that we can buy as capturing a classic view of nature, too.

"Render Nature by Means of the Cylinder, the Sphere, the Cone, all Placed in Perspective."

Cezanne said this in 1904, and it was to become his most famous line. That notion that there's some kind of geometric "foundation" to reality, and to pictures, became an artistic touchstone for most of the 20th century, from the birth of cubism right through 1960s minimalism.

There are two problems with seeing Cezanne's famous "cylinder" quote as key to coping with his radical art.

First of all, by the time that Cezanne said it, it was on its way to becoming a cliche. By 1904, 15 years had passed since formalism started to hold sway -- since artists began to entertain the notion that the shapes and lines and colors found on the surface of the canvas, as well as in nature, might matter as much as any deeper understanding of a painting's subject matter. In fact, it was an idea that had been hinted at for decades and even, in certain forms, for centuries. The quote doesn't get at what might be new in Cezanne. Once again, it shows Cezanne doing his best to ground his radical art in accepted ideas.

The other, much bigger problem is that the statement has almost nothing to do with much of what Cezanne painted.

A great, truly innovative picture such as his "Large Pine and Red Earth," painted between 1890 and 1895, is hardly about geometric order and rational analysis. It's a glorious, nearly uninterpretable mess.

This painting doesn't clarify the underlying solid structures of the world. If anything, it obscures them. We've got a spider's web of branches, surrounded by such a froth of greenery that the picture would look almost as good -- and not so very different -- hung upside-down.

There's no more geometric order on the surface of this picture, as an abstract pattern, than there is in the scene it portrays, where a tree's leaves and the shrubs and grasses all around it seem to meld into a single wreath. Or rather, that messy surface seems to say something about the parallel messiness of nature herself. The picture seems to argue for the irreducible complexity of reality, and of art, not for some simple system that might make sense of either one.

In fact, this picture helps explode the venerable notion that Cezanne is at heart a formalist, someone who cares much more about the surface look of his canvases than about the reality portrayed in them. "Large Pine and Red Earth" may be full of fantastic, innovative brushwork and inspired color harmonies, but the strange world that it presents is equally compelling and important. Imagine getting rid of every mark of Cezanne's hand and palette, until you had a photograph with the same essential features as the painting -- a tree trunk strangely plopped dead center; branches spinning leaves off in a vortex all around it; a classic landscape, the apparent subject of the picture, barely glimpsed in the background -- and you'd still be faced with a scene worth looking at. (In fact, you'd more or less be faced with an image by Lee Friedlander, one of the more inventive photographers of recent times.)

Once again Cezanne, the radical traditionalist, foils any "either/or" reading of his work, such as might divide its style from its content. He always prefers the complexities and contradictions of "both/and."

"Form Is at Its Fullest When Color Is at Its Richest."

A fine sentiment, expressed by one of the great colorists and form-guys of all time. It links him to supreme colorists such as Titian and Veronese, as well as to classic masters of form such as Michelangelo.

The problem is that the statement is more or less untrue. Head back once again to your neighborhood perceptual psychologist, and you'll be told that shape, line, shading and composition most successfully convey a sense of rounded forms arrayed in space. Of all of the components of pictures, color in fact has just about the least to do with grasping form. (No one's ever complained about the special flatness of black-and-white photos.) But by insisting on the unlikely yoking of color and form -- by breaching the line that had always been drawn between Titian and Michelangelo; by struggling to square the circle -- Cezanne gives himself, and his viewers, a compelling challenge.

A picture such as the Basel art museum's "Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen From Les Lauves," painted in Cezanne's final years, is as colorful as anything he ever did. With its kaleidoscope of bright greens and yellows and baby blues, it makes most of his earlier work look positively drab. What it clearly doesn't have, in any normal sense, is much more of a sense of "full form" or space than they do.

There's so much happening on the very surface of a Cezanne picture such as this -- so much color, so brushily applied -- that flatness, rather than depth, is its principal feature. (For years, flatness was the main subject of Cezanne studies.)

A traditionally realistic picture is often described as a transparent "window" into deep space beyond and onto the full-formed objects arranged in it. There's a kind of transparency in this painting as well, but it's of a different, innovative sort: There are strange gaps that let you see between its colored brush strokes, yet all they reveal is the blank canvas underneath. Cezanne's picture isn't even an intact surface that could, by force of will and suspension of disbelief, simply be read for the subject that it shows. It loudly proclaims itself to be a thin and broken film of paint whose holes reveal precisely nothing about any world that lies beyond.

And yet despite all this, there is just enough substance to the things this picture shows to make you try to read depth into it. It hints at substantial, weighty, traditional subjects: a craggy mountain that's an icon of Provencal identity; the blocklike structures of farm buildings, well-rooted in the rural earth; dense, dark pine trees classically arranged to lead the eye from near to far. The picture's built on a traditional scaffolding of space: Its "bones" are the same as any venerable landscape view. But even as you try to read it for the open air and forms you know are there, the only thing your eye can really cling to is its color. The result is a kind of forced, unnatural, almost metaphorical equivalence of form and hue that fascinates as much as it frustrates.

But then, as I hope I've shown by now, fascinated frustration and frustrated fascination are what Cezanne is all about.

Cezanne in Provence is in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art, Seventh Street and Constitution Avenue NW, through May 7. The gallery is open Monday-Saturday, 10 a.m-5 p.m., Sundays 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free. Call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov/ , which has an extensive section on Cezanne, complete with maps and detailed pictures of his art, at http://www.nga.gov/exhibitions/cezanneinfo.htm.