Paul Cezanne and Amadeo Modigliani
Paul
Cezanne: Painting People at the National Portrait Gallery and Amadeo Modigliani
at the Tate Modern on the 26th & 27th of November
2017
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was
born in Aix-en-Provence in the south of France but soon moved to Paris to be
with his childhood friend, the writer Emile Zola. Throughout his life he divided his time
between Paris and Aix. Cezanne’s father,
Louis-Auguste Cezanne (1798-1886) had accrued a fortune firstly by selling hats
and then as a banker. He wanted his son to be a lawyer. However, Cezanne’s
ambition was to be an artist. His wish to
be purposefully engaged in a creative life and to marry the woman he loved were
all opposed by his father who also happens to be the subject of the first major
painting in this exhibition. Cezanne’s
painting of his father, ‘The Artist’s Father reading L’Evenement’ (oil on canvas, 1866) demonstrates the dominant
influence of Cezanne’s early life.
Louis-Auguste is sitting in a chair reading a newspaper, his figure is
firmly contextualised with concrete details of his study and local environment,
a sturdy functionary ensconced in his armchair.
The paper published Emile Zola’s defence of the artists rejected by the
Paris Salon in 1866 which included Cezanne.
Therefore, Cezanne is alluding to
a recent, topical event that was of urgent relevance. The portrait was completed with a palette
knife, this technique evokes a rough, sculptural style at odds with the
refinement of Cezanne’s later works.
Cezanne described this early style as his maniere couillarde (from coquilles,
testacles) meaning a crude, ballsy style, visceral and muscular rather than
sensitive and delicate.
Other works from this
early period include ten portraits of Uncle Dominique (1817 -?) who worked as a
bailiff. They were also completed with
palette knife, dark hues and tones dominate. Painted over ten days in 1866-7, roughly a
portrait a day, Uncle Dominique wears differing costumes, a turban, smock and
blue cap. Cezanne tellingly depicts
Uncle Dominique as a lawyer, the profession he rejected, in a reference to
Provencal art that liked to satirise members of the legal or ecclesiastical
professions. Clearly Uncle Dominique was
in on the joke, the comedian Cezanne would rise to be a much more than a local
functionary. Uncle Dominique was
obviously prepared to wear fancy dress to underline a blatant nudge to
Cezanne’s father who was probably looking the other way.
Louis-Auguste disapproved
of Cezanne’s relationship with Hortense Fiquet (1850-1922) who later became
Madame Cezanne. Initially their
relationship was furtive, concealed from his father until their marriage in
1886 when Cezanne’s father died. They
had met in 1869 and their son, also called Paul, was born in 1872. Cezanne’s most significant portrait of
Hortense was Madame Cezanne in a Red
Armchair (oil on canvas, 1877) of which the German poet Rainer-Maria Rilke
said: “the consciousness of her presence has grown into an exultation which I
perceive even in my sleep: my blood describes her to me.” Cezanne’s relationship to Hortense which was
furtive then undisguised but ended prematurely when the couple drifted apart
towards the end of Cezanne’s life, is documented in many paintings. This is the most significant of these
portraits of Hortense, also clearly a monumental artwork that encapsulates
Post-Impressionism and tends towards 20th century art movements such
as Cubism and Abstraction. Hortense is
individualised on her throne, her dress shimmers with myriad colours and her
face is blank and expressionless.
Essentially, this is an anti-portrait, unflattering, unsensational,
Madame Cezanne’s misery lurks in every detail and brushstroke from the
perfected depiction of her chair, dress and hands clasped together. The tension created by the interlocking
elements creates an artwork that is an essential critique of portraiture and
the torpor of bourgeois ordinariness.
Each succeeding portrait of Madame Cezanne exudes misery, masterpieces
of lugubrious intent such as Madame
Cezanne in a Striped Dress (1885-6, oil on canvas), Madame Cezanne in a Red Dress (1888-1890, oil on canvas), Madame Cezanne in Blue (1886-7, oil on
canvas). These are mesmerising portraits
of sculptural even architectural design with intricate usage of space to
emphasize the artists theme of a family being gradually destroyed by an artists
obsession with the ineluctability of artistic form.
Cezanne was free to
pursue his vocation as artist by the bequest he received from his father, he could
paint as and when he liked and did not have to complete commissions. Consequently, he unfailingly attempts to
portray his sitters in an unflattering light, defying convention and the
dominant aesthetic of the time, Impressionism.
These sculptural paintings of his, completed with a palette knife, lead
on to an architectural conception of painting as he sought to replace the
immediacy of the Impressionists with an art that could contain the permanence
of the Old Masters. For this reason, he
is regarded as a bridge between Impressionism and the 20th century,
both Picasso and Matisse remarked that Cezanne is ‘the father of us all.’
Like Rembrandt, Cezanne
documented his life through a series of self-portraits in which elements of his
development as an artist can be perceived but also his own personal evolution
from revolutionary young artist to respected member of the bourgeoisie. Cezanne’s friendships with the novelist Emile
Zola (1840-1902), Paul Alexis (1847-1901) and other friends from Aix and Paris
summarise his early life of struggle and revolutionary ardour. (The exhibition tells us that it was once
thought that Zola’s novel L’Oeuvre or
The Masterpiece (1886) which depicts the struggles of an artist ended their
friendship because it is very clear that the artist is Cezanne but much later
correspondence between Cezanne and Zola has been discovered falsifying this
claim.) The exhibition presents two self-
portraits from 1875 when Cezanne was 36, Self-Portrait
and Self-Portrait, Rose Ground (oil
on canvas). The self-portrait was
developed from a mirror rather than a photograph because Cezanne used both
means. He is thickly bearded and bald
too, he gazes from the canvas with great intensity, looking the epitomy of a
wild Bohemian artist. The works were
painted when Cezanne was on the periphery of the Impressionists, he
demonstrated these works at the 1st and 3rd Impressionist
exhibitions away from the Paris salon.
Unflattering and unconventional, these works seem to allude to the
theories of Zola outlined in his Rougon-Macquart series of novels that debate
the influence of genes and hereditary.
The 20 novels of the series illustrate how the fates and destinies of
two families, the “good” Rougons and the “bad” Macquarts, are shaped by
heredity and environment. Creativity and
insanity, Zola implies, are closely connected since the protagonist of L’Oeuvre Claude Lantier, a Macquart,
displays the symptoms of mental illness in his obsession with painting that
also run in his family but as an uncontrolled obsessive-compulsive
disorder. Like Lantier, Cezanne was
rejected by the art establishment and in this portrait visionary and madman
seem to merge. Incidentally, Emile Zola
is depicted in Cezanne’s work Paul Alexis
Reading a Manuscript to Zola (1869-70, oil on canvas). This becomes more apparent when later
self-portraits of Cezanne are viewed such as Self-Portrait (1880-81) and Self-Portrait
in a White Bonnet (1881-82, both oil on canvas). In these Cezanne appears calmer, he exhibits
a neatly trimmed beard, his father now approved of his choice of
profession. The works demonstrate Cezanne’s
‘constructive brushstrokes’, patches of paint applied in a parallel, usually
diagonal direction. By the time of his
two works, Self-Portrait with Bowler Hat
(1885-6, both oil on canvas), Cezanne is no longer the wild eyed
revolutionary. He is now a bourgeois
complete with bowler hat, a symbol of affluence and success. He has inherited his father’s fortune, he is
married, and his young wife has a son.
Cezanne’s final self-portrait, Self-Portrait
with Beret (1898-1900, oil on canvas) illustrates the artist’s willingness
to document his own life yet the expression on Cezanne’s face, blank and
miserable, is essentially unchanged.
Towards the end of his
life Cezanne’s marriage finally ended and he now rarely saw his wife and
child. Instead Cezanne took to painting
the people of Aix. These paintings, such
as Old Woman with Rosary (1900, oil
on canvas) are suffused with tenderness and close observations of the lives of
the ordinary people Cezanne observed. (Although some saw a look of cynicism
about the old woman saying that she was a former nun who had lost her faith and
was then taken in. However, this story
was uncorroborated.) Cezanne completed
two portraits of his gardener, The
Gardener Vallier (1905-6) and works that take figures from his series of
card player portraits and provide a closer observation such as Man in Blue Smock (1897), Man with Pipe (1891-6) and even Woman with Cafetiere (1895) where forms
like the cone and cylinder are exemplified.
Cezanne kept painting right up to the very end and, by this time, his
work was beginning to be recognised in the art centres that had often rejected
him. Today he is a household name like
his friend Zola.
Amadeo Modigliani was a
Sephardic Jew born in Livorno, Italy in 1884 and who died in Paris in 1920 at
the young age of 35. He spuriously
claimed that the philosopher Spinoza was an antecedent and when he was 21
gravitated towards Paris where he became part of the cutting edge of
experimentalists and pioneers. However,
Modigliani was to suffer from the bitter, populist anti-semitism that was
common in France at that time. Consequently,
he was forced to endure poverty which afflicted him throughout his short
life. At first, he lived in Montmartre,
the fashionable art quarter of Paris of the 19th century, and later
moved to Montparnasse which became the place to be for the generation of les Annees Folles (the crazy years from
1918-1939). Modigliani had a wide circle
of friends and he painted them too but also intimate, personal paintings of his
wife and a series of nudes that scandalised Paris.
Initially he painted in
the Post-Impressionist manner established by Paul Cezanne who was his first,
important influence. In early works the
diagonal brushwork and architectural concept of space and the interrelationships
of figure and context intimate Cezanne yet Modigliani was also attempting to
develop his own signature which he eventually began to realise. Modigliani gradually began to simplify
facial features and colour into a format indicating primitive art or even the
pre-Raphaelite painting of the first Renaissance (that occurred with the work
of Giotto in the 13th century).
As well as painting Modigliani
had a parallel career as a sculptor. In Modigliani’s
sculptures his signature style, a set of clichés or shorthand, began to
evolve. He was heavily influenced by the
Romanian sculptor Constantin Brancusi (1876-1957) who had also moved from his
native Romania to Paris. However,
Modigliani’s work was short-lived. By
1911 he had finished his work as a sculptor altogether. He liked to visit the non-Western art
collections in the Musee d’Ethnographie du Trocadero and Musee Guimet with
Brancusi and another friend, the Portugese painter Amadeo de Souza-Cardoso. He made studies of Caryatids, plinths, supports
and pillars in feminine forms used in ancient Greece and Rome. The émigré Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova
(1889-1966), with whom he had an affair, is drawn in a style reminiscent of the
Egyptian statues he viewed in the Paris ethnographical museum.
He created many paintings
of eminent art figures of the day such as Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Juan Gris
(1887-1927) and Jean Cocteau (1889-1963).
Although never a friend of Picasso nor a part of his inner circle,
Picasso is depicted in a portrait, Pablo Picasso
(1915, oil on canvas) by Modigliani who writes the French word connais next to Picasso probably intending
it to mean that Picasso is the one who knows, an acknowledgement of Picasso’s
genius. Modigliani often used text in
his paintings to connect his images to a certain signposted concept. His portrait of Cocteau, Jean Cocteau (1916, oil on canvas) is supremely satirical, even
cartoonish. Cocteau’s snooty, snobbish
attitudes are encapsulated in Cocteau’s implausibly elongated nose that also
implies the extent of Cocteau’s self-regard.
Cocteau apparently acquired the painting but then contrived to leave it
behind when he left Modigliani’s studio.
The exhibition includes
the usual audio guide which is dense, intense and compulsory as usual but new technology
is on display, the Modigliani VR (Virtual Reality headset), the Ochre Atelier
(yellow studio). The headset is meant to
provide an immersive experience, simulating Modigliani’s last studio complete
with damp rot, rats and cold, an artist’s reek and, finally, the stench of
death. Its not quite as immersive as
this but its good to see that the Tate Modern is bringing us up to date with
new technologies and acknowledging the important contemporary place that gaming
technology and online worlds are to artists today even if everyone inside the
exhibition looked like a trooper from the Death Star. The addition, however, seems a bit belated as
does the Tate’s overall interaction with our online, virtual world.
Modigliani’s signature
style had finally begun to crystallise, the human face is compressed to an
expressive oval, almond shaped eyes, a discrete nose tucked away between
reddened cheeks and an elongated, swan-like neck. Modigliani had also begun to shock Parisians
with his female nudes which clearly exist in a continuum of art history. They display a knowledge of the genre of
female nudes rather than being simply drawings of naked women. One painting which is clearly referenced is Olympia (1863, oil on canvas) by Edouard
Manet, the precursor of the modern nude depicted in works like Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon 1907,
Matisse’s Blue Nude 1906 and Gaugin’s
Manu Tupapau 1892. In this iconic painting the figure covers her
genitals with her hand thus drawing the viewers attention to them. Modigliani, aware of the rules and
conventions of the genre, gives his nudes pubic hair and therefore sexualises
the women he paints as in Reclining Nude
(1917-18, oil on canvas), Female Nude
(1916, oil on canvas) and Reclining Nude
(1919, oil on canvas). The women are
depicted as sensuous individuals with real bodies rather than as sex
objects. Also, the models that
Modigliani used gaze out of the portraits, seemingly independent, female models
who were now well paid. Modelling was
regarded as a plausible alternative to office or domestic drudgery. The furore at Modigliani’s one and only one-person
exhibition staged during the artists lifetime in December 1917 at the Paris
gallery of Berthe Weill, a prominent dealer of avant-garde art, led to the
exhibition being closed by the police but only for a day. Modigliani’s nudes are foregrounded within
the image to the extent that their heads are often cropped away. Flesh tones are accentuated to the extent
that Modigliani’s figures are just one constant flesh tone which is being
accentuated to undermine the genre’s realist claims.
Modigliani remained in
Paris during WW1 but, towards the end of the war when the Germans began to bomb
the city, he left and departed for the Cote D’azure with his wife, Jeanne
Heburtene. Modigliani completed many
portraits of Jeanne, some of which are included in this exhibition, for
instance, Jeanne Heburtene with Yellow
Jumper (1918-19, oil on canvas) and Jeanne
Heburtene Seated (1918, oil on canvas)
Modigliani had suffered
from tuberculosis throughout his life, aggravated by his addiction to alcohol
and drugs. He hoped that a visit to the
south of France would speed his recovery.
However, he died on 24th January 1920 one year after his
return to Paris. Some five days later,
Jeanne, heavily pregnant with Modigliani’s child, took her own life.
Paul Murphy, November
2017
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