A fresh view
When his work was first exhibited, Cézanne was shunned by the art world and it took writers - including Virginia Woolf, Zola and Rilke - to recognise his genius. James Wood celebrates the most literary of modern painters
Fri 29 Sep 2006 19.07 EDT First published on Fri 29 Sep 2006 19.07 EDT
In difficult, stolid isolation... Self-portrait by Cezanne, 1880-81. Photograph: National Gallery
In the autumn of 1910, a little exhibition was held at the Grafton Galleries in London, entitled Manet and the Post-Impressionists, with works by Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cézanne, Matisse and Picasso. These were wild, rough-edged paintings, vertiginous with hazards in perspective and form. The curator was a talented critic and connoisseur, Roger Fry, who also played a grandfatherly role in the family romance that was Bloomsbury. Virginia Woolf, in her often moving biography of Fry (one of the last things she wrote), gives an amusing sketch of the public reaction to the exhibition: stiffly upholstered old ladies tried to stifle their laughs and then gave way to helpless guffaws of abuse; portly gentlemen redly tut-tutted; letters of complaint to newspapers were written; prominent chiefs of the art establishment and paralytic academicians were wheeled out to condemn the "lunatics" who painted this way; a famous doctor judged Fry to be clinically insane.
"KILL JOHN BULL WITH ART," went the vorticist manifesto, a few years later, of the artist and writer Wyndham Lewis. In the case of Fry's exhibition, art certainly triumphed over John Bull. Just two years later, in a sequel exhibition, hostility had softened somewhat, and Fry noted that "two years ago, Cézanne's works drew down the most violent denunciation ... this year Cézanne is always excepted from abuse". By the time Woolf came to write her biography, in the late 1930s, she remarked that now even British hospitals were trying to acquire some of the paintings, and would take as settled presumption the standing of these great artists and, equally, the ignorance and philistinism of the public outburst. The year 1910, she had written years earlier, was when "human character changed".
At the National Gallery in London this week, a new exhibition entitled Cézanne in Britain brings together many of the Cézannes acquired in this country since Fry's pioneering interventions. As Anne Robbins argues in her lucid catalogue essay, until after the second world war Cézanne was essentially a private joy of the fortunate and discerning rather than a public possession. Sir Michael Sadler, later the vice-chancellor of Leeds University, seems to have been the first Briton to acquire a Cézanne, in 1911 (he had been stirred by Fry's exhibition). Sadler was joined by Gwendoline Davies, the granddaughter of a Welsh coal and railway magnate, and in 1918 John Maynard Keynes, in Paris, bought the first of the four Cézannes he eventually owned. Between 1923 and 1937, the textile manufacturer Samuel Courtauld bought 14 works by the Provençal artist, several of which are included in this exhibition. (Courtauld then donated them to his eponymous institute.) Other collectors included Kenneth Clark and Henry James's friend, the writer Hugh Walpole. But these bare facts don't convey the almost clandestine excitement that surrounded the viewing and sharing of these precious objects. When Keynes returned from war-stricken Paris in 1918 with his small still life, Fry was deeply moved to see the work. Woolf wrote that "Roger very nearly lost his senses ... I've never seen such a sight of intoxication." Imagine us, she went on, "gloating upon these apples". A teenage Clark came across two of Davies's Cézannes, which she had loaned in 1918 to an art gallery in Bath. They were, he later wrote, "a knock-out blow. One landscape, in particular, gave me the strongest aesthetic shock I had ever received from a picture. I could not keep away from it, and I went down the hill to see it almost every day."
The apples that Woolf, Keynes, Fry and Vanessa Bell (briefly Fry's lover) would privately "gloat on" did not easily find their way into public ownership. In 1920, when Davies tried to loan Mountains in Provence and Still Life With Teapot to the National Gallery, the museum's trustees - who had blocked Fry's nomination as director - demurred, alleging that space to display "modern foreign pictures" was limited. Anne Robbins argues that "this excuse only masked official doubts about the quality of the pictures themselves". Courtauld was worried enough about the sluggish pace of public acquisition that he gave the nation £50,000 in 1923 for this purpose, with a list of works he thought would be desirable. It worked: Self-Portrait was obtained in 1925 and Hillside in Provence in 1926. But it would take decades before scattered British galleries - in Edinburgh, Glasgow, Sheffield, Liverpool and London - had substantial holdings. When the National Gallery bought Bathers in 1964, the steep asking price of £475,000 provoked grumbles in the letters columns, and the big canvas was screened behind Perspex, for fear of vandalism, and hung in the boardroom. The Sunday Telegraph rightly commented at the time that the nation was being punished for its "earlier refusals to recognise the importance of the 19th-century master. This fantastic sum is being paid by the very gallery which once hid the Lane bequest of impressionist pictures in the basement."
Generally speaking, there is something a little grotesque about the metropolitan art world's version of what Eugenio Montale called "the second life of art", when intense, layered canvases and sheets of marked paper, created out of private struggle, are transformed into objects whose golden auras have more to do with money than paint; and there is something poignant, or perhaps just comical, about a nation scrabbling to make amends with cash for its earlier philistinism. That disjunction is especially acute in the case of Cézanne, who of all painters shunned the market, the metropole and the art scene, who was sometimes mocked for his rough manners and heavy Provençal accent, and who preferred to let his mistress (later, wife) and child live in Paris while he worked stubbornly and slowly in Aix-en-Provence.
On the other hand, the British should not feel uniquely ashamed: Cézanne was admired by Gauguin and Pissarro and Renoir, but never attained great renown while he was alive. During his lifetime it was literally impossible, for long periods, to find his work. When the young gallery owner Ambroise Vollard held a one-man show of Cézanne's work in Paris in 1895, none of his paintings had been exhibited for 20 years; only the cognoscenti knew that a few drawings and oils could be found in Julien Tanguy's paint shop in the city. (Tanguy accepted customers' work in exchange for materials.) Cézanne, characteristically, did not travel from Aix for the retrospective in 1895, though if he had done he might have witnessed Degas and Renoir tussling over one of his drawings, which both wanted to buy.
Cézanne, for interesting reasons, is probably the most "literary" of the great modern painters; some of the painter's earliest admirers and collectors were writers. Zola was a childhood friend; the two boys were devoted to the countryside around Aix. Rilke wrote a series of famous letters about the experience of viewing Cézanne's work, day after day, and these fragments of lyrical criticism, torn off the poet's larger work, still have eloquent things to say about his overwhelming visual presence. Gertrude Stein and her brother Leo were very early collectors; it was in Gertrude's apartment that Picasso was so taken by the Portrait of Madame Cézanne. Woolf was fascinated by Cézanne's radical approach to form and representation. Cézanne reverberates in Wallace Stevens's poetry. And so on.
I suspect that what all these writers revered in Cézanne was, first, the intensity with which he looked at the world, seeking to penetrate its deep essences while at the same time giving the most acute account of its visible surface layers. Witnesses reported that he would look for hours at his subject - whether apples or a sitter like his gardener or his wife - before committing himself to a few strokes of the brush. Humans had to remain absolutely still; apples were better than flowers, which faded, hence the many sublime still lifes with apples on tables. The dried, equitable colours of the south of France, whose plane trees and sparse firs and ochre rocks look the same for so many months a year, allowed him to return again and again to an unchanging, ancient landscape, and work away at different iterations of the same theme. Best of all was Mont Sainte-Victoire, which rises massive behind Aix and the surrounding countryside; he would paint this rock repeatedly, trying to credit a variety of perspectives.
Behind this determination to see something new, to see something which no one else had painted, was Flaubert's example as much as Courbet's or Pissarro's. It was Flaubert who, like Cézanne, was both a realist and a formalist - a realist because he looked very hard at the visual world, and a formalist because he looked very hard at his own representation of that world. It was Flaubert, greatly admired by Cézanne, who told Maupassant that "there is a part of everything which is unexplored, because we are accustomed to using our eyes only in association with the memory of what people before us have thought of the thing we are looking at. Even the smallest thing has something in it which is unknown. We must find it."
In Cézanne's painting, we are helped to see the world afresh in this Flaubertian way. Shadows suddenly have intense spectra of colour: Cézanne said that the southern sun was so tremendous that objects seemed to be silhouetted not only in black and white, "but in blue, red, brown and violet". Apples are red and orange, with yellow blotches and thick brown lateral strokes, and sometimes with huge patches of white blazing on them. Mont Sainte-Victoire is sometimes almost polar blue and white, at other times a kind of Aztec red. In the late paintings, the multitude of small, sharp brush strokes pushes the work towards abstraction - one is always aware of the paint confessing its pigments, owning up to the fact that it is paint, that it is a difficult medium and not a portal to easy illusionism.
Cézanne further reminds us that he is painting by leaving some of his work a little unfinished - a bit of unpainted white canvas to show a white arm, or the cloth on a table left with awkward brown streaks on it. Still Life With Water Jug, painted around 1893 and included in this exhibition, shows Cézanne experimenting with this kind of daring unfinishedness, unafraid of using just a few lines to do no more than suggest a wall at the back of a room.
Most importantly, and most influentially perhaps, Cézanne consciously subverted the history of western perspective, which is based on the conventional idea of a single vanishing point seen from one point of view. As Cézanne developed, he grew more teasing in the way he acknowledged that we have two eyes and a swivelling head and tend to see things from various perspectives at once. Thus, in many of his still lifes, two or three pieces of fruit are seen from above, while two or three other pieces are seen from the side, and these are then jumbled together on a table that often leans strangely. In The Card Players (1892-95), one of the works acquired by Courtauld, and also in the National Gallery exhibition, two local men play cards at a table. Conventional perspective does not, for Cézanne, reveal the way people actually look at the world. So the men are peculiarly elongated, and loom over the little table, which leans to the left. And though the scene is full of verismo - it certainly seems real enough - the whole formal composition seems to be what matters more: the browns and yellows and greens and reds make an extraordinarily satisfying system of patterns. And it is the same in Still Life with Teapot (around 1902-06), another work at the present exhibition: the table is not straight but veers to the right, forcing us to view it both from above and straight on.
The literary links are clear: modernist writers, even those close to artists, sometimes disdained painters because they could not capture lots of things with the great variousness of language - not enough can be going on at once on a canvas, they seemed to imply. But Cézanne seems to rise to that challenge, and the near-cubism of his late work was a great influence on his admirers, Braque and Picasso. And the writers, despite their occasional snobberies, were in fact trailing behind his advances. In 1940, in her biography of Fry, Woolf wrote that "literature was suffering from a plethora of old clothes. Cézanne and Picasso had shown the way; writers would fling representation to the winds and follow suit."
In the National's exhibition, you can see Cézanne working away at all these dilemmas and solutions, in his difficult, stolid isolation in Provence, far from a market that did not respect him and that now guiltily reveres him.
· Cézanne in Britain is at the National Gallery, London WC2, from October 4 until January 7. Details: 020-7747 2885
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