The Cézanne book

I said I’d bought the catalogue -- a lavish and lovely production and value for money, I’d say -- and I turned to the chapter by Richard Shiff, ‘He Painted’, in the hope that it would tell me more than its title. It starts rather uninterestingly, for me, about Cézanne’s early reputation, but soon starts to say some helpful stuff, first by quotes and then in his own explanations.

So, Duret (1906) calls his technique, ‘strokes next to each other, then on top of each other’ - as if ‘he lays his painting with bricks’. Then Shiff asserts that ‘the historical trajectory’ of this technique (Courbet, perhaps) ‘need not engage the forces driving social history at any given time.’ (So somebody suggests or could suggest it might? interesting....) ‘The possibility of aligning aesthetic and social stars hardly motivated Cézanne’ (so it might, or did, others? I’d like to know more -- should read more art books....)

Then there’s stuff on whether Cézanne dehumanises his figures -- again, not something that worries me. This concern comes from Meyer Schapiro (1952), who then is quoted with this lovely formulation about The Card Players: ‘The inherent rigidity of the theme is overcome also by the remarkable life of the surface. There is a beautiful flicker and play of small contrasts.’ Shiff comments that ‘fllicker’ is right, and it is, and says that it has the effect of making the surface appear to ‘warp’, which it does.

Then, to my delight, he confirms that, as I said in the first post, Cézanne’s marks aren’t all representational: ‘Yet Cézanne’s characteristic warp does not necessarily adhere to the representational anatomy or the logical arrangement of a figure in the space of a room.’ Rather what happens is an ‘insistent sequencing of parallel marks and alternating colours’, regardless of ‘the depicted subject’.

What follows is then terrific and just the sort of art criticism I need. Best if I try to reproduce a couple of pages. Start at the second para on p.79. Click on images to enlarge.

What was Cézanne doing?

Finished De Tocqueville, Ancien Régime (but still intend to read some more appendices, including that on Frederick the Great; I found very interesting the one about French Canada displaying in its purest, most oppressive and most dysfunctional form the absolutism of the ancien régime). He keeps referring by way of contrast to Voltaire’s three years stay in England, so I've now started Letters on England (in English, Penguin).

That was on the train to Waterloo this morning where I was en route to the Courtauld Gallery for opening time of the last day of Cézanne’s card players. It was one room, about 20-25 pictures, all on the same theme -- just right for a single gallery visit. Not too crowed either -- I suppose not that many people know where it is.

They weren’t all card-playing scenes but were all peasants, portraits with and without pipes, some playing cards in two or three and studies for them, none doing peasant stuff in the peasant environment but all indoors in the studio, the space traditionally reserved for posher people. (The notes and captions were -- for once -- good; not a hint of Tate Modern’s post-modern bollocks.)

So, a good chance to look properly, an activity to which I was impelled by an article on the show by T.J. Clarke which was either very profound or rather silly, I'm not able to decide, but was certainly interesting and not post-modern.

So here’s some of what I saw.

Well, they were beautiful, if you’re allowed to say that these days. The atmosphere was calm and contemplative, the figures dignified despite their clown’s hats and pipes. The colours rich and wonderful.

I could see where this way of painting was headed: you could have taken passages of paint from these works and transferred them to a cubist painting of a decade and more later: painting that looks like paint marks applied with a broadish brush and close up doesn’t look like anything else.

I.e. if you looked closely at the actual jacket or its sleeve (sleeves are big in these paintings) as the chap was wearing it, you wouldn’t see what the painting shows. Each brush mark doesn’t represent something corresponding in that position in reality. But the whole effect does look like a sleeve or jacket: solid, volumetric, dipping away, protruding, lit and shaded, borne up and drooping or falling. It’s a mystery how he could do this, since to apply the paint he must have worked so close up that the marks lost their bigger context and were emptied of meaning.

So what’s the process? Perhaps: form a concept of the the whole effect and of the bits that will go to make it up; then, keep that firmly in your head and approach the canvas, but in painting keep the idea in mind and take no notice of the meaningless of the marks you’re making.

Or was it like this? He’s evolved a language or vocabulary of types of brushstrokes. (Of course it’s wrong to say that it’s a language -- in many ways it’s nothing like -- but the idea of combinable elements, some arbitrary -- not representational -- is similar.) He’s found another way than copying each minute bit to convey the effect of an object, using instead an ensemble of brush marks, each meaningless in itself but together delivering the idea; he’s found that human perception can be relied on to produce that transformation. So, having that language, he looks at a sleeve, forms a concept, and then paints the concept -- constructs the sentence ‘sleeve’, something that means sleeve just as the sleeve as seen for real does but getting there by starting somewhere quite different.

I'm interested enough to want to know more about this, so -- something I never do -- I bought the catalogue and to hell with the expense. The articles looked as if they’d be helpful. Then I want to know how he got there from, presumably, being a conventional young painter.

What’s the best book on Cézanne’s life and career?

Painting photographs

I've been to the exhibition The Painting of Modern Life at the Hayward Gallery. The theme is actually more restricted than the title: it’s about painting based on photographs -- mainly painting that copies photographs more or less closely but, as a rule, greatly enlarges them and sometimes changes the colour, as well as substituting painting, with brushmarks visible, for the photographic process.

There’s a video on the gallery site where you can see some of the images, sort of:

http://www.hayward.org.uk/painting/

The photographic originals are not art photographs but are generally taken from the media or historical documents or personal collections of snaps. Sometimes the painted image we see has been through a succession of transformations in different media.

An image taken from life is already at one remove. If we come across a photograph of a torpedoed destroyer in a yellowing newspaper lining a drawer, we feel remote from the event but also aware that it happened, it was real, it caused the photograph which could not have happened otherwise. Now turn the photograph into a painting and we are more remote still – but the awareness that something, this, once happened persists.

That awareness survives everything that might contrive to drain the sense of reality out of any residue of the originating event. The image we see is and looks like a painting; we can see the paint, the work is much larger than an ordinary photograph and it’s displayed on an art gallery wall. More than that, it is (typically) beautiful, despite the horror or banality of the subject matter (car crash scene with bodies, artist’s mum standing in front of her car outside a suburban house).

How far the beauty was there from the start in the photograph is hard to tell (we aren’t shown the originals except for some tiny reproductions in the brochure); perhaps it was, if looked at with an artist’s eye, and perhaps that was partly and sometimes why the artist chose it. But I would say the painting also emphasises and enhances compositional qualities such as the relationship of tones and colours in different areas of the work, and in general makes the image feel quite different, and sometimes weirdly over-real and strange.

Sometimes the transformation happens despite what looks like an attempt to be absolutely faithful to the original; just doing it in paint and making it bigger and displaying it as art makes the difference. In other paintings the work of transformation is overt: Vija Celmin takes an official U.S. Navy photograph of civilian damage from the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor; it shows a car riddled with bullet holes, its tyres burst and the driver’s body slumped over the wheel, against a background with palms and other apparently damaged vehicles. In the painting (likewise monochrome), the background is reduced to vague swirls, the brushstrokes are broad and obvious and the body is reduced to a shape that is hardly recognisable. It unashamedly looks like a painting. As a pattern of paint on a surface with, at the same time, an allusion to an old car and some strange and unexplained holes that seem like bullet holes, it’s a beautiful thing that rewards contemplation. But still an actual shooting-up of cars at a particular moment, and a resulting state (car still there, driver dead) that lasted until it was cleared up, is there in the back of my consciousness.

Which is the lesson, that horrific reality can’t be wished away or what beauty it can be transformed into?

Perhaps the key difference between the paintings and the photographs is that in the paintings everything – every square millimetre -- has been chosen, everything has been put down by a conscious decision – even if it’s a decision to follow a specific set of rules quite mechanically – because a photograph doesn’t automatically dictate a fixed sequence of operations with a range of brushes and tubes of paint.

A camera just does its stuff mindlessly, but this mark is here and just so because that’s how the artist chosen to have it. Everything in the picture is significant or meant. So a particular spatial distribution of shapes and areas of colour and tone that happened to occur in some scene some day in front of a lens (I'm leaving out of account any manipulations with lens filters and darkroom jiggery-pokery) now, in the artist’s ‘copy’, invites or demands a quite different sort of appreciation, as a painting, a set of choices, a creation.

But, on top of that, and quite different, there’s the creepy awareness that it’s still a record of something that once really happened – and the relationship between that awareness and our aesthetic appreciation of oil on canvas, the order of composition and the luxury of the texture of paint, is complex and mysterious: I can’t say what it is but it’s there and fascinating and disturbing.

No photography by me was allowed in the gallery, but I could shoot out of the window: