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Distractions: Cézanne in a Sketchbook Author(s): Richard Shiff Source: Master Drawings, Vol. 47, No. 4, Articles and Notes in Honor of Karen B. Cohen (Winter,
2009), pp. 447-451Published by: Master Drawings AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25609762Accessed: 31-03-2015 18:03 UTC
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Distractions: Cezanne in a Sketchbook
Richard Shiff
Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) had a procedural
quirk. It shows in his paintings but all the more
obviously in his modest sketchbook drawings, unintended for sale or public exhibition. He
linked disparate images by their happenstance form and location?one shape resembling anoth
er, one position on the page corresponding to
another?with no apparent concern for thematic
consistency. No doubt, the possibility of inappar ent consistency remains: a private code or obscure
witticism comprehensible to the artist but not to
his contemporaries, a hidden factor that would
explain his curious formal links and transpositions. A plausible alternative to the missing explanation
lies in plain view: Cezanne's graphic oddities jus
tify themselves in the bemusing "distractions"
they create. I imagine the artist engaging in aes
thetic play that he never actively sought but could
not resist. Sketching, he indulged himself.
Some prime examples are found in a drawing book that Cezanne used during the period 1885
to 1900, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
("Sketchbook n").1 On one page (p. xxxvi recto;
Fig. 1), a sequence of pencil strokes converts the
buttocks of a striding female figure (a "bather"
type) into a motif of rhythmically spaced, some
what arched verticals. These lines double as legs of
a swan, oriented inversely, most likely the first of
Figure 1
PAUL CtZANNE
Two Female
Bathers; Swan;
P. XXXVI (recto) of A
Sketchbook ii
Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
K
447
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Figure 2a
PAUL CtZANNE
Puget's Atlas
Standing Male
Bathers; P.L
(recto) of
Sketchbook ii
Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
two thematically unrelated, but graphically con
nected images to be drawn. The conjunction of
two buttocks?or, improbably, three??and two
legs?three??results in three lines that demand to
be viewed as a single rhythm because of the reg
ularity of their spacing. The intervals between the
lines happen to correspond to the disposition of
the bounded spaces just above them, representing the arm of the striding figure and the left side of
her back. Bather and swan are interwoven.
In Cezanne's drawings we characteristically
perceive as positive projections from the paper
ground both the spaces or separations and the
lines that contain them. The result is spatial ambi
guity: not only the positive marks but also the
nominally negative reserves appear as positive
solids rather than negative voids. This is but one
of a number of "abstract" effects that the artist's
representational drawings share with his paintings, an element of the general abstraction that both
mystified and fascinated early viewers, induced to
focus on the materiality of the mark at the
expense of perceiving it as the representation or
sign of something else.2
On the left of this sheet, Cezanne drew a more
developed version of the same striding bather,
inserting a plane of diagonal pencil strokes that fill
the space between the figure's legs. He continued
this diagonal stroking throughout the body and
beneath an extended right hand, lending the
entire figure a sense of graphically directed move
ment?arbitrary in relation to the rectilinear for
mat of the page but relevant to the position of the swan. The tail of the swan, upside down also in
relation to this bather, complements the hand of
the figure to its left, as if a graphic spark could pass between them, across the indefinite space, now
highly activated. This spacing or interval repre sents neither air, nor volume, nor perspective, nor
anything symbolic; it is a felt relationship, animat
ed in an immediate act of drawing. It is difficult
to dissociate the curves and angles of the swan
from those of the two female figures because each
fulfills the other's implied vector of graphic inten
tion: the left bather's extended hand is to the
swan's extended tail as the right bather's compact
448
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Figure 2b
PAUL CEZANNE
J ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~Male Bathers; p. XLIx (verso) of
"1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ ~~~~~~~~~ ~~~Sketchbook ii
Philadelphia, Philadelphia
'T~~~~~~~ "S~~~~~~~~~' ~~~Museum of Art
4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P
ed buttocks are to the swan's compacted legs? mutual complementarity.3 If there is meaning here, it is sensory or emotional meaning, felt
through the nature of the marking, as opposed to
an identification of the image. Elsewhere within the same sketchbook, simi
lar situations arise?a distribution of forms that
fails to communicate thematically becomes force
ful in a graphic way. A study after one of the
sculptures of Atlas by Pierre Puget (1620-1694),
designed for the H?tel-de-Ville, Toulon, but avail
able to Cezanne as plaster casts in the Trocadero, closes off the leftward end of a two-page spread that includes studies of male bathers whose pos tures Cezanne often incorporated into paintings
(p. L recto; Fig. 2a).4 Logically, we would assume
that the Atlas fragment preceded these somewhat
independent images of bathers, for it would be
peculiar to begin drawing a figure in a space insuf
ficient to complete it. Yet the position of this frag ment, especially its curving bottom edge, extends
the implied recession suggested by the shift in
scale of the two variants of a single figure to its
right. It even echoes the curving, angled legs of
the lightly sketched seated bather on the facing
page (p. xxix verso; Fig. 2b), whose left-hand
position it occupies in exchange. This is compo sition by transpositional coincidence.
The discipline of art history frowns on hap
penstance and chance, smiles on cause and effect
rendered conscious. By one device or another, an
art historian might divine a cultural link between
Atlas, male bathers, and the various sources from
the historical past that Cezanne chose as his
anatomical models. Unpacking an ultimate the
matic justification for a complex composition is a
familiar intellectual challenge; but no matter how
impressively informed and inventive the results,
they will remain conjectural. The immediate
sense to be derived from the situation of
Cezanne's Atlas?bather drawing?from its physi
cal positioning, its graphic motif?presents a dif
ferent kind of question: of felt response, not spec ulation. It matters not whether we decide, after
the fact, to classify our feeling as sensory, emo
tional, or both. A felt response can be the mean
449
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Figure 3 (left)
PAUL CEZANNE
Antique Aphrodite and Eros;
p. xxxvii (verso) of Sketchbook II
Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Figure 4 (right)
PAUL CEZANNE
Standing Male
Bather; Dog; p. xxxviii (recto) of
Sketchbook n
Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum of Art
ing of a work, its human significance, without
extending into intellectual reasoning. Instead of
directing his composition to the traditional end of
enhancing and clarifying a thematic message, Cezanne either amused himself with his subver
sive play of incompatible subjects or became so
intensely?perhaps distractedly?engaged with
form and movement that these factors of sensation
disengaged from the representational theme.
Consider another curiosity from the sketch
book. Cezanne copied an antique Aphrodite and
Eros sculpture from the Louvre in which Eros
forms a short vertical to the right of Aphrodite's
long vertical (p. XXXVII verso; Fig. 3).5 On the
facing page, he repeated this structural ratio by
combining an image of a dog with an unrelated
standing male bather (p. xxxvill recto; Fig. 4). Either of the drawings, Aphrodite or bather, may
have preceded the other, and within the latter
drawing, either the bather or the dog may have
been the initial image. The dog appears in a posi tion on the bather page analogous to the position Eros holds on the Aphrodite page. To accomplish this, Cezanne had to rotate its placement ninety
degrees in relation to the bather (or vice versa). The naturalistic horizontality of the lying dog, with ground plane indicated, becomes arbitrarily vertical, so long as we allow the standing bather to
determine the orientation of the compound
image. Here the dog assumes the pictorial situa
tion not only of Eros but also of numerous male
bathers reduced in vertical stature because they sit
on a river bank or stand partly immersed in a
stream, beside the full vertical of a standing or
striding figure. Cezanne developed such a motif
(long vertical, short vertical) in his drawing and
450
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furthered it in paintings of groups of male bathers, where it tends to repeat (long, short, long, short .. .).6 It is as if he felt an affinity for, or took pleas
ure in, certain structural relations. His concentra
tion on positioning licensed him to exchange the
matic place-holders: on paper or canvas, a dog
could substitute for a bather, a tree for a bather's
towel, an apple for a human head, and so forth.
The degree to which Cezanne may have con
sciously pondered the extent of his violation of
conventional aesthetic and intellectual order
remains at issue. "Artists don't perceive all the
relationships directly," he is reported to have said,
"they sense them."7 Whatever the case, Cezanne's
transgressions were noticed. A number of
younger artists and critics interpreted them as
constituting not only "abstraction" but also a new
form of realism: a self-referential realism of mate
rial forces that the artist both directed and
responded to in an experiential loop. Today, aca
demics tend to deny claims of phenomenological detachment and sensory immersion. It was in this
respect, however?for feeling, for the intensity of
Cezannian "sensation"?that "apples [could] assume the same grandeur as a human head," as a
member of Cezanne's generation epitomized the
thoroughly improper effect he created.8 The fol
lowing generation rendered explicit what they believed Cezanne had been hiding from himself: "The goal is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact
but to constitute a pictorial fact."9 The subject or
"anecdote" was not the source of feeling and
meaning; all was in the mark, the drawing.
Associate Editor Richard Shiff is a professor in the
Department of Art and Art History at the University of Texas at Austin, specializing in modern and contempo rary art of Europe and America.
NOTES
1. Inv. no. 1987-53 (Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Walter H.
Annenberg). Graphite pencil on wove paper; 127 x 216
mm. On determining the dates of use of this sketchbook, see Theodore Reff, "Introduction," in Theodore Reff
and Innis Howe Shoemaker, Paul Cezanne: Two Sketch
books, exh. cat., Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of
Art, 1989, pp. 9-10.
2. On the perception of "abstraction" in Cezanne's art, see
Richard Shiff, "Lucky Cezanne (Cezanne tychique)," in
Joseph J. Rishel and Katherine Sachs, eds., Cezanne and
Beyond, exh. cat., Philadelphia, Philadelphia Museum of
Art, 2009, pp. 54-101.
3. This drawing makes no apparent allusion to the theme of
Leda and the Swan. A recent study of Cezanne's involve
ment with this theme should nevertheless be consulted
for similar examples of the graphic conflation of subjects: see Jean-Claude Lebensztejn, "Une Source oubliee de
Cezanne," Etudes Cezanniennes, Paris, 2006, pp. 46-59.
4. For the identification of the source in Puget, see
Gertrude Berthold, Cezanne und die alten Meister,
Stuttgart, 1958, no. 130, repr., in conjunction with the
observations of Theodore Reff in Philadephia 1989, pp. 233?34. On these two pages Cezanne worked with the
sketchbook upside down.
5. See Berthold 1958, no. 26, repr. Cezanne drew the same
subject on p. xxix recto (see Philadelphia 1989, p. 191).
6. See Sketchbook n, p. xxxn verso, for an example in
drawing (see Philadelphia 1989, p. 198). In painting, see
Cinq baigneurs of 1879-80 in the Detroit Institute of Arts
(inv. no. 70.162; oil on canvas; 34.6 x 38.1 cm); see John Rewald et al., The Paintings of Paul Cezanne: A Catalogue Raisonne, 2 vols., New York, 1996, vol. 2, no. 448, repr.
7. One of a number of aphoristic statements attributed to
Cezanne's conversations with the writer Leo Larguier; see Leo Larguier, Le Dimanche avec Paul Cezanne:
Souvenirs, Paris, 1925, p. 137.
8. See Theodore Duret, Histoire des peintres impressionnistes, Paris, 1906, p. 180.
9. See Georges Braque, "Pensees et reflexions sur la pein ture," Nord-Sud, December 1917, p. 4.
451
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