Cézanne, Cubism and Giacometti (1).

Cézanne, Cubism and Giacometti (1): Objects.

Illustration 1: 'Still Life With Water Jug', c. 1892-3, Paul Cézanne; National Gallery, London.

Illustration 2: 'Still Life With Fruit Basket' c. 1890, Paul Cézanne; Musée d'Orsay, Paris.

As a high-school student, I was taught to view Cézanne as a gateway to something more important: Cubism. It was only as an art undergraduate, when I visited London, that I recognised his greater significance (and this was reaffirmed much later on a trip to Paris). At that point I felt my own work was too formless. Besides the lucidity of his colouring and paint application, which I hadn't expected, it was the vivid sense of the presence of the objects he represents that most overwhelmed me:

'Painting from nature is not copying the object, it is realising sensations' - Paul Cézanne.

That statement is often interpreted as a manifesto for abstraction, and is borne out by the impetus Cézanne's innovations gave to succeeding painters:

Illustration 3: 'Fruit Dish, Bottle and Violin', 1914, Pablo Picasso; National Gallery, London.

I believe there is another way, requiring a greater leap of imagination, to interpret Cézanne's method, that was largely ignored by Modernism. Each mature canvas (after he meets Pissarro) can be viewed as an experimental attempt at making contact with the model in a new, and wholly unanticipated, manner. In a triadic relationship of eye (perception), hand (mark making) and object (intuition), Cubists and 'post-Cubists' paid lip-service to the first principle, gave primary focus to the second and made redundant the latter. Yet, I would argue, it is the third factor which is most fundamental. D. H. Lawrence grasped this, brilliantly, in his tendentious essay 'Introduction To His Paintings' (1929):

'Cézanne's great effort was, as it were, to shove the apple away from him, and let it live of itself ... he wished to displace our present mode of mental-visual consciousness, the consciousness of mental concepts, and substitute a mode of consciousness that was predominantly intuitive, the awareness of  touch'.

The artist who most forcefully comprehended and penetrated this problem was not, in my opinion, Picasso but Alberto Giacometti (1901-1966):

Illustration 4: 'Still Life With Apple', 1937, Alberto Giacometti.

Cézanne, it seems to me, is concerned with an anti-Western, non-photographic examination of objects: how they are bound in a relationship with the visual-field, which in itself is merely a product of perception; and how the intuitive core of things, the feel and presence of reality, must somehow be apprehended from the centre outwards (and not simply be 'frozen', or conceptualised, as in a machine-like way of seeing/representing). When Giacometti returned to painting from life (after a successful career making semi-abstract, Surrealist objects), his 'Still Life With Apple', 1937, became a key point of entry - through Cézanne - to a reinvention of figuration.

Edouard Manet.

Edouard Manet: A Dynamic Viewpoint.

'Music in the Tuileries Gardens:' 1862; National Gallery, London.

Illustration 1: 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens.'

This open-concert scene shows an audience of friends, family and public figures, and even includes a self-portrait. On the surface, it adheres to a notion of the 'casual' impression: a sweeping view, controlled from a detached perspective. The artist, however, makes the centre of the composition - a man, probably Manet's brother 'Eugène,' standing next to a veiled woman - an area of great painterly ambiguity. Textures reminiscent of an 'ébauche' (or 'study') are left as finished, and directly contiguous to 'worked-up,' detailed passages of paint; elements on the periphery are brought into unexpected focus; and there are discontinuities of scale, which all combine to produce a sense of tension and fragmentation, not unity.

Illustration 2: The centre of focus is unclear (detail).

Illustration 3: Peripheral elements are brought into focus - see portrait, left (detail).

Illustration 4: Discontinuities of scale - compare the size of these children to e.g. chairs in the foreground, right (detail).

Many of the methods are familiar from 'Old Master' paintings. 'Music in the Tuileries Gardens,' however, adapts them to a contemporary, urban theme. In cinema, a wide-shot can contain potential, successive camera movements, each revealing further details unfolding in time. Manet seems to compress such sequencing within one composed frame, producing an effect that I would describe as a 'dynamic' viewpoint: a type of optical 'scanning' that is active, not passive. 'Snapshot' views are juxtaposed within a contingent form, that momentarily holds fractured images together before they dissolve into chaos (signified, here, by the crowd).

'Corner of a Café-Concert,' c. 1878-80 (National Gallery, London); 'The Waitress,' c. 1879 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris).

Illustration 5: 'Corner of a Café-Concert.'

Illustration 6: 'The Waitress.'

'Corner of a Café-Concert' is probably the truncated, right-hand section of a larger work (see Illustration 7). Manet establishes a push-pull dynamic of viewing across, and into, the composition (from right to left), whilst including a figure who gazes out of the pictorial 'window' towards an indefinite point. It has the unexpected effect of making what is central (the café-concert) peripheral, and what seems peripheral (the woman/waitress) central (Illustration 5 and 6). The artist expands this approach, infinitely, in his late masterpiece 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.'

Illustration 7: 'Brasserie de Reichshoffen' - the left hand section of a bigger work?

'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère,' 1882 (Courtauld Institute Galleries, London).

Illustration 8: 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.' 

Critics disagree about the employment of a mirror in this painting. At some point, Manet made a conscious decision to shift the reflection of two figures further to the right-side of his composition:

Illustration 9:  The barmaid is slightly less central in this preliminary sketch, and her reflection - along with that of a customer - is positioned more parallel to the viewer's line-of-sight i.e. closer to the middle.

Logical attempts have been made to describe the perspectival arrangement of 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère', in terms of conventional geometry:

Illustration 10: A rationalization of the space in 'A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.'

In this model, 'we,' as observers, are 'at the shoulder' of a male customer, without also being visible as a reflection. It makes the viewer a semi-ghostly, invisible presence, simultaneously conscious of the needs and desires of a male client, but suspended somewhere inbetween; privy, also, to an intimate, withheld feminine space. An alternative possibility is that Manet simply introduced irrational readjustments - distortions even - for aesthetic and/or dramatic purposes. This could suggest a further, more radical interpretation: that the relationship between model and reflection is meant to imply a sense of spatio-temporal displacement and separation. Two distinct states-of-being existing in different moments.

Egon Schiele: 'The Family'.

Egon Schiele: 'The Family', 1918 (Belvedere Gallery, Vienna).

Illustration 1: 'The Family'.

My lifelong Egon Schiele 'obsession' began with seeing a reproduction of 'The Family' (in an art-book that I'd bought in the 1990s). His use of line, particularly, evokes a hypersensitive awareness of touch. By describing the contours of a human body, each model becomes an exposed object: its presence makes an incision into pictorial space. Schiele's mastery of contour-line, however, also transmits enormous emotion and pathos.

Illustration 2: 'Self Portrait', 1914.

Having the privilege, much later, of viewing 'The Family' in The Belvedere Gallery, Vienna, I was struck by its compositional authority. I see it as Egon Schiele's great attempt to resolve the problem of alienation, and of human separateness, that is pervasive in his earlier work.

The family members are joined, like Russian-dolls, in a sequence of interlocking forms; but, positioned within a cradle of darkness, each face points in a different direction. The self-examining gaze of a father (and self-portrait) is, perhaps, a comment on masculine and parental uncertainty.

Illustration 3: 'The Family' (detail).

The emotional centre, however, is shifted elsewhere: towards the representation of a mother's face, with her expression of profound sadness and ambivalence.

Illustration 4: 'The Family' (detail).

This marks an unexpected transition. By focusing attention away from 'the self', Schiele appears to replace anxiety and isolation with the unifying principle of shared intimacy.

'A Streetcar Named Desire'.

TENNESSEE WILLIAMS (1911-1983): 'A Streetcar Named Desire'.

(2) Madness.

Illustration 1: Tennessee Williams.

In the opening scene of 'A Streetcar Named Desire' (1947), Blanche DuBois describes her sister's ramshackle New Orleans' apartment as follows: 'Only Poe! Only Mr Edgar Allan Poe! - could do it justice!'. Unconsciously, she invokes a spectre of Gothic fiction, which may be a subtle background presence in this play.

Illustration 2: Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49).

The acknowledgement of Poe - Williams's great nineteenth-century literary precursor - feels more than cosmetic; in particular for that author's correlation of insanity with aural disturbance. Roderick Usher (in 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 1839), morbidly sensitive towards noise, becomes cursed by the scratchings of his sister - buried alive - attempting to claw a way out of her tomb. In another story, an unnamed murderer is driven mad by the beating of his victim's heart, long past the point of that individual's death: 'The disease [madness] had sharpened my senses - not destroyed - not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute' ('The Tell-Tale Heart', 1843).

Illustration 3: 'The Fall of the House of Usher'; Harry Clarke, illustrator.

Illustration 4: 'The Tell-Tale Heart'; Harry Clarke, illustrator.

In 'A Streetcar Named Desire', the suicide of Blanche DuBois's young husband reoccurs as a series of sense memories - shock waves and sound waves - that convey her palpable nervous disorder and descent into mental chaos. She describes a sound 'that goes relentlessly on and on in your head' (Scene Nine), a mixture of gunshot and a polka tune, the 'Varsouviana', both heard at the location of her lover's death. Later, background songs combine with 'inhuman voices' (Scene Ten) and the cry of a train, all 'echoing' and 'reverberating' (Scene Eleven) the fragmentation of her personality.

Illustration 5: Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois (1951, film version).

Central to the Gothic tradition is a concept of decay. For a male author, Williams creates an astonishingly perceptive and empathetic representation of female sexuality on the downturn. 'Miss DuBois' is conscious she is older and her looks are fading. A sense of imminent death emerges, pathologically, as its obverse - desire (from Thanatos to Eros), manifested in her promiscuity and abnormal attraction to young men.

Poe writes (in 'The Tell-Tale Heart'): 'True! - nervous - very, very dreadfully nervous, I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?'. This positive view of mental illness, as a gateway to acute insight and heightened sensory experience, seems to resound throughout 'A Streetcar Named Desire', particularly its final scene (Scene Eleven). Blanche DuBois had sought refuge in her sister's home, situated (ironically) at 'Elysian Fields', which becomes, instead, a place of abjection as she begins to psychologically unravel. Religious references abound: a Madonna in a painting; a soul taken to heaven; and cathedral chimes. Caught between the dangerous carnality of her physical surroundings and the 'cynical detachment' of institutionalised psychiatric care, Williams presents his character's doomed romanticism (and retreat into insanity) almost beatifically - like a rite of purification.