Cézanne, Cubism and Giacometti (1): Objects.
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| Illustration 1: 'Still Life With Water Jug', c. 1892-3, Paul Cézanne; National Gallery, London. |
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| 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:
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):
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.
'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.
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