T. J. Clark on Cézanne’s Portraits

      Paul Cézanne, Woman with a Cafetière (c.1895)  

T. J. Clark’s dazzling “Relentless Intimacy” (London Review of Books (January 25, 2018), attempts to light a fuse under traditional Cézanne criticism. The piece begins thrillingly:

Look first at Woman with a Cafetière, who presides over the next to last room of the Cézanne Portraits show, staring down even the saturnine Ambroise Vollard. Then meet the gaze of Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress, infinitely courageous in her alarming throne-room, oppressed – or is it enlivened? – by a glorious Vermeer curtain, a bucking dado, a chairback like a coffin lid, exploding fire tongs, white lightning in the grate, a painting – or is it a mirror? – perched on the chimney breast. It matters that both portraits are of women, and I shall come to that. But it matters just as much that still, more than a century after they were painted, these images so effortlessly keep their distance, resisting our understanding, refusing (as the philosophers say) to ‘come under a description’. In particular they strike me as putting the strange word ‘expression’ to death.

The orthodox line on Cézanne is that his portraits are “inexpressive,” that he’s “detached” from his subjects. For example, Peter Schjeldahl, in his recent “High Anxiety” (The New Yorker, April 9, 2018), a review of “Cézanne: Portraits” at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., writes,

Once, at the Metropolitan Museum, I counted dozens of people clumped in front of several paintings by van Gogh while one or two or none paid a whole room of Cézannes cursory attention as others walked through with passing glances. I empathized. A glance at his work warns of slow going ahead. That’s because he didn’t paint for the pleasure of other people but for his own, always elusive satisfaction. I’m used to feeling lonely when looking at his work—as humanly unconsidered as Hortense, who, through hours and days and years, displays not the slightest flicker of happiness. 

Note that “as humanly unconsidered as Hortense.” The reference is to Hortense Fiquet (Madame Cézanne), the subject of at least twenty-eight Cézanne portraits. 

Clark rejects this view. He says, “Cézanne is not in the least ‘detached’ from his sitters, he is relentlessly intimate with them.” Cézanne’s intimacy, he argues, is in his details (“Avert your gaze from Madame’s mummified torso and attend to the earth-quaking room instead”), e.g., the spoon in Woman with a Cafetière:

The spoon in Woman with a Cafetière is upright with its own identity: it has a halo of shadow to keep the rest of reality from contaminating it. The woman’s hands (or her hair with its geological parting) have the same weight and distinctiveness as the spoon. And yet spoon, hair and hands are fitted like cogs or levers into the pictures naïve, elaborate of the world-all-at-once: the table so eager to be there for us, pushing its way through the picture plane; the flowers tumbling down the wall, changing colour as they hit the floor; the long central seam of the woman’s dress splitting open under her fist.

This is magnificent critical writing, and what makes it magnificent is its concentration on detail. Another strand of Clark’s argument – his theory that “the famous ‘inexpressiveness’ of his [Cézanne’s] sitters has to do (not wholly, but indubitably) with their situation in class society” – is less persuasive. But his argument from particulars is exhilarating. “Relentless Intimacy” is one of this year’s finest critical essays.