Chapter 3

Cezanne
I. Introduction
(born: Jan. 19, 1839, Aix-en-Provence – died: Oct. 22, 1906, Aix-en-Provence) 

Paul Cezanne was a French painter, one of the greatest of the Postimpressionists, whose works
and ideas were influential in the aesthetic development of many 20th-century artists and art
movements, especially Cubism. Cézanne's art, misunderstood and discredited by the public during
most of his life, grew out of Impressionism and eventually challenged all the conventional values
of painting in the 19th century through its insistence on personal expression and on the integrity
of the painting itself. He has been called the father of modern painting.

A. Emile Zola’s Romantic Distinction between the Poet and the Worker
True artists are born with the spark of imagination and have only to ‘exercise [their]
fingers’ – with its corollary that technical accomplishment alone cannot make an artist.
B. What is distinctive about the career of Cézanne is that to the end of his life and beyond, he was
to be regarded by the majority of both his admirers and his detractors in terms consistent with
this typically adolescent self-image: as someone possessed of an authentic ‘artistic
temperament’, who continued to struggle with the problems of technique.
1. Technique
The term technique refers to those – typically manual – procedures for
performing an operation that tend to require practice, and that improve with practice.
In this context the relevant procedures were drawing, especially drawing from nature and
from the model, and painting, involving not simply the controlled application of paint but
also experience in the mixing and interrelating of colours. The possibility of
development in an artist’s work will normally depend upon some change or extension of
technique. It could therefore be said that the only artists who don’t encounter technical
problems are those who are content simply to repeat themselves.
2. Salon
This was a large public exhibition to which anyone could submit work, but which was
heavily influenced by the traditional values of the Academy of Fine Arts, with entries
vetted by a jury of senior professionals. Before the late nineteenth century, those who failed
to get noticed in the Salon had little prospect of establishing any kind of career, since there
were then few independent dealers’ galleries where aspiring artists might hope to be shown.
3. Traditionalists looked to established principles of training, technique and composition.
4. Modernists believed that art should represent and stimulate a specifically contemporary
sensibility.
5. Impressionist artists:
Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Auguste Renoir, Berthe Morisot, Alfred Sisley and
Edgar Degas

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C. Attitudes to Cezanne’s Works
1. Negative
Shall we mention Cézanne, who, by the way, has his own legend? No known jury
has ever, even in its dreams, imagined the possibility of accepting a single work by this
painter, who came to the Salon carrying his paintings on his back, like Jesus Christ
carrying his cross.
(‘Prouvaire’, 1874, in Moffat, 1966, p. 126)
2. Positive
M. Cézanne’s works are those of a Greek of the classical period; his canvases have
the tranquil and heroic serenity of antique painting and pottery, and the fools who laugh
at les Baigneurs, for instance, make me think of barbarians criticizing the Parthenon. M.
Cézanne is a painter, and a great painter. Those who have never wielded a brush or pencil
have said that he can’t draw, and they have identified ‘flaws’ in his work which are in fact
deliberate refinements, the result of his enormous skill.
(Rivière, 1877, in Harrison et al., 1998, p. 596)
D. Bathers
They are a long series of paintings of bathers that the artist produced between the 1870s and
his death in 1906. These show nude or near-nude figures – usually females – in outdoor
settings. To label these works as ‘bathers’ is not necessarily to imply that the pictured figures
have actually been swimming or washing. Rather, it is to identify a type of subject-matter or
genre.
1. Genre is a conventional term meaning ‘kind’, originally used in the late seventeenth century
to refer to different classes of subject-matter in painting, such as history painting,
landscape, portraiture, still life and scenes from everyday life.
2. The Long History of the Genre of Bathers in European Painting
a. In the Italian Renaissance during the late fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, most
paintings and sculptures were devoted to the illustration of biblical and other religious
texts. But the surviving literature of Latin poetry and prose provided some justification
for works of a different kind. A picture of an attractive nude woman could be a ‘Venus’,
the goddess of love; a collection of nudes imagined in an outdoor setting could be
nymphs, the spirits that peopled the landscape in classical mythology – and notably
in the work of the Latin poet Ovid – as personifications of different aspects of the
natural world. From the point of view of the painters and their patrons, the most popular
of nymphs were the Naiads, the spirits of rivers, who could most reasonably be
expected to appear unclothed. Stories of the loves of the gods provided further
justifications for displays of nudity. For the purposes of art, reference to such classical
themes as these gave a kind of respectable cultural gloss to the natural connection
between bathing and nudity, a connection that artists continued to exploit over the
next two centuries.
b. By the mid nineteenth century the term ‘baignade’ – meaning a scene of bathing –
had become firmly established in France as the label for a certain type of ambitious
painted scenario. In enterprises such as these, artists measured their practical skills
against the comparable achievements of their predecessors in two respects that were
both central to the art of painting and pleasing to the (generally male) spectator:
i. …by managing a coherent illusion of broad and deep pictorial space,

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 ii. …by providing plausible representations of the nude figure in a variety of
poses.
3. The Paradox of Cezanne’s Bathers
But if this is the context in which we should be considering Cézanne’s large Bathers
(Plate 1.3.5), there seems to be something of a problem – or a paradox at least.
a. On the one hand, if we take our measures of artistic achievement from such traditional
examples of the genre as Palma Vecchio’s or Correggio’s, or even Fragonard’s, his
painting appears deficient in both the supposedly crucial respects I have cited. Where
the compositions of the earlier works present an open and measured passage from
foreground into depth, allowing the absorbed spectator to imagine some interaction
with their figures, the picture space of Cézanne’s work seems dense and hard to
read, while his nudes appear relatively lumpy and unconvincing.
b. At the same time, Cézanne’s Bathers occupies a virtually unequalled position in the
history of art as this is represented in the national collections in Britain. It both marks
the very end of the long tradition of figurative painting represented in the National
Gallery, and serves as a potential point of entry to the avant-garde art of the
modern period represented at Bankside.
i. ‘avant-garde’: In the French military vocabulary from which it is borrowed, the
term ‘avant-garde’ designates an advanced fighting force. When applied to
artists, writers and musicians it serves to identify those considered pioneers in the
development of specifically modern forms.
II. Terms and Techniques
A. In the view of hindsight, the wide differences of opinion about his work serve vividly to
demonstrate the gap that had already grown between traditional and ‘modern’ views on art.
1. To those who viewed Cézanne’s paintings with an eye to traditional standards of artistic
skill and competence, they appeared simply worthless.
2. Yet for the English critic Clive Bell, writing in 1914 and speaking for a gathering army of
supporters of the modern movement in art, the painter was ‘the Christopher Columbus of
a new continent of form’, the person who ‘In so far as one man can be said to inspire a
whole age ... inspires the contemporary movement’ (Bell, 1914, pp. 207, 199).
B. Some Technical Terms and Definitions
1. Delineation refers to the representation of shapes and details by means of drawing.
2. Modelling refers to the technical means used to represent figures and objects as three-
dimensional. In drawing and painting, modelling involves assuming a direction and fall of
light, normally from the side. (An object lit from directly in front tends to appear relatively
flattened, whereas an object lit from behind tends to appear as a silhouette.) A given fall of
light, whether observed or assumed, will distinguish lit from unlit surfaces, and will impart a
particular quality to the transition from one to the other: gradual when the light is subdued
and diffused, abrupt when it is bright and concentrated. The technique used to convey the
quality of this transition is known as shading.
3. Tone is the range from lightest light (pure white) to darkest dark (pure black). In painting,
the more that black is mixed with a given colour, the darker its tone will be. An artist may
exploit dramatic contrasts of tone, or may use a relatively even range of tones.
4. The frontier between this virtual world and the actual world in which the viewer stands is
known as the picture plane. This is a virtual vertical surface that defines the nearest extent
of the picture space and includes all that the painting’s spectator is imagined as seeing.

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 Imagine a painting of a man seen near-to, who is pointing an outstretched arm and finger
towards you, so that the finger seems to come as near as it can without poking through the
surface. Now imagine that you reach out to touch that finger. The picture plane is like a
sheet of glass that runs through the point where the fingers would touch if they could. In
fact, of course, what you would actually touch is the literal surface of the canvas, and in
doing so you would – as it were – be breaking a spell cast by the painting’s illusionistic
properties. The point to remember is that while literal picture surface and picture plane
normally coincide, the one is real and tangible, the other virtual and visual.
5. Brushwork is the evidence of the means of application of paint that is left on the literal
surface of the painting. It is one of the factors that most clearly define the individual artist’s
style and technique. During the period we are considering, artists’ oil-painting brushes varied
greatly in texture, from very soft to bristly, and in size from a few hairs’ width to several
centimetres. Whereas artists working in classical styles tended deliberately to smooth
over the evidence of application of paint, typically the Impressionists applied their paint
with comparatively stiff square-ended brushes, leaving the separate coloured touches
often unblended on the surfaces of their pictures. One effect of this was to make it
harder for the spectator to ignore the coincidence of the literal surface with the picture
plane, so that however appealing the represented content of the picture might be, the
painting would always also be experienced as a decorated surface.
III. Tradition and Modernity
Now imagine our jurors reflecting upon these differences in 1884. Given the professional
standing of Bouguereau and the public success of his work, I think it likely that each significant
departure from the type of work that his ‘baignade’ represents would have been read as a
sign of incompetence. That’s to say, the jurors would probably have seen Cézanne’s picture not
as a successful attempt to paint the picture that actually emerged, but rather as a failed attempt
to paint a picture like Bouguereau’s – the failure being attributable to a sheer lack of
technical skill.
To say that the appearance of Cézanne’s picture was a consequence of incompetence –
that it was not what he meant to produce – was, in effect, to say that his work was meaningless.
In fact, if evidence is needed of Cézanne’s ability to produce faithful and delicate likenesses, it is
there in abundance. We also know that far from meaning to emulate Bouguereau’s work,
Cézanne hated and despised everything it stood for.
So what the Salon jurors no doubt took for the unintentional signs of involuntary
incompetence were actually the intentional consequences of the artist’s determination to do
things differently. He meant his painting to look as it did. To put the point another way, it was
in its very difference from the prevailing academic standard that the meaning of the painting was
to be found. And it was central to that ‘meaning’ that artistic quality was somehow at odds with,
or was inhibited by, the acquisition of academic technique and the exercise of craftsmanship as
conventionally understood.

The one thing that Cézanne’s contemporary defenders were sure of was that it was
produced by an unusual strength of feeling in the painter. This was the clear sign of the
artist’s authenticity.

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IV. The Modern Nude
A. What was at issue was the relationship between three crucial factors:
1. the imagined world represented by the work of art
2. the physical and technical character of the work – the paint on canvas of which it was
composed
3. the experience of the spectator
B. Modernists’ Objection to Traditional Art
The criticism the modernists levelled at such work as Bouguereau’s was that its
supposed emotional content was unoriginal and bogus. Its effects were achieved by
playing on the thoroughly conventional associations evoked by certain poses and
situations and types of likeness, so as to draw the spectator into a thoroughly familiar
range of sentiments.
C. Modernity and Originality
To support the idea of a modern art was to regard the work of art as something
made out of the materials of the present: drawing on the sensation of real rather than
literary or mythological scenes and figures, executed in an original style so as to engage
the spectator actively with its actual colours and forms, and stimulating to a fresh
emotional response rather than a reassuring sentimentality.
D. Baudelaire and Modernity
The idea of a specifically ‘modern beauty’ had been raised in a review of the Salon as
early as 1846. Its author was the poet and critic Charles Baudelaire (1821–67), who played
an early and dominant role in establishing the imagery and vocabulary of modernity in art
and literature. Baudelaire conceived of the artist as a kind of receptive surface, whose
consciousness registered the distinctive flavour of the present as he passed through the
typical locations of the modern city. In a crucial passage on ‘Modernity’, Baudelaire
proposed that art demands a kind of tension between its abiding traditional values and its
preoccupation with the fleeting aspects of the present. ‘By “modernity” I mean the
ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent, the half of art whose other half is the eternal
and the immutable.’ Reviewing the works then being exhibited in Paris, he diagnosed a
tendency among painters to ‘dress all their subjects in the garments of the past’, as though
by this means they could evade the contrasting demands of the present – or of ‘Realism’, to
use a term that was prevalent in the art and literary criticism of the 1850s and 1860s.
If we return to our comparison with Baudelaire’s strictures in mind we may get a better
understanding of what was at issue at the time in the contrast between two paintings such
as these. It was in part a matter of just how the balance between tradition and
modernity was to be struck. Of course, a nude woman is always by definition undressed,
and thus might be thought always potentially timeless, unless, that is, she is somehow set
within a recognisable context. In fact, the ‘proper’ context for the nude in academic
practice was an idealised classical world. To set an undressed figure in the present was
to imply some immorality – on the part of the pictured figure, or of the artist, or of
both. One such explicitly modern nude was exhibited in the Paris Salon in 1865 by the
French artist Edouard Manet, and it caused a considerable scandal (see Plate 1.3.16). By
combining a pose associated with representations of Venus with a setting that unmistakably
referred to the world of the contemporary prostitute, Manet brought the traditional and the
modern into a collision with which very few commentators at the time could cope.

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 E. Cezanne’s Modern Nude
It is significant, however, that Cezanne’s own painted nudes tend almost always to
avoid the kind of direct confrontation with the gaze of the viewer that is so dramatic in
Manet’s Olympia. They also tend to be arranged in landscape settings, and to be devoid
of the kind of cues that would pin them down to a given present. What makes
Cézanne’s bathers appear relatively ‘modern’ is the simple fact that they don’t appear
classical either in setting or in style. Remove from the nude figures the insulating illusion
of a golden age, allow their bodies to be possibly imperfect, and it is as though the whole
scenario is forcefully projected into the here and now. At the same time the inescapable fact
that this is an image constituted out of dabs of paint on canvas makes it very much harder for
the spectator to project himself in fantasy into a world established on the other side of the
picture plane, and thus to escape from the critical demands of the present.
F. In what sense does Cezanne resemble ‘a Greek of the classical period’?
Given that modernism is generally associated with a rejection of the classical
tradition, how is this claim for the relative ‘modernity’ of Cézanne’s work to be
reconciled with Rivière’s assessment, quoted above, that the painter resembles ‘a Greek
of the classical period’?
The answer lies in the nature of the resemblance Rivière had in mind. He was not
suggesting that Cézanne was painting in a classical style, which in the 1870s he
evidently was not; rather that his painting had ‘the indefinable attraction of biblical
and Greek antiquity’ and that his figures were ‘as simple and as noble’ as those of
classical sculpture (Rivière, 1877, in Harrison et al., p. 597). What he was trying to
convey, I think, was that rather than conforming to a certain style, Cézanne’s work
appeared like a point of origin for what might come after. For the spectator, the
measure of this ‘originality’ was the emotion the work gave rise to – an emotion
deriving ultimately from the strength and freshness of the artist’s own feelings before
nature.
V. Modern Artist
Baudelaire had made a related point about the ideal ‘painter of modern life’:
The child sees everything in a state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more
resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which a child absorbs form and
colour ... Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will – a childhood now
equipped for self-expression with manhood’s capacities and a power of analysis which enables
it to order the mass of raw material which it has involuntarily accumulated.
(Baudelaire, 1863, in Harrison et al., 1998, pp. 495–6)
This image of the modern artist as someone who preserves a childlike strength and
freshness of response was to persist in criticism and theory over the next hundred years – and
Cézanne was to retain a prominent place among those from whose work this image was
constructed. Its corollary was the idea of the hide-bound traditionalist, in thrall to the past and
restricted by convention and precedent, whose work might reassure but could never provoke
and challenge the viewer.
VI. The Artists’ Artist
It was a sign of that ascendancy that a public exhibition of Cézanne’s work was arranged in
1907, the year following his death. This was the exhibition that made such an impression on Picasso
and Matisse.
Among the artists who were inspired by Cezanne we can name:

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 A. Picasso
B. Matisse
C. Gustave Caillebotte
D. Degas
E. Pissarro
F. Renoir
G. Pierre Bonnard
H. Henry Moore
I. Jasper Johns
J. Rainer Maria Rilke
VII. Painting the Landscape
One contributory factor in Cézanne’s reputation as it developed at the end of the
nineteenth century was his apparent attachment to his native Provence. ‘When one is born
down there ... nothing else means a thing’, he wrote to a friend in 1896 (Letter of 23 July 1896
to Philippe Solari, in Smith, 1996, p. 20).
A. The Impressionism of the 1870s was largely an art of the city, its suburbs and its rural
surroundings, and those who remarked on the modernity of the Impressionists’ paintings
tended to attribute it as much to their subject-matter as to their technique.
B. But from the mid-1870s to the end of his life, much of Cézanne’s work was devoted to the
rural scenery of Provence, which, like his bathers and his still lifes, appeared largely
untouched by the social and technological processes of modernisation.
C. The Reason’s for Cezanne’s Fame
1. On the one hand his absence from the occasions of the Parisian art-world fed the
image of him as a reclusive genius, the strength of whose work derived from a kind of
authentic and primitive vigour.
2. On the other, the ‘timeless’ character of his subjects led other sympathetic critics to
discover the kind of ‘classical’ purity that Rivière had claimed for his paintings.
D. The Mont Sainte-Victoire Motif
There is one particular feature of the Provençal landscape that appears in over thirty of
Cézanne’s paintings. This is Mont Sainte-Victoire. The paintings in question are divided
into two groups.
1. The distinctive shape of the mountain appears in some twenty oil paintings from the
1880s, all based on viewpoints that could be reached by a long walk from the
painter’s childhood home.
2. It is also the dominant motif in eleven canvases and a number of watercolours from
1901 to 1906. These were painted in a studio that Cézanne occupied on a hillside
facing the mountain.
E. Point of Difference between Cezanne and Impressionists
At the time when Cézanne was exhibiting with the independent group in the 1870s, the
guiding principle of Impressionism was:
1. to achieve a kind of realism in the visual effects of nature and of modern life
2. to capture the fleeting appearance either of the landscape, or of urban or
suburban life under specific conditions of light and atmosphere
But while this principle conformed well to the sense of modernity that Baudelaire had
associated with ‘the ephemeral, the fugitive, the contingent’, it tended to be less
favourable to those ‘eternal and immutable’ values that furnished the other half of his

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 recipe for art. Cézanne was to remain committed to the aim of truth to the immediate
sensation of nature, but he is reported as having said near the end of his life, ‘What
I wanted was to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of
the museums’ (in Harrison and Wood, 2003, p. 42).
F. The French painter Nicolas Poussin was the major figure in the establishment of a classical
style of painting in the mid seventeenth century. He worked principally in Rome, using
studies of the actual buildings of Roman and Renaissance Italy and of the surrounding
countryside as material for lucid and ordered compositions. Typically peopled with figures
from the world of classical and biblical mythology, his landscapes furnished a powerful
visual imagery for the idea of a golden age. Plate 1.3.21 illustrates a work of the kind
Cézanne is likely to have had in mind.

Activity, p. 74
Bearing in mind the discussion of terms and techniques in Section 3.2, make a brief
note of what you see as the principal similarities and differences between Cézanne’s
landscape reproduced in Plate 1.3.20 and that of Poussin (Plate 1.3.21).
Discussion
The principal similarities I notice are all in the basic compositions of the two paintings.
Both have tall trees framing the space at the left, both have buildings catching the light
slightly further back on the same side, both represent extensive views over a large enclosed
area, and both have projecting mountains in the far distance.
As to differences, there are marked variations in the scenes depicted – for instance, the
absence of any human or animal life in Cézanne’s picture, whereas the goatherd and flock
provide a point of entry to Poussin’s painting – but the main contrasts I notice are in
technique, and particularly in the ways in which the two painters handle the relationship
between virtual picture plane and actual surface.
G. The Illusion of Reality
Looking at the printed reproduction of a landscape set on its white page it is easy to
forget that what the painter starts with is a flat textured surface of canvas – a surface
that has a clear physical edge. To paint a picture is to do something to that surface so that
it will appear other than flat – and so that it can then become a self-sufficient
imaginative world. Not only must the artist fill the rectangular shape with figures or objects
of one kind or another, but in order that those figures and objects can be seen as existing in
plausible relation to each other, he or she must produce the illusion of a coherent picture
space sufficient to contain them. And if the finished painting is to have the power to affect
and to absorb its spectator, as part of this process the artist must establish an imaginary
position from which the whole makes sense. Another way to put this is to say that what
the artist must do is not only to conceive the scene as something that an imagined
spectator is seeing, but also to conceive it as that spectator sees it – as if to accord the
spectator a certain identity and disposition.
H. Alienation Effect: The Difference between Cezanne and Classical Art
The picture plane, as I mentioned earlier, defines the nearest vertical point of the
represented space that the picture contains. Everything on the other side of it is part of the
picture’s represented content, everything on this side part of the world we inhabit. In
traditional classical paintings such as Poussin’s, that plane is made more or less
transparent. What I mean by this is that the artist customarily works to make

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 spectators forget that what is actually being looked at is a flat surface covered with
more or less expensive varieties of pigment. Thus the spectators may the more easily
become absorbed in the pictured scene, and in whatever incidents it may contain. In the case
of Cézanne’s picture, on the other hand, the paint never quite ceases to look like paint,
the canvas to appear as a canvas, however compelling the illusion of breadth and
distance may be, and however pungent the sense of spatial division created by such
incidents as the point at the left where a sharp yellow wall stands out against a deep
blue shadow. It is in part this strange tension between represented depth and literal
surface that makes Cézanne’s painting seem initially so perplexing.
The implication was that the difficult relationship between the virtual and the actual
might be what Cézanne’s painting was really about – that it might in some sense be its
‘content’ or philosophical meaning. This realization in turn both served to stimulate the
interest of critics and art historians in the wider development of modernist technique in
painting, and encouraged such younger painters as Picasso and Matisse to place an increased
stress on the relationship between virtual content and literal surface. It could even be said that
from this point on no painting could properly be conceived as modern unless it involved
some evident tension between the two.
I. Plate 1.3.22 illustrates a work from the second series of Cézanne’s views of Mont Sainte-
Victoire. It is dated to the years 1904–06. What makes this work so intense is the fact that
every brushstroke he applied had to satisfy two very different demands:
1. It had to be true to Cézanne’s sense of the relative values of light and colour as these
defined his intense sensation of the real landscape he was looking at; it had thus to play
its part in the composition of colours and tones by which the sense of substance and
distance and atmosphere would be reproduced in the eye of the spectator.
2. At the same time, however, each touch of colour had to be adjusted to the dynamic
pattern that developed on the literal flat surface of the canvas. It was only through the
vividness and autonomy of this artificial decorative thing – the painting in its aspect as an
independent, self-sufficient whole – that Cézanne could be assured of some adequate
match with the reality and harmony of the natural world as he perceived it.
VIII. “Such Pure Thing”
A. Cezanne and Women
One important consideration to bear in mind is that none of the figures in the painting
was posed from life. According to his dealer Vollard:
For his nude compositions, Cézanne used drawings from nature made previously at
the Atélier Suisse [see Plate 1.3.14], and, for the rest, he called upon his memories of
museums. His dream would have been to have models pose in the open air; but that was
unfeasible for many reasons, the most important being that women, even when clothed,
frightened him.
(Vollard, 1914, p. 96)
That Cézanne suffered from a fear of women, and in general of being touched, is a
well-established component in the mythology of his life. What is perhaps more important for our
purposes is that in the imaginary worlds he worked to establish for them, his figures appear
compellingly tactile and solid. If the spectator is to be involved with the represented world,
however, it will not be by means of an unreal continuity between that world and the actual one in
which the spectator stands – a continuity that might be suggested by some such device as an arch
outward glance directed through the picture plane by one figure or another. Rather, it is notable

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 that, as in the great majority of Cézanne’s paintings of bathers, the figures as a group
convey an air of completeness and self-sufficiency. The spectator’s imagination may be
exercised, but it is not pandered to. The very absence of sentimental appeal is a telling
feature both of the pictured women and of the painting as a whole.
Activity, p. 77
Read the following extract from Rilke’s letter. This is a difficult passage, partly because
Rilke is feeling his way to an understanding as he writes. Approach your reading as a kind of
exercise in comprehension, and then test your understanding of its main points against the
suggestions I offer in the discussion that follows.
Without looking at a particular one, standing in the middle between the two rooms, one feels
their presence drawing together into a colossal reality. As if these colours could heal one of indecision
once and for all. The good conscience of these reds, these blues, their simple truthfulness, it educates
you; and if you stand beneath them as acceptingly as possible, it’s as if they were doing something for
you. You also notice, a little more clearly each time, how necessary it was to go beyond love, too; it’s
natural after all to love each of these things as one makes it; but if one shows this, one makes it less
well; one judges it instead of saying it. One ceases to be impartial; and the very best – love – stays
outside the work, does not enter it, is left aside, untranslated: that’s how the painting of sentiments came
about [Rilke means painting with merely sentimental appeal] ... It may be that this emptying out of love
in anonymous work, which produces such pure things, was never achieved as completely as in the work
of this old man ... With this disposition, which was completely developed now, thanks to his strangeness
and insularity, he turned to nature and knew how to swallow back his love for every apple and put it to
rest in the painted apple forever. Can you imagine what that is like, and what it is like to experience this
through him?
(Letter of 13 October 1907, in Rilke, 1998 [1944], pp. 50–1)
Discussion
The key point that I think Rilke is trying to make is this: that it is not through the mere
sentimental ‘showing’ of one’s emotions that the strong sensation of the world – the ‘love for every
apple’ – becomes invested in the finished painting; rather, it is through the impartial discipline of
artistic work. When the sensation is thus ‘put to rest’ in the work, it becomes possible for it to be
recovered and experienced by the spectator who approaches the painting ‘as acceptingly as
possible’ (and who thus has ‘the right eyes’).
IX. A Still Life and Its Value
The Still Life, Curtain, Jug and Compotier reproduced in Plate 1.3.1 would certainly have
been made in the presence of the assembled motif.
A. The types of element from which it is composed are familiar from a number of others of
Cézanne’s pictures:
1. the ordinary kitchen table with a single drawer,
2. the patterned dark blue cloth,
3. the glazed stoneware jug,
4. the plain rustic fruit dish and white cloth,
5. and, of course, the lemons, oranges, apples and pears that provide such intense
concentrations of colour across the horizontal expanse of the canvas.
B. Description
In fact, the intensity of Cézanne’s attention can be deduced from certain slight but
significant variations in the consistency of his viewpoint. Note how the profile of the large apple
just in front of the fruit dish has grown outward at the upper right, presumably as the artist leaned

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 forward as though to see round it, anxious to capture the full richness of its volume. Similarly,
the pyramid of apples and oranges in the fruit dish at the right appears to rise from its logical
horizontal position and to advance towards the picture plane, invested with strange independence
and vitality by the singular attention Cézanne must have devoted to it in the process of its
depiction. Notice also how assiduous he has been in finding the minutest variations of texture
and tone in his account of the wall behind the table, lest it be reduced to a simple flat background
plane.
C. Still Life as a Genre
Still life emerged as a fully independent type of subject for painting around 1600 and
became prominent during the ensuing century, especially among painters in the Protestant
Low Countries. It was common for still-life pictures to be designed as allegories:
collections of objects and motifs that could all be read symbolically. The commonest
allegories were those that encouraged philosophical reflection on human mortality and
on the transience of sensory pleasures and material possessions. A painting of this type is
referred to as a ‘Vanitas’, after a verse from the biblical book of Ecclesiastes: ‘Vanity of
vanities, all is vanity saith the preacher’ (Eccles. 1:2). The most easily interpreted Vanitas
paintings are those featuring objects that have clear associations with the passage of time
and with death. (Such works are often referred to by the Latin tag memento mori,
‘remember that you must die’.) The work by Harmen Steenwyck reproduced in Plate
1.3.25 includes a skull, an empty shell, a watch, an extinguished and smoking taper and
a lute placed face down (possibly implying the silencing of music). The trumpet may
refer to the worthlessness of worldly fame, the Japanese sword to military power, and
the books to another passage from Ecclesiastes: ‘Of making many books there is no
end, and much learning is a weariness of the flesh.’
Other still lifes from the same period appear to record exotic possessions and to
celebrate the delights of the senses. For example, in the small work by Jacob van
Hulsdonck (Plate 1.3.26) an appetizing collection of fruit is arranged in and around a
Chinese porcelain bowl from the reign of Wan Li (1573–1619) – a recently imported
item to which a very special value would have been accorded. (It was to be another
century and a half before porcelain was made in Europe that approached anything like this
degree of refinement.) If this second still life seems to suggest a more hedonistic and less
philosophical way of life than the first, we should bear in mind – as its contemporary
viewers would no doubt have done – that porcelain is fragile, that fruit decays and that
orange blossoms wither.
D. Appeals of Classical Still Life Paintings
1. On the one hand, they mount a determined appeal to the senses – an appeal sustained
by conspicuous displays of artistic virtuosity in the representation of complex three-
dimensional forms, of subtle surface textures, and of demanding effects of transparency
and reflection.
2. On the other hand, they may suggest religious and philosophical reflection on the
brevity of life and on the emptiness of worldly achievements and material
possessions. The appeal is generally no less seductive where the objects depicted are
suggestive of mortality.
3. If there are some still-life paintings that offer their spectators images of themselves as
consumers of opulent banquets, these are balanced by others that encourage us to admit
the simpler priorities of the austere kitchen.

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 If, as I believe, paintings have the potential to offer us different kinds of
imaginative experience and identification, then we might say that what largely
characterises the genre of still life is its playing on differences of way of life –
differences, that’s to say, in the way one’s life may be lived.
E. The Unique Appeal of Cezanne’s Still Lifes
With this view in mind I return to Plate 1.3.1, Cézanne’s Still Life, Curtain, Jug and
Compotier. I don’t mean to suggest that the elements represented should be read as symbols
in quite the way that a skull may signify death. Nor does the picture appear to stage a way of
life other than the one from which the painting itself must have emerged. Rather, the very
lack of potential for symbolic reading requires us to concentrate the more closely on the
distinctive qualities of the composition and technique. However intense this concentration,
I don’t believe that it is likely to yield the kind of moralistic reading that a painting such as
Steenwyck’s enables. But my own feeling is that the more I focus on the way the individual
fruits are represented in Cézanne’s painting, and on the ways in which they are related one to
another, the more it seems that individuality and relationship are here being given
substance as values in themselves – or at least as values in some larger sense than can be
restricted to a world of apples and pears and lemons.
The world I’m led to imagine is one in which various individuals might be gathered
together in a complex harmony without compromising their different values. What I
am saying, I think, is that the painting feels like a kind of model or metaphor for the
way of life such a social world might permit. The art historian Paul Smith has gone further
and suggested that ‘seeing and interpreting Cézanne involves a challenge to our politics’
(Smith, 1996, p. 75).
X. Scholars and Owners
A. In France from the 1860s to the 1880s, substantial disagreements occurred between different
factions concerning the virtues of the work of Manet and the Impressionists, and particularly
of the work of Cézanne. Where such prolonged and violent controversies are provoked, there
is always likely to be more at stake than simple differences of taste. At moments such as
these, disagreements on artistic matters tend actually to betray much wider divisions between
the value systems that define the social order. This point had been forcefully made by the
critic Jules-Antoine Castagnary, writing a review of the Salon exhibition of 1863:
The purpose of painting is to express, according to the means at its disposal,
the society that produces it ... Painting is not an abstract concept, raised above
history, alien to human vicissitudes, to the revolutions in morals and notions; it is
part of social consciousness, a fragment of the mirror in which each generation in its
turn contemplates itself, and as such, it must follow society step by step and describe
its incessant transformations.
(Castagnary, 1863, in Harrison et al., 1998, p. 411)
In this case, I suggest, the transformations that really mattered were not those associated
with conflicts between the aristocracy – or what remained of it in France after the major
revolution in 1789 – and the middle class, or even between middle class or bourgeoisie and
working class. Following further revolutions in 1830 and 1848, the bourgeoisie was without
question the dominant class in France and the one that largely shaped its literary and artistic
culture. What was not quite so clear was how membership of the bourgeoisie was to be
defined, or the precise values that it represented. Was it one’s taste and culture that served

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 to establish class status, or was one’s property and financial standing the deciding
factor?
B. As early as 1846 Baudelaire had prefaced his review of that year’s Salon with an ironic
dedication – ‘To the Bourgeoisie’ – and had made clear the possible grounds for a conflict
of values within the class in question – a conflict that he symbolised in terms of the different
powers and interests of ‘scholars’ and ‘owners’.
You are the majority – in number and intelligence; therefore you are the force
– which is justice.
Some are scholars, others are owners; a glorious day will come when the
scholars shall be owners and the owners scholars. Then your power will be complete,
and no one will protest against it. Until that supreme harmony is achieved, it is just
that those who are but owners should aspire to become scholars; for knowledge is no
less of an enjoyment than ownership...
But the monopolists have decided to keep the forbidden fruit of knowledge from
you, because knowledge is their counter and their shop, and they are infinitely jealous
of it.
(Baudelaire, 1846, in Harrison et al., 1998, p. 301)
What Baudelaire was pointing to was a conflict between those whose class-status
was secured by heredity, by education and by culture (the ‘scholars’ who claimed a
monopoly on knowledge), and those who had acquired status through industry and the
acquisition of property (the ‘owners’). It was the latter that he pretended particularly to
address, warning them, in effect, that those who saw themselves as the already cultured were not
about to hand over their privileges. It was from its rooting in this larger social context that
modernist art’s characteristic conflict of values drew its animating tension: was the work of art
something to be esteemed for its own sake – for its ‘aesthetic quality’; or were such things
as paintings and sculptures properly regarded as specialised kinds of commodities, the
value of which could always be tested in the market place? … Cézanne maintained a kind of
dissident ‘scholarly’ ambition against the admonitions of his ‘owner’ father, while continuing to
challenge accepted notions of what a ‘cultured’ and professionally produced picture should look
like. It was this apparent compulsion to drift free from the prevailing identifications of the
dominant class that largely accounted for the emergence of an ‘avant-garde’ in the world of
art – a community of artists whose primary identification was with the idea of art itself, as
the point of most certain critical moment in a modernizing world.
C. Cezanne and the Avant-garde
That Cézanne’s work showed him to be the most advanced of the avant-garde was a
view widely held during the later nineteenth century both by his supporters and by his – and
the avant-garde’s – detractors. The quality of extreme impartiality that Rilke had noted in
his work – the purging of sentiment and the transferring of worldly emotions and
attachments to the forms of his pictures – was seen as demonstrating the priority of
aesthetic values over the material and the commercial. During the early twentieth century,
as avant-garde movements came to occupy an increasingly central role in the development
and business of the art-world, Cézanne’s reputation grew accordingly. He was to remain for a
considerable time both the artists’ artist par excellence and – until finally supplanted by
Picasso – the favoured Aunt Sally of modern art’s professional opponents.

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