25609762

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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



Figure 2a

PAUL CtZANNE

Puget's Atlas

Standing Male

Bathers; P.L

(recto) of

Sketchbook ii

Philadelphia,


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



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



Figure 3 (left)

PAUL CEZANNE

Antique Aphrodite and Eros;

p. xxxvii (verso) of Sketchbook II

Philadelphia,


Figure 4 (right)

PAUL CEZANNE

Standing Male

Bather; Dog; p. xxxviii (recto) of

Sketchbook n

Philadelphia,


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



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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