Cezanne & Pissarro in Pontoise

This morning I spent a fascinating hour or two contemplating images of paintings by Cezanne and Pissarro side by side, as they were when the two artists created them together in a Paris suburb beginning in the early 1860s.

Such different approaches to the same scene ... Cezanne left, Pissarro right.

Perhaps by necessity, they were rebels, bohemians, outsiders both, intent on shattering prevailing ideas about painting and about beauty. Newly arrived in Paris at the age of 22, Cezanne played the provocateur, flaunting his outsider, country-bumpkin status like a hipster in flannel and a lumberjack beard (or, as an astute New York Times reviewer of the show lovingly described him, "a furious misfit with the face of a hobbit, the mind of a scholar, and the mouth of a (dockworker).". He'd been packed off to Paris to study law, but instead he enrolled in painting classes at a walk-in art school.

Cezanne, left, Pissarro right, same delft vase.

Jacob Abraham Camille Pissarro was a Dutch citizen, a Jew born in the West Indies, who grew up learning French in an all-black school; he was shunned by the local rabbi because his father'd come to the island to deal with the estate of a deceased uncle and ended up staying and marrying the man's creole widow (his niece by marriage). Pissarro was one of the few artists or students in Paris who didn't either avoid, disparage, or make fun of Cezanne, so friends and allies they became.

Cezanne (l.), Pissarro (r.)

Pissarro was nine years older than Cezanne, a restless innovator with a single-minded drive to redefine painting that would eventually allow scholars to recognize him as the "pivotal" figure in avant-garde painting of the time. He sought out radical teachers like Courbet, settling eventually on Corot, but soon outgrew the soft focus approach with work that had the plein-air plainness of Daubigney - and "the future geometry of Mondrian" (Cotter).

Cezanne (l.), Pissarro (r.)

Pissarro afterward anchored and unified the young Impressionists, including Monet, Manet, Renoir, and Degas, and then pushed into the new territory of Post Impressionism, a father figure to Seurat, Cezanne, van Gogh, and Gaugin. Cezanne's work fits into the Modernist narrative as a turning away from Impressionism, but Cezanne was working it out with Pissarro as early as 1866 (the first Impressionist exhibition wasn't until 1874).

Again, same houses.

In Pontoise, the Paris suburb where Pissarro lived, the two painters often painting the same motif, sometimes in fundamentally different ways, a bit like Picasso and Braque, who together invented Cubism, picking up where the earlier odd couple left off ("My one and only master," Picasso called him, "Cezanne was like the father of us all").

Although the exhibition of 2006 has come been and gone, the Museum of Modern Art keeps a wonderful interactive catalogue parked on their website that's well worth poking around in. It's even got details of the brushwork of each painting. The article I cited above by Holland Cotter's great too.

Painting & Place (an American tradition)

Marsden Hartley, Snow, 1908

"Place is not a static mental or perceptual construct converted to paint and canvas. Place is the vehicle by which the artist moves out from his own creative center to discern the universal truths of man and his environment." - Marsden Hartley scholar Gail R. Scott

George Inness, c. 1885

Albert Pinkham Ryder, Moonlit Cove, c. 1880s (Armory Show 1913)

Walt Kuhn, Morning in Nova Scotia, 1912 (Armory Show, 1913)

Arthur Dove, Sunrise III, 1937

Marsden Hartley, from the Dogtown series, 1937

Richard Diebenkorn, Berkeley #59, 1955

John Laurent, Three Rocks, 1960s

Willem de Kooning, Rosy-Fingered Dawn at Louse Point, 1963

Eric Aho, Beach, c. 2012

John O'Reilly, Dogtown - Hartley series, 2008

Stuart Shils, Rain Passed, the Bay with a Touch of Sun, 2007

Monumental Simplicity: Nicolas de Stael

At first glance, I saw only a stony wall of dull, fragmented paint.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue, 1951-1952 (detail)

But look again, something said.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue, 1951-1952 (approx. 31"x39")

Then I saw the bright yellow band of color spanning the center, like light emanating through the "chinks" in the "wall" from some concealed paradise beyond. The epiphany of the yellow paint revealed the warm orange I could now see soaking the entire work, with greatest concentration on the top half, where it's both an underlayer and a glaze atop the neutral blue-gray marks.

Nicolas de Stael, Fugue  (detail)

A stabilizing band of joined gray-blue "bricks" at the bottom of the painting parallels the central yellow band; it makes a horizontal "L" shape that mirrors another horizontal "L" at the top (orange-gray vs. blue-gray again), and these two book-ending "L's" snugly contain the whole.

de Stael's Fugue with notations

The central yellow band is counterpointed by three clusters of whitish shapes (mostly, imperfect squares) ranged in pyramid fashion around the center; other shapes (at this point they're more like musical notes than anything else) fill out the composition, alternating between harmonious variety and repetition of color, size and shape. The roughly handled, layered impasto, with its insistence on the materiality of the paint itself, creates of the painting an emphatically "made thing" that nonetheless looks raw and utterly "natural" - that is, without a whiff of rational calculation. It's an intricate dance between order and disorder, harmonized (like any good painting) by subtle choices of design, color, value, and line.

Given a chance, this "wall" of paint becomes as complex, unexpected, and lively as jazz. Now the title, "Fugue," a kind of musical composition in which a theme is taken up and counterpointed by two or more voices in growing complexity, seems fitting. 

Nicolas de Stael, Rue de Gauguet, approx. 78x94 inches.
One of de Stael's largest paintings, this work is currently on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

Russian-born Nicolas de Stael (1914-1955) is a lesser-known artist today because he pioneered a radical, expressive, European form of abstraction in the worst possible place at the worst possible time: Paris in the 1940s and '50s, when the titanic achievements of Pollock, Rothko, Kline, de Kooning, Mitchell and their peers in the same realm ostensibly established the ascendency of New York/America over Paris/Europe as the epicenter of avant-garde art. 

Red on Red: de Stael, installation view.

De Stael was born into Russian aristocracy just as the revolution overthrew the country; he was orphaned in exile and spent much of his adult life in serious poverty before collectors began paying big money for his art. It wasn't lack of financial success but something deeper that led him to abandon his growing family, isolate himself in a spot on the Mediterranean French coast with a view onto a military compound, and hurl himself to his death on the rocks at the age of 41.

The abstractions like "Fugue" above originate in paintings by the earlier Modern geometric abstractionists like Braque, Mondrian and others. 

Piet Mondrian, Composition with Red, Yellow, and Blue, 1935

Mondrian was working out a new idealism in painting, where beauty in art could be reduced (abstracted) to its most essential and stable elements (here, the primary colors, white, black, and horizontal and vertical lines)  - an essentially spiritual quest not unlike Pythagoras's or Plato's to uncover ideal mathematical forms  - the basic "Truths" behind the shifting, multifarious world of appearances. 

Much more of a colorist (and more an existentialist than an idealist) de Stael also seeks and finds lofty harmonies and truths, but he includes the world - which for him also means the hand of the artist. He too seeks philosophical bedrock but without denying the sloppiness and even the ugliness of reality as it confronts us.

Nicolas de Stael, Le Parc de Sceaux, 1952, approx. 63x44 inches.

The color harmonies in "Fugue" and "Le Parc de Sceaux" above seem to pay homage to Corot's lyrical late palette; de Stael was steeped in classical and contemporary painting: Ucello, Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van der Meer, de Koninck; and only then Matisse, Cezanne, Soutaine, Picasso, Leger, and above all Braque. “I am now getting to know, seeing and copying, Titian, El Greco, the beautiful Primitives, the last of Bellinis, Mantegna, Antonella da Messina, all of them," he wrote to a friend, "and wish for only one thing: to be able to study them for as long as possible.” 

Nicolas de Stael, Bouttailes (Bottles)

His work, though at first glance chaotic, is a complete absorption and synthesis of the history of painting and always balances original, spontaneous expression with the classical principles of harmony, balance, and restraint; it's always carefully patterned in line and color, harmonious and balanced, and it's made strange to us by its unusual unification of extremes of rough hand-hewnness and refinement - just like the man and his life.

Nicolas de Stael, Ciel (Sky)

His later work saw a return to figuration, and it's credited with advancing a European style of abstract expressionism called "Abstraction Lyrique," or Lyrical Abstraction for its sensuous, poetic interpretations of subject matter taken from the natural world as well as its overt painterly beauty.

Nicolas de Stael, Marine (coastal scene). That midnight blue of the sky!

These works take painting down to its primal elements. De Stael shows us painting as a tool for perceiving the essential reality of things. He strips painting to its most basic building blocks - handmade, expressive line and paint and color - without ever losing touch with its classical principles. 

A landscape by de Stael - lyrical and poetic.

De Stael dug deeply into a series of dozens of works capturing his experience of the raw, elemental nature of colorful bodies clashing against bodies, digging into the earth and each other that is soccer (footbal in France). 

Nicolas de Stael - Le Parc de Prince, 1952

Of these paintings, he wrote to a friend excitedly, "Between sky and earth, on grass that is either red or blue, there whirls a ton of muscle in complete disregard for self with, against all sensibilities, a great sense of presence. What joy! What joy!"

Nicolas de Stael, c. 1953

He kind of approached Modernism like a Rodin: monumental works visibly hewn from the raw material of perceptual reality, the final "meaning" of which is their very testimony to the human effort to use what blunt instruments we have been given to wrestle unprecedented beauty and meaning from the complexity of existence.

In color sense and approach, de Stael puts one in mind (and may help some make sense of) the kind of abstract/observational work one encounters in contemporary perceptual painters such as Ken Kewley.

Ken Kewley, Things Behind the Pines

Thanks, MFA, for getting de Stael back into the conversation.

Cezanne's Magnificent Bathers, Part 1

Cezanne, The Bathers (1898-1906)

During the last 20 years of his his solitary life, isolated and immersed in his work, Paul Cezanne reinvented painting as a crucible in which to experiment with new combinations of sensation and representation.

In his many paintings of "bathers" - mostly nude women and men lounging beside alluvial scenery -  Cezanne achieves a mature synthesis of psychology, private symbolism, tradition, spontaneity, and joyous color and light. A masterpiece of early modernism, The Bathers, also known as "The Large Bathers" because of its size, from 1906. is currently in Boston, on loan from Philadelphia and on display at the MFA. The museum is pairing this painting, on which Cezanne worked during the last six years of his life, with another large-scale important work of post-Impressionism, Gaugin's epic Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? 

Gaugin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? (1891)

It's hard not to see each of the paintings as culminations of these great artists' careers: last testaments to the world on a monumental scale. To see them both on one wall is a once-in-a-lifetime treat (and then, of course, turn your head and to the left and you're viewing gorgeous Monets, to the right it's masterworks by Van Gogh - not bad!). 

Cezanne saw Impressionism as liberating but too superficial. He had emerged from the introspective personal mythology of his early work ready to embrace Impressionism's light and color, but he wanted to make out of it something more solid, more "permanent," he said. 

Melding the movement's freedom from the Academic rules of painting with the firm construction and solidity of the more enduring art "of the museums" committed him to objects and vision. The irony is, that despite believing he was an ultra-honest realist in the service of Truth, the work he created, with its deliberately interpenetrating surfaces, objects, spaces, and paint, set the stage for abstraction and modern art; as blogger John Haber has succinctly observed, without Cezanne, "the art of the next century (the 20th) becomes incomprehensible."

To see what he means, one has only to turn to Picasso's Les Damoiselles D'Avignon, painted in 1907. 

Picasso, Les Damoiselles d'Avignon, 1907

This painting changed art forever. It was here, trading in nymphs for prostitutes, Renaissance perspective for shattered space, the Greek ideal for a jarring, brutal quasi-primitivism, that Picasso outstripped the last remaining vestiges of traditional European representation and reinvented art's role as a daring reflection of our uncertain times. Inadvertently setting the stage for Cubism and all that it would mean to modern art, Picasso's work was conceived as an acerbic response to Matisse's La Joie [bonheur] de Vivre, completed in 1906 (note the two female figures with identical poses, arms folded behind their heads). 

Matisse, La Bonheur de Vivre, 1905-06

The idealized utopianism of Matisse's conception ("natural" men and women depicted with a childlike exuberance freely loving, dancing, and existing in a beautiful, bright simplicity) was in turn a direct answer to the Bathers of Cezanne.

And that's all we have time for today..... the art-historical-high-fallutin' artspeak of this post has worn me out already, so a fuller treatment of Cezanne's masterpiece will have to wait until next time.