A few years ago, reviewing a show in London of Cézanne’s paintings of cardplayers, I began by saying, “Cézanne, whose work was the touchstone for critical thinking and writing on art for more than a century, cannot be written about any more.” And went on: “After a few minutes in the exhibition at the Courtauld, surrounded by Card Players and Smokers, one understands why. The mixture of seriousness and sensuousness in the paintings—I am tempted to say, in the best of them, of lugubriousness and euphoria—is remote from the temper of our times. And the quality of grim, eager pursuit of perfection within a deliberately narrow range— ‘the difficult thing is to prove what one believes,’ Cézanne wrote to one correspondent, ‘so I am continuing my researches’—is likewise deeply foreign. It has a nineteenth-century flavor to it.”
The temper and pace of Cézanne’s art are unthinkable, in other words, apart from the grave, dogged optimism of a long-vanished moment. But that optimism was always perceived in his case to have taken a strange, maybe self-defeating, form. “He dares,” wrote a critic in 1895, at the time of Cézanne’s first one-man show (the artist was in his mid-fifties, and had been painting for three decades) “to be harsh and as it were savage, letting himself be dragged to the limit, careless of everything, carried forward by the impulse that alone drives innovators, the wish to create a few new signs.” Newness and savagery went together. Maybe perfectionism and loss of bearings.
Reading the 1895 critic, I think of the Getty Museum’s Still Life with Apples. “Savage” the picture is not. “Dragged to the limit” seems overpitched. But “constrained” or “uncanny” or “in a state of high tension”—keeping some kind of peculiar energy just under control—words like these do seem justified, or at least understandable. I look at the sugar bowl perched on its carpet, or the apples rolling off their plate, or the wall carved out of blocks of ice, and I know I am somewhere beautiful but dangerous. The most probable date for Still Life is the early 1890s, perhaps 1893 or ’94. We might recall that a few years before, Camille Pissarro, writing to his son in December 1890, had reported the painter Guillaumin as saying “that Cézanne was in a madhouse…everyone then!…it’s dreadful!” (The “tous donc!” had in mind van Gogh, whose suicide had taken place the previous July, and the mental collapse of Vincent’s brother Theo.) The story turned out not to be true, but Pissarro and Guillaumin—both of whom had painted alongside Cézanne, admired him deeply, regularly shaken their heads at his vulnerability and intransigence—found it plausible.
I have been mildly surprised since the review of the Card Players to find that its opening sentence, the idea that Cézanne cannot be written about any more, has gone on to be my most-cited remark. And among my most unpopular. Obviously I did not mean by the aphorism that writing about Cézanne would now, or even should now, literally come to a halt. There will doubtless be writing on Cézanne in the future. But the question for such a writing (this is what I wanted to suggest) was how it now stood in relation to a previous century in which the very nature of modern art, and the nature of writing about art, ancient and modern, had seemed to turn on the Cézanne problem.
“Quel état faites-vous de Cézanne?”: that had been one of five questions put by Charles Morice in 1905 in his Enquête sur les Tendances Actuelles des Arts Plastiques. It was an account—a reckoning—that for a hundred years went on being refashioned. And I think we could say that even the form of Morice’s half-ironic interrogative was meant to mirror Cézanne’s: that one of the things Cézanne stood for from the early 1890s till, say, 1977 (the date of a great valedictory Cézanne show at MoMA, which sticks in my mind as the end of an epoch) was precisely the idea of art, and therefore of criticism, as questioning, investigation, “proving the difficult thing.” One respondent to the 1905 questionnaire said of Cézanne that “he has taken, in the face of nature, the attitude of a question mark.” This is clever and generous, and I think sums up one whole aspect of modern culture—or of French painting’s special place within it. The image connects to a judgment which Kurt Badt, in a book on Cézanne from the 1950s, attributes to Nietzsche: that painting “emerges as the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism.” The phrase is put in quotation marks by Badt, though no source is given; and Badt seems to concede (his wording is not clear) that Nietzsche’s verdict was originally meant as a characterization of art in general at the end of the nineteenth century, not of painting in particular. But apocryphal or not, the phrase points directly to the background assumption that made a kind of writing on Cézanne possible for a century, and that now, because the assumption is a thing of the past, puts writing on Cézanne in a strange, maybe fruitful, limbo.
We are no longer part of a world, that is, in which György Lukács could casually remark that “Simmel was the Monet of philosophy; up to now there has been no Cézanne to succeed him.” (No prizes for guessing Lukács’s candidate.) Or a world where Ernst Bloch, in his Geist der Utopie from 1916, could let slip, as the first Battle of the Somme was in full swing, that Cézanne’s apples were “no longer fruit, nor fruit made over into paint; instead all imaginable life is in them, and if they were to fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.”
This world of writing—this world of belief—is remote from us. And it is not simply a matter of that world’s having been, from our perspective, too full of an overweening faith in Art, with high Hegelian rhetoric to match. For Cézanne could be admired just as much for his alleged matter-of-factness. Rainer Maria Rilke’s letters on Cézanne, to the extent that I can glimpse their tone in German, seem largely free from Bloch-type exaltation. Cézanne is exemplary for Rilke above all in his restraint: his concentration, his empirical temper, his attention to the task. “La nature, j’ai voulu la copier, je n’arrivais pas.” In the English-language literature, the two great texts on Cézanne seem to me Roger Fry’s and Meyer Schapiro’s. (The latter has never entirely entered the canon of art history because, as I see it, the discipline remains uneasy with a book aimed first, in New York in 1952, at a broad American reading public. A volume in the Abrams “Library of Great Painters” cannot quite belong on the shelf with Spätrömische Kunstindustrie. And even Roger Fry’s book, with its whimsical Bloomsbury cover and its origins in a catalogue essay for the Pellerin collection, floats somewhere between art world and academy. Art writing and art history, we could say, are always two separate entities—sometimes touching, mostly not quite.) Both texts, Fry’s and Schapiro’s, are triumphs of plain style. Ernst Bloch is far away. But theirs is a plainness put firmly under the sign of Nietzsche’s dictum. Painting was, Fry and Schapiro would have agreed, “the last metaphysical activity within European nihilism,” the last practice convinced of its eventual difficult access to Truth; and Cézanne’s hostility to art with big ideas—his distaste for the Symbolists, his impatience with some of his admirers’ philosophizing, his fierce, anxious trust in what painting alone could tell him—was his (entirely nineteenth-century) contribution to the activity. In calling Pissarro “humble and colossal,” Cézanne described himself, and writing about his art has somehow to model or emulate that balance of qualities.
This is what I had in mind with my (admittedly too cheery) “Cézanne cannot be written about any more.” The whole intricate structure of assumption that went with writing on Cézanne for a century, and which in some sense tried to ingest and keep alive the artist’s own fragile metaphysic, is no longer available to us. Some will consider this a pity, some a relief. (Who in their right minds can now read Ernst Bloch without a shudder?) But whatever our judgment on the line of writing’s ending, the end is surely a fact. And therefore certain questions present themselves, if writing about Cézanne—which for me is still writing about art “in its highest vocation”—is not simply to reproduce the dead tropes and topoi of what was once a living language-game.
What would it be like (here is the question) not to have a “view” of Cézanne? Not to have a sense of his meaning for us, his significance—not to have his art “fit” anywhere, least of all in a history of modern art? One of the great moments in the Cézanne century, I go on thinking, was May–June 1951, when Partisan Review carried the first version of an essay on the artist by the critic Clement Greenberg. (The closeness in time and place to Schapiro’s Abrams volume is part of the story, part of a battle of “reckonings” and lineages for the artist, in which always the wider nature of modern culture was in question.) Green-berg’s title is touching: “Cézanne and the Unity of Modern Art.” And of course the temptation, now the last five words of the title have such a period flavor, is to write a Cézanne premised on—organized around—a systematic reversal of all Greenberg’s terms. There was no such unity as “modern art,” and insofar as there was a set of art practices roughly answering to the name, their common denominator was the pursuit of disunity; and the most reckless pursuer—the madhouse always close—was Cézanne. But this too, I’m convinced, is too much of a “view” of Cézanne, too much of a totalization. I want, rather, a writing (which now may really be possible, in the ruins of a great coercive discourse) that actually lingers for a moment in the state induced, time and again, by a new Cézanne, or an old one encountered after long enough away: the feeling of everything else in the world, especially the world of art, being so comprehensible by comparison; the feeling of the world “occurring” in this particular pattern of line and color, and pushing both to behaviors that are more like conjuration than composition, more like…
More like what? I’ve found that the kind of writing that prevents me giving an answer the longest (which is what I want) is a diary of looking at a single work. A few years ago I sat in front of the Getty Still Life daily for a couple of months, notebook on knee. The jottings I made then—those worth preserving—had the feeling, I remember, of coming on me unbidden, involuntarily. They didn’t add up. When, after a few weeks, I began to be aware that I’d decided, without wanting to, what the “issues” were in Still Life, and wasn’t any longer being trapped or intercepted by the insignificant—here a flower on a sugar bowl, there a label on a bottle of rum—I knew it was time to stop. I am an admirer of Valéry’s definition of the work of art as that object whose very character is that it goes on calling for, and rewarding, repeated viewing. But there is a difference between a viewing and a “view.” When all you are doing in front of a painting is confirming your view of it, it’s time to take a rest.
Lately I have gone back to the Getty notes and turned them into a chapter in a book. I’ve preserved the diary form, at least partly; but as I looked at the entries in retrospect, it soon came clear that my “simple narrative of looking” had been a contrivance. A narrative always knows where it is going. Almost from the start, the big Cézanne “issues” lay in wait. So be it. The issues are real. But if a narrative can come across them haltingly, elliptically, from an unexpected direction—if it can “tarry with the negative” for as long as possible—it will have served its turn. I found myself trapped by the flowers on the sugar bowl. I followed the curves of the straw holder on the rum bottle for minutes—hours—on end. Even now I don’t know why.
And a notebook entry, by the way, is not necessarily—however immediate, however seemingly spontaneous—an exercise in Cézanne-type plainness. Cézanne isn’t “plain,” or isn’t only plain. He’s plain and portentous. Roger Fry’s affectless anti-metaphorical drawl is wonderful for him, but it will never quite displace Bloch’s sense that if his apples “were to fall, a universal conflagration would ensue.” Plain style, unsurpassable as Fry’s and Schapiro’s and Greenberg’s achievements with it may have been (Schapiro in 1952 was affected by the example of Greenberg’s journalism in The Nation), is not enough. Plain style—Fry is the central example—was ultimately the voice of a modernist loftiness, a modernist closure against “personality.” A narrative of looking may even offer me a way out of, a weapon against, just that. A Cézanne diary as arrogant and bewildered, as empirical and heretical, as its object: now that would be something.
T. J. Clark is living in the Norfolk countryside, writing the books he’d planned to write for too long.
