7 Cezanne, Farm in Normandy, 1885/6
Of the painters in this introduction to modernism, Cezanne is the one who least enjoyed Paris, preferring his native South, Aix-en-Provence, near Marseilles, & who was least successful in his lifetime, or ahead of his time: Cezanne is usually associated with post-impressionism, was often noted as a forerunner or inspiration by 20th c. painters who claimed expressionism or abstraction as a cause. His troubled friendship with the impressionist painters depends on a shared interest in nature as unceasingly beautiful because it is so full of variation, always hinting at a unity of being that seems beyond our grasp, which the artist tries to recapture by yoking his craft to his sensitivity, & to which he wants to lead his audience as a first step in liberating mankind from the delusions of the past—those visions which owed their charm to anything but to nature.
Is nature accessible on a farm? In the background we see the farmhouse, with the rigorous, but simple geometry of its forms, straight lines, right angles; the colors make it seem built in sunlight… One imagines the house, since it is hardly visible: It is obscured by the orchard, or at any rate trees planted for a purpose, by people who make their living by such activities. The trees bend as they do, we suppose, to reach the light; yet the canopies all become one mass of leaves with hardly a branch here or there. The green grass is comparably easy to see & make sense of, the space of the garden, the shadows cast by the sun. The canopy is otherwise, there is nothing to distinguish from anything else, it is hard to say why things look the way they do, hard, too, to say why the painter made them look so; the brushstrokes & the various leaves are indistinguishable, nature presents infinite variety, details everywhere, but hardly a form by which to judge the ensemble. One could stop & explain the colors in terms of light hitting the surfaces of the leaves, one could explain the various shadings of the various growths of leaves, & even more than that—but that would sacrifice the experience of the strength of living beings, we would lose any suspicion that beauty is independent of science, & we could then no longer enjoy the view, the pleasure of being able to take in the spectacle. To stop before the painting & to look upon the scene is to realize that we are determined in our attitude by the object we contemplate, not the other way around. We could then say instead of the whole picture that the canopies are like a turbulent sea; or that the treetops are like clouds; the motions & shapes, in escaping prediction, remind us that we are not in control. Such painting introduces into the lives of the bourgeois the startling reminder that before power & even before knowledge, there must be nature & life—these are necessary questions for us, because they bring up the problem of individuality; Cezanne leads us to the thought that painting trees is like painting people, that a landscape might be understood in a similar way to a portrait, or the other way around.
8 Toulouse Lautrec, White horse “Gazelle,” 1881
Of the artists in the forefront of the revolution we call Impressionism, Toulouse-Lautrec would seem best to fit the Romantic anti-bourgeois figure: A decadent aristocrat who lived off his family’s money, dead before 40, drunkard, syphilitic, at home in Montmartre, in the cabarets & brothels. It is only apparently a weakness in this moral attack on artists to add that Toulouse-Lautrec was the first artist now considered great to work for the popular magazines, in illustrations, in advertising, &c. At the time, these things were not considered respectable. Such a portrait of decadence would seem to damn the bourgeoisie itself, since art is a luxury, nut in his lifetime, Toulouse-Lautrec was not famous or successful. His other favored luxury, also typical of decadence, was cooking, at which he was apparently very good, & which was esteemed at the time, but not practiced by the respectable. A century on, these two arts changed places: Our elites do not prize French cuisine, but they do prize revolutionary art.