Customer Reviews

Paul Cezanne: the Bathers Hb

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The monumental effort of many collectors, both public and private, came together in 1989 to show and reproduce this body of work as nearly in its entirety as possible. This is the reason this book gets a 5-Star rating. The book is truly remarkable in the overwhelming quality and quantity of the images, a collection I doubt will be seen in print again.

This said, the fact that this book has never been reviewed in 20 years on this site is puzzling. Two obvious explanations are not only viewers' overwhelming interest in the Impressionist landscape and still life works for which the artist is best known, but also the clear reluctance to deal with the work of Cezanne that was narrative or Symbolist, that is, fiction, the true work space of the figure.

This is a space that is indivisible from self-exposure, and for that reason also a site of courage for the artist, but as such, also a locus of merciless criticism from whomever would present themselves. And criticism it does receive in a large dose from the major essayist of this book, Mary Louise Krumrine.

Cezanne's early work is a definite pre-requisite for the "Bathers" precisely because it is not Impressionist. This period is covered by two books: Mary Tompkins Lewis, Cezanne's Early Imagery ,and Lawrence Gowing Cezanne: The Early Years 1859-1872. After Cezanne subsumed himself into Pissaro's Impressionist regime, he is concentrated on Nature. But as time wore on he knew he would never gain recognition in the Salon from landscape or still life, but had to present figure work. He viewed the Salon as the great meritocracy of French culture. and worked for his entire life to be admitted next to Puvis or Bouguereau. As it turns out, he wasn't, it wasn't, it was corrupt. His Bathers were is life long attempt in this.

As these themes are reprised by Krumrine in "Bathers" (she was a contributor to Gowing) they take on a gratuitously false model of the artist and his intentions, couched in early feminist critque and resuscitated pseudo-psychological profiling by Rubin (MOMA,on Picasso), that is the foundation of what ultimately becomes a not so subtle attack on Cezanne as a misogynist, a theme which applied to the figurative art and carried to the end of the book.

Ironically, Krumrine partitions herself off from this and sees herself as above liking or disliking, as she is writing art history as Wofflin or Panofsky, self-legimating her endeavor. But I feel every time she sees a woman depicted, she mis-interprets Cezanne's early work, The Modern Olympia, the Eternal Feminine, clearly both satires on Parisian sociology, and failed to see Balzac's novella Le Chef d'Oeuvre Inconnu as both a philosophic work and a satire on the plight of artists.

She does however contribute an interesting picture of Cezanne working from published anthologies of the day which featured many classical paintings. By-passing live models, Cezanne would work with copies of certain figure poses and groupings, which Krumine assiduously catalogs in a Glossary of her own contruction. It is when she assigns functionality to these in the form of labels and content that the essay assumes a monumentality of its own image, becoming self-serving in relation to the work, which is clearly more modestly conceived.

Cezanne was indeed a timid man in some respects, and endowed with limited representational skills, especially figures, both male and female. While he can show academic drawing skills as any student of the period, when confronted with drafting original figures and groups, he, like most of us without further practice, failed. As he was not interested in working as a Naturalist, or projecting themes or appearances of the Salon, or the painting methods of the Salon, Cezanne had to teach himself how to make credible presentations from alla prima methods, just as his other work.

The results are well documented in this book, where, I think, the pictures support that Krumrine's essay is but a footnote to the achievement.

This is a classic. There are lots of great images and insight on Cezanne's process. I highly recommend this book for any Artist/Painter and Cezanne enthusiast.