![]() ![]() Sometimes tender, sometimes brutal, forever a flaneur of styles. He could mimic anything - Greek, Renaissance, African, You Name It - a veritable parrot. Like Clifford Still, who once revealed about his painting process, “I paint like I mean it”, Cezanne’s paintings have a fierce intentionality, a clear identity, an insistency of self like a flexed muscle. Regardless of whatever anguish and indeterminacy daily plagued his paintings, they were all nonetheless fated to have a stubborn inevitability, this overall consignment of persona: Cezanne could not avoid being Cezanne. As Merleau-Ponty pointed out in his essay, “Cezanne’s Doubt”: the Catholic (as Cezanne preeminently was) argument between Free Will and Predetermination held sway over his entire oeuvre. Yet, right from the very beginning, all of his paintings are stamped with the same raw gruff power that constitutes his voice and authenticity as an artist. Paul Cezanne, Portraits of Uncle Dominique, 1866, Oil on canvasĬezanne was part intellect, part animal a stern contradiction buried deep in his character made the resolution of his paintings nigh impossible. These emboldened mishaps of expressive energy, much like his early narratives of revenge, rape, and murder, are at odds and so quarrel with the righteous legacy of this artist. ![]() Using only an intrusive palette knife, Cezanne applies the paint like a plasterer in a hurry to finish the job. So might seem the paintings in the first rooms of the exhibition of Paul Cezanne’s portraits at the National Gallery in Washington - portraits of his uncle Dominique and his father, Louis Auguste, reading the newspaper with one klutzy foot crossed over the other - all raucous likenesses slathered on with reckless abandon. Paul Cezanne, The Artist’s Father Reading L’Evenement,1866, Oil on canvas, 78 x 47 inches, National Gallery of Art Washington DCĬrude primal catastrophes from a limited talent. ![]()
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