I went today to the National Portrait Gallery to catch their exhibition of Cezanne portraits before it ends this weekend. I'd already missed Tove Janson at Dulwich, which finished at the end of January, and I'd been looking forward to that since it was announced about this time last year. Next winter I should probably make a point of catching any exhibitions I particularly want to see ahead of Christmas, before I go down with a cold or it snows.
Somebody from the garden club who did see the Cezanne last November urged me to go, saying it was very good and not too crowded. Unfortunately by this stage I was not the only person to have worked out that if we didn't go now we'd have missed it, and it was quite busy. Never mind. The National Portrait Gallery is sensible about not selling so many tickets for each slot that nobody can see anything or move.
As a child I loved Cezanne's still lifes, his bowls of apples and amazing multi-coloured, crumpled white cloths. As a grownup I came to respect his angular landscapes in the Courtauld's permanent collection. I didn't immediately associate him with portraiture, and I didn't know much about his private life. And in a way I was right not to think of him as a portrait painter, in that he painted almost portraits for money. His career was built on the bowls of apples and sweeping hillside views. The sitters for his portraits were almost entirely family, friends, and servants.
They are strange paintings. I got very little feeling of most of the sitters as human beings, and then read in the introduction to one of the rooms that Cezanne soon rejected the psychological aspect of portrait painting. I felt pretty sure from the paintings that Cezanne had not been a people person. Holbein I imagine as a very shrewd observer, and I am sure that Sir Anthony Van Dyck charmed and smoozed his way through sittings with his aristocratic and royal subjects. I got the impression that Cezanne must not have been very comfortable with people most of the time, and then read in the text on the walls that Cezanne had only one real friend as an adult, and saw that I could have been to a lecture exploring his volatile relationships and personality. He wasn't interested in figure drawing either, in any classical sense, so that while his sitters have mass and volume you get no sense of normal anatomy under their clothes. I remembered our exotic (to my provincial teenage eyes) Hungarian school art teacher pointing out to us that the card players' arms came out from their rib cages.
By the time you've jettisoned the idea of figure drawing, any indication of personality, and all but a rough idea of a likeness, you might not have much left, but that was not the case at all. The critics gave the exhibition what seemed like a clean sweep of five star reviews, and they were very absorbing paintings, in a slightly uneasy, brooding, compelling, odd sort of way. Cezanne's own verdict on one of them, at the point where he gave up working on it, was that the shirt wasn't too bad, and indeed the shirt was extraordinarily good. A small self portrait, done from a photograph, had the most peculiar hands, which Cezanne had had to invent because they were cut out of the photo, and I overheard another visitor say to her friend that the hands were dreadful but she loved the background, and indeed the mottled, teal blue background was wonderful. The way that Cezanne conjured his wife's nose and eye socket from slabs of blue and pale paint was wonderful.
There was only one painting I would have really liked to take home and so I spent a long time looking at it, an early portrait of the future Madame Cezanne, sitting in a blue jacket and striped dress on a red chair. It dated from the point in his career when he was closest to the Impressionists, and his sitter's impassive expression and monumental stillness reminded me of the young Polynesian women in the Courtauld's two Gaugins. And I liked the colours. It was not really typical of the rest of the exhibition, though.
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