The Brooklyn Rail

For those who study the historical fate of Paul Cezanne, the ramifications of his respect for Nicolas Poussin become central. If, as Picasso and others argued, Cezanne is rightfully the “father of modern art,” then Poussin must be the grandfather or great-grandfather. Summary accounts of Cezanne in surveys of art history discuss little of his actual practice. Instead, they focus on his stated aim to “remake Poussin after nature,” as if this allusion to an amalgam of classical structure and naturalistic observation somehow prefigured Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, and Constructivism, no matter how varied. Endlessly repeated, the Poussin connection suggests that Cezanne, by founding his aesthetic in a predecessor known for classical erudition, favored classicism himself. As support for this interpretation, Cezanne had a documented interest in Virgil and other Latin authors who, it was said, provided suitable afternoon reading when he reached a mountainous summit to gaze at the prospect of land and sky.

The phrase refaire Poussin sur nature occurs in several variants in the documentary record, including vivifier Poussin sur nature, “to bring Poussin back to life after nature.” Reports of the statements come late in Cezanne’s career and always secondhand, repeated by younger acquaintances, only some of whom had spoken with him directly. The preposition sur in this context means “on the order of” or “according to,” as in tailoring sur mesure. The reference is somewhat curious because Cezanne—although making drawings after antique statuary, as Poussin did—appears to have studied other masters of the Baroque more intensively, including Peter Paul Rubens and Pierre Puget. The statement is probably bona fide in essence, yet it might represent Cezanne’s recourse to explaining himself through an unimpeachable figure of the French tradition. Cezanne’s nationalistic politics, religiosity, and bourgeois mode of living were far more conservative than his profile as a painter. When he viewed historical works, a witness reported, “naiveté, even to the point of ignorance, readily seduced him.” With sequences of abruptly conjoined greens, blues, ochres, and reds, extending through land, sky, and architecture, all set in irregular perspective, Cezanne’s technique was hard to justify. A forgiving critic located it at the “primitive” end of impressionist practice. Cezanne’s admiration for Poussin’s refined order, though sincere, also served to deflect from failings he sometimes perceived in himself.

Nineteenth-century writers, in a formulation analogous to Cezanne’s, referred to Poussin’s desire to “remake the antique after nature.” Apparently, Cezanne was to Poussin as Poussin was to the ancients; and both practices reverted to nature. For the early art historians, Poussin was not only a classicist but a naturalist capable of representing moss on stone. He could function for Cezanne as a conduit to the nudes of classical Mediterranean mythology as well as to the natural Mediterranean environment, epitomized by the local stone of Bibémus quarry and Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cezanne’s motifs.

Some years ago, I visited Judit Geskó’s enlightening exhibition in Budapest, Cézanne and the Past; there, Poussin’s grand Landscape with the Ashes of Phocion (1648) seemed to render the historical distinction between classicism and naturalism irrelevant. The work provided me with a way to regard a puzzling aspect of Cezanne and perhaps representational painting in general. Linked to its primary theme of moral tragedy, Ashes of Phocion presents vignettes of oblivious recreation in a distant background, including several swimmers and archers. Close to the precise center of the transversal axis, a figure draws a bow, with an arrow ready to be released. Across the composition to the right lies the target, posted to a timber, turned enough to be noticed. An arrow in the air would have signified the distance traversed in the way that a depicted pathway or a bridge signifies a passage, but no arrow is visible. What then exists between archer and target? Space, though not “empty” space. This is pictorial space tensed and activated, thickened by the representational forms that bound it. The transparency of this space is merely an attribute and makes it no less material than any other feature of Poussin’s complex composition.

The archery vignette causes me to imagine that a spatial void—from archer to target, across a landscape of both perspectival articulation and atmospheric vagueness—consists of the same substance as the material things that would “fill” this space. In an obvious sense, an image generated by Poussin, one dimension reduced from the wax effigies he devised to plot a composition, is of a single substance, paint. With respect to their shared essence, space and matter hardly differ from their representations. They diverge from each other only in their degree of compression or extension, density or diffusion. In representations of nature, the atmosphere or space of perspective acquires material form, as if to confirm that space is as substantial as anything else. Painting as a practice suits Baruch Spinoza’s monism, or better, the exchange of space and matter in quantum physics. Maurice Merleau-Ponty said the world was a “mass without gaps,” that each of Cezanne’s brushstrokes “must satisfy an infinite number of conditions.” Those conditions would have to include the fusion of matter and space, the continuity of materiality and void, and the co-existence of Poussin’s arrow with its absence.

Implicitly, Cezanne followed Poussin’s example by blatantly materializing all aspects of the view before him, extending his patches of color through the space across the plane of land and the arc of sky between himself and Mont Sainte-Victoire. Each of his brushstrokes is a little arrow of touch and vision, an experiential vector of human sensation.