After seeing the show of Cai Guo-Qiang’s gunpowder drawings at the USC Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena, I drove a mile west (this is the Los Angeles area after all; there’s a fearsome taboo against non-car transportation) to one of my favorite museums, the Norton Simon, which contains a few works by Cézanne, including his ‘Farmhouse and Chestnut Trees at Jas de Bouffan’ (1884-85), a work that has taught me a great deal about Cézanne and artistic painting more generally. One minor surprise in Cai’s show was his long engagement with Cézanne: his initial proposal for an outdoor gunpowder drawing was for a (never realized) massive dragon-shape ascending Cézanne’s major motif, Mont St. Victoire in the late 1980s; and as recently as 2019 he hiked the mountain and reflected on its importance for Cézanne. What does Cézanne’s art mean to Cai, and how does its artistic ontology relate to Cai’s?
As noted in my previous post, something like the concept of nature has a two-fold employment in Cai’s poetics: ‘nature’ is everything that is, and ‘nature’ is the counter-concept to humanity and the human realm; and this two-fold conception corresponds to the dual viewpoints that (so Cai urges) are embodied in his work, the view from the whole, and the human or participatory viewpoint within the whole. Cai puts this point in the Chinese idiom with the claim that his work unites the ‘inner qi’ (an impersonal energy conceptualized most fundamentally as something that flows and so characteristically imaged as a stream) of spirit with the ‘outer qi’ of form. In a catalog essay the cultural historian Simon Schama has given a somewhat breathless articulation of Cézanne’s importance to Cai; Schama writes: “Cai is fascinated by Cézanne because the French painter “looked backward and forward.” He longed for the spirit of eternality, as exemplified by masters from the past, while simultaneously thirsted to open new frontiers in art history. Cézanne looked out on his homeland and its fields and could perceive in it the essence of time and space without being tempted by the mere representation of light and shadow. In fact, Cai is fascinated by Cézanne also because he sees Cézanne’s shadow within himself.” Again as reconstructed in my previous post, Cai’s basic conceptualization of an artwork is as something that somehow contains and fuses space and time while simultaneously itself being atemporal and non-localizable. This formulation evidently demands a great deal of explication that I cannot give here, but at least part of what Cai means (a) the fusion of space and time evokes, proximally or distantly, all of space and time while neither figuring nor referring to any particular temporal moment or spatial particular, and (b) the work aims for an intelligibility not limited by social or cultural particularities. One element of Schama’s interpretation gives us a lens through which to view Cézanne: the idea that the his work presents the ‘essence’ of space and time without ‘mere’ representation of light and shadow. What might this mean?
Consider the Norton Simon’s great later Cézanne landscape.
The painting shows a farmhouse, viewed from an oblique angle and set back at something like the far edge of the middle-distance. The farmhouse is framed on either edge by trees, on the right with just a bare, tall trunk that branches just below the top of the picture, and much more elaborately on the left by two trees, the foremost of which’s branches curve down to visually enclose the top of the house, while the more distant tree’s branches and leaves occlude the furthest edge of the building. A field stretches between the viewer and the farmhouse, with the foreground in shadow and the rest unshaded. Two features characteristic of Cézanne’s later style are particularly at a glance: the ‘uneven’ roof line which seems to bob and buckle to the point that one cannot determine its furthest point, and the mutual echoing of the slope of the roof and the hanging branches. There’s a great deal of insightful writing about Cézanne (for highlights see the ‘References’ below) from which I draw, and to my mind the beginning of wisdom on the artist starts with his statement that he wanted ‘to do Poussin according to nature’. For a quick route into this thought, consider Cézanne’s rendering of the small attached buildings to Poussin’s rendering of analogous buildings in his great ‘Landscape with a Calm’ (currently a mere 24 miles west of the Norton Simon at the Getty Center).
Note the three roof lines—the full line of the building on the far right, the whitish line furthest left that seems to run diagonally higher left-to-lower right and end in the farmhouse’s side, and beneath it the short line formed by four curved roofing tiles (?) that seems to end before the farmhouse. Each line wobbles its way, and Cézanne has rendered the far right so ambiguously that the viewer wavers between two distinct attributions of outline. These little roof lines are kindred to the great line of the farmhouse, and similarly characterized by its bends and indeterminacies. Poussin’s picture is a different world than Cézanne’s:
Yet there are many points of comparison between the two. Cézanne must have admired Poussin’s dictum ‘I have neglected nothing’, and one senses in both painters the seemingly limitless care for each detail and its place within the overall organization. However unorthodox, Cézanne shares with Poussin an adaptation and massive elaboration of Claude Lorrain’s simple schema of framing elements upon a spatial scheme of receding planes alternating light and dark. But consider Poussin’s rendering of the outbuildings:
What was ambiguity in Cézanne is paradox in Poussin. In Poussin’s work the lines are precise, but he has placed the shadow on the roof and the wall so as to suggest a fold in what would otherwise be seen as a straight line. Is the roof straight or bent? The ineliminability of this paradox seems of a piece with the peculiar rendering of the ‘galloping’ horse, which seems frozen despite the visual cues of great speed. To render Poussin according to nature means at least to relieve the style of its precision and sense of heightened visual intelligence, and to cultivate instead a sense of vision as quasi-tactual groping.
A remark by the art historian Kurt Badt in his tremendous book The Art of Cézanne offers rapid way into Cai’s sense of Cézanne. Badt characterizes a central feature of Cézanne’s late style as ‘the dissolution of the object’. With what I’ve considered so far, this dissolution would involve at least the dissolution of the outline. Cézanne of course rejects outline as a continuous line marking the visual edges of an object, but also he rejects the idiom supremely practiced by Rembrandt of making a broken outline through a series of partially disconnected strokes. More basic to Cézanne’s late style than outline is his treatment of volume and surface by laying down a series of parallel strokes, most typically with small yet progressive changes of hue, value, or saturation across the motif, as in the rendering of the leaves in the Norton Simon’s landscape painting:
Then Cézanne either omits the visible outline entirely, or, as with the roof lines, deviates from linearity and inflects it in such a way that it seems responsive to the visible and invisible contextual features of its surrounding objects and atmosphere, the pressure of Cézanne’s hand, and the unrecoverable shifts in ocular focus and exact placement of his head.
A second central feature of Cézanne’s late style is the strong tendency to collapse, at least partially, ordered recession in space in favor of heightened communication between foreground, middleground, and background elements. This is especially prominent here in the visual closeness of the branches and the farmhouse’s roof.
This intimacy of foreground and background typical of Cézanne serves a range of pictorial functions, including binding the pictorial elements and motifs together more tightly than was possible in previous styles of composition, further to set up rhythms and counter-rhythms, echoes and responses, concords and dissonances, all the while breaking the sense (common in works rendered in linear perspective) of a continuous space subtending the pictorial world and the physical location of the viewer. Despite their continuous appeal to tactility and embodiment, Cézanne’s later works insist on the sense that the pictorial world is a kind of self-contained realm at an unbridgeable distance from the viewer. The very rendering of surface and volume in series of rectangular patches invokes a micro-ordering responsive to the macro-orders of foreground/middleground/background and the physical rectangularity of the canvas itself.
So one might say that in ‘doing Poussin according to nature’, Cézanne relives Poussin of his well-ordered space, his learnedness, his mythological subject-matter, and his acute sense of visual paradox in favor of a ‘nature’ that is a groping and fundamentally embodied kind of vision amidst a fundamentally other world of durable yet constantly changing objects. Perhaps this is enough for Cai to see Cézanne’s shadow in himself. But Cai’s work, and its motivating ideology of embodying two-fold qi, that is qi as a dynamic whole and qi as the opposing and interacting forces of the inner and the outer, rejects something that is still basic for Cézanne, the sheer thereness and materiality of the world.
In my next post, I’ll consider my final foray into the artistic ontologies of nature in Los Angeles with an account of Joseph Beuy’s conceptions of nature as evidenced in the retrospective entitled ‘In Defense of Nature’.
References:
Kurt Badt, The Art of Cézanne (1965)
Roger Fry, Cézanne: A Study of his Development (1927)
Lawrence Gowing, ‘The Logic of Organized Sensations’, in Cézanne: The Late Work (1977), ed. William Rubin
Maurice Merleau-Ponty, ‘Cézanne’s Doubt’, in Sense and Non-Sense (1964)
Fritz Novotny, ‘The Late Landscape Paintings’, in Cézanne: The Late Work (1977), ed. William Rubin
--‘Cézanne and the End of Scientific Perspective’, in The Vienna School Reader (2000), ed. Christopher Wood
Simon Schama (ed.), Cai Guo-Qiang: Odyssey and Homecoming (2021)
Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (1952)