Distractions: Czanne in a Sketchbook

Author(s): Richard Shiff

Source: Master Drawings, Vol. 47, No. 4, Articles and Notes in Honor of Karen B. Cohen (Winter,
2009), pp. 447-451
Published by: Master Drawings Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25609762
Accessed: 31-03-2015 18:03 UTC

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Cezanne

Distractions:

Shiff

Richard

had a procedural
(1839-1906)
in
It
shows
his
paintings but all themore
quirk.
in
his
modest
sketchbook drawings,
obviously

Paul

Cezanne

for sale or public exhibition. He

linked disparate images by their happenstance
form and location?one
shape resembling anoth
er, one position on the page corresponding to

unintended

no

another?with

consistency. No
ent

in a Sketchbook

consistency

apparent

concern

for

thematic

doubt, the possibility of inappar

remains:

private

code

or obscure

to the artist but not to

witticism

comprehensible
his contemporaries, a hidden

factor that would

lies in plain view: Cezanne's

graphic oddities jus

in
the
themselves
bemusing "distractions"
tify
create.
I
artist engaging in aes
the
imagine
they

thetic play thathe never actively sought but could

not resist. Sketching, he indulged himself.
Some prime examples are found in a drawing
used during the period 1885
in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
("Sketchbook n").1 On one page (p. xxxvi recto;
Fig. 1), a sequence of pencil strokes converts the

book

thatCezanne

to 1900, now

buttocks of a striding female figure (a "bather"

type) into a motif of rhythmically spaced, some

as legs of
explain his curious formal links and transpositions. what arched verticals. These lines double
a
most
to
the
first of
A plausible alternative
themissing explanation
swan, oriented inversely,
likely

Figure 1
PAUL CtZANNE
Two

Female

Bathers; Swan;
P. XXXVI (recto) of
Sketchbook

ii

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia
Museum ofArt

447

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Figure 2a
PAUL CtZANNE
Puget's Atlas
Standing Male
Bathers; P.L
(recto) of
Sketchbook

ii

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia
Museum ofArt

two thematically unrelated, but graphically con

nected images to be drawn. The conjunction of
two buttocks?or,
two
improbably, three??and
in three lines thatdemand to
legs?three??results
be viewed as a single rhythm because of the reg
ularity of their spacing. The intervals between the
lines happen to correspond to the disposition of
the bounded spaces just above them, representing
the arm of the striding figure and the left side of

her

back.

Bather

and

swan

are

characteristically
perceive as positive projections from the paper
ground both the spaces or separations and the
lines that contain them. The result is spatial ambi
guity: not only the positive marks but also the
nominally

negative

reserves

appear

as

positive

solids rather than negative voids. This is but one

of a number of "abstract" effects that the artist's
representational drawings sharewith his paintings,
an element of the general abstraction that both
mystified and fascinated early viewers, induced to
focus on

the space between the figure's legs. He continued

this diagonal stroking throughout the body and
beneath an extended right hand, lending the
entire figure a sense of graphically directed move
ment?arbitrary

in relation

to

the

rectilinear

for

mat of the page but relevant to the position of the

interwoven.

drawings we

In Cezanne's

sign of something else.2

On the leftof this sheet, Cezanne drew amore
developed version of the same striding bather,
inserting a plane of diagonal pencil strokes that fill

the materiality of the mark at the

of
expense
perceiving it as the representation or

swan. The tail of the swan, upside down also in

relation to this bather, complements the hand of
the figure to its left,as ifa graphic spark could pass
between them, across the indefinite space, now

highly activated. This

sents neither

air, nor

spacing or interval repre

volume,

nor

perspective,

nor

anything symbolic; it is a felt relationship, animat

ed in an immediate act of drawing. It is difficult

to dissociate the curves and angles of the swan

from those of the two female figures because each
fulfills the other's implied vector of graphic inten
tion: the left bather's extended hand

is to the

swan's extended tail as the right bather's compact

448

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Figure 2b
PAUL CEZANNE

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
XLIx (verso) of

ii

~~~~~~~~~
"1 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
~~~Sketchbook

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia

~~~Museum

'T~~~~~~~
"S~~~~~~~~~'

4~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~P

ed buttocks are to the swan's compacted legs?

complementarity.3 If there is meaning

right. It even echoes the curving, angled legs of

the lightly sketched seated bather on the facing

here,

page

mutual

it is sensory or emotional meaning, felt

through the nature of themarking, as opposed to
an identification of the image.
Elsewhere within
lar situations arise?a

the same sketchbook, simi

distribution of forms that

fails to communicate

(p. xxix verso; Fig. 2b), whose

position it occupies in exchange. This

left-hand
is compo

sition by transpositional coincidence.

The discipline of art history frowns on hap
penstance

and

chance,

on

smiles

cause

and

effect

an
another,
By
thematically becomes force
ful in a graphic way. A study after one of the art historian might divine a cultural link between
Atlas, male bathers, and the various sources from
sculptures of Atlas by Pierre Puget (1620-1694),
chose as his
the historical past that Cezanne
designed for theH?tel-de-Ville, Toulon, but avail
rendered

conscious.

one

device

or

an ultimate the
as plaster casts in the Trocadero,
anatomical models. Unpacking
closes off the leftward end of a two-page spread matic justification for a complex composition is a
familiar intellectual challenge; but no matter how
that includes studies of male bathers whose pos

able to Cezanne

tures Cezanne

often incorporated into paintings

L
(p. recto; Fig. 2a).4 Logically, we would assume
that theAtlas fragment preceded these somewhat

independent images of bathers, for itwould be

peculiar to begin drawing a figure in a space insuf

ficient to complete it.Yet the position of this frag

ment, especially its curving bottom edge, extends
the implied recession suggested by the shift in

scale of the two variants of a single figure to its

impressively informed and inventive the results,

immediate
they will remain conjectural. The
sense

Cezanne's

to be

derived

Atlas?bather

from

the

drawing?from

situation
its

of

physi

a dif
cal positioning, its graphic motif?presents
ferent kind of question: of felt response, not spec
ulation. Itmatters not whether we decide, after
the fact, to classify our feeling as sensory, emo
tional, or both. A felt response can be themean

449

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Figure 3 (left)
PAUL CEZANNE
Antique Aphrodite
and Eros;
p. xxxvii (verso)
of Sketchbook

II

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia
Museum ofArt

Figure 4 (right)
PAUL CEZANNE
Standing Male
Bather; Dog; p.
xxxviii (recto) of
Sketchbook

Philadelphia,
Philadelphia
Museum ofArt

ing of a work, its human significance, without

extending into intellectual reasoning. Instead of
directing his composition to the traditional end of

enhancing and clarifying a thematic message,

Cezanne
either amused himself with his subver

subjects or became so
with
distractedly?engaged

sive play of incompatible

intensely?perhaps
form and movement

that these factors of sensation

have preceded the other, and within the latter

drawing, either the bather or the dog may have
been the initial image. The dog appears in a posi
tion on the bather page analogous to the position

Eros holds on theAphrodite page. To accomplish

this,Cezanne had to rotate its placement ninety
degrees in relation to the bather (or vice versa).

disengaged from the representational theme.

Consider another curiosity from the sketch

naturalistic horizontality of the lying dog,

with ground plane indicated, becomes arbitrarily
vertical, so long aswe allow the standing bather to

book. Cezanne

determine

(p. XXXVII verso; Fig. 3).5 On the

facing page, he repeated this structural ratio by
combining an image of a dog with an unrelated

bathers reduced in vertical stature because

copied an antique Aphrodite and

Eros sculpture from the Louvre in which Eros
forms a short vertical to the right of Aphrodite's
long vertical

standing male bather (p. xxxvill

Either of the drawings, Aphrodite

recto; Fig. 4).

or bather, may

The

the orientation

of the compound
assumes
the pictorial situa
image. Here the dog
tion not only of Eros but also of numerous male

they sit
on a river bank or stand partly immersed in a
stream, beside the full vertical of a standing or
striding figure. Cezanne developed such a motif
(long vertical, short vertical) in his drawing and

450

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furthered it in paintings of groups ofmale bathers,

where it tends to repeat (long, short, long, short
..

NOTES
1.

.).6 It is as ifhe felt an affinityfor, or took pleas

ure

in, certain

concentra

His

relations.

structural

on

place-holders:

or

paper

canvas,

aesthetic

and

intellectual

2.

sense

"they

them."7 Whatever
were

transgressions

the case,

noticed.

not

constituting

only

"abstraction"

but

forces

that the artist both

Cezannian
assume

member

"sensation"?that

the

same

grandeur

"apples

4.

as a human

as a

generation epitomized the

thoroughly improper effect he created.8 The fol
lowing generation rendered explicit what they

5.

"anecdote"

meaning;

was

allwas

6.

the

identification

upside down.

See Berthold

See

Cinq

1958, no. 26, repr. Cezanne

recto (see Philadelphia

drew

the same

1989, p. 191).

n, p. xxxn

Sketchbook

(see Philadelphia
baigneurs of 1879-80

in
verso, for an example
1989, p. 198). In painting, see
in the Detroit
Institute of Arts

(inv. no. 70.162; oil on canvas; 34.6 x 38.1 cm); see John
et al., The Paintings ofPaul Cezanne: A
Rewald
Catalogue
Raisonne, 2 vols., New York, 1996, vol. 2, no. 448, repr.
7.

One

of a number

of aphoristic statements attributed to

conversations with the writer Leo Larguier;

Cezanne's

the source of feeling and

in themark, the drawing.

see Leo

Larguier,

Souvenirs, Paris,
8.

See Theodore
Paris,

Texas atAustin, specializing inmodern and contempo

raryart ofEurope and America.

pp. 46-59.

Paris, 2006,

see
of the source
in Puget,
Cezanne
und die alten Meister,
Berthold,
Stuttgart, 1958, no. 130, repr., in conjunction with the
observations of Theodore Reff in Philadephia
1989, pp.
233?34. On
these two pages Cezanne worked with the
For

drawing

not

Associate Editor Richard Shiff is a professor in the

Department ofArt andArt History at theUniversity of

be consulted

subject on p. xxix

believed Cezanne

had been hiding from himself:

"The goal is not to reconstitute an anecdotal fact
but to constitute a pictorial fact."9 The subject or

should nevertheless

Etudes Cezanniennes,

sketchbook

[could]

head,"

art, see

Gertrude

and

of Cezanne's

this theme

Cezanne,"

responded to in an experiential loop. Today, aca

demics tend to deny claims of phenomenological

detachment and sensory immersion. Itwas in this

respect, however?for
feeling, for the intensity of

in Cezanne's

for similar examples of the graphic conflation of subjects:

see Jean-Claude
"Une Source oubliee de
Lebensztejn,

a new

directed

of "abstraction"

of

This drawing makes no apparent allusion to the theme of

Leda and the Swan. A recent study of Cezanne's
involve
ment with

form of realism: a self-referential realism ofmate

rial

3.

of

also

Museum

Philadelphia

pp. 54-101.

Art, 2009,

artists and critics interpreted them as

younger

the perception

Reff

Two Sketch

Shiff, "Lucky Cezanne

(Cezanne
tychique)," in
and Katherine
and
Sachs, eds., Cezanne
Joseph J. Rishel
of
Beyond, exh. cat., Philadelphia,
Philadelphia Museum

Cezanne's

number

On

in Theodore

Paul Cezanne:

Richard

order

remains at issue. "Artists don't perceive all the

relationships directly," he is reported to have said,

"Introduction,"

Shoemaker,

books, exh. cat., Philadelphia,

Art, 1989, pp. 9-10.

The degree towhich Cezanne may have con

sciously pondered the extent of his violation of

conventional

Reff,

and Innis Howe

dog

could substitute for a bather, a tree for a bather's

towel, an apple for a human head, and so forth.

H.
and Mrs. Walter
(Gift of Mr.
on
x
wove
127
216
paper;
Annenberg).
Graphite pencil
mm. On determining the dates of use of this sketchbook,
1987-53

see Theodore

tion on positioning licensed him to exchange the

matic

Inv. no.

9.

Le

Dimanche

avec Paul

Cezanne:

1925, p. 137.
Duret,

Histoire

des peintres impressionnistes,

1906, p. 180.

See Georges

"Pensees et reflexions
Braque,
December
1917, p. 4.

sur la pein

ture," Nord-Sud,

451

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