Paul Cezannes Modulated Primitivism - Essay Example

Paul Cezanne's Modulated Primitivism Paul Cezanne led an artistic life of isolation. He had few exhibits during his lifetime but is considered todayas the forerunner of modern painting. He was misunderstood during his lifetime and his techniques stemmed from Impressionism. His works challenged the values held dearly by the 19th century art world. He remained faithful to his concepts of personal expression and the integrity of the painting itself. He had a unique manner of putting in canvass what his eye saw in nature, and his pictorial qualities attest to his distinct way of treating space, mass and colour. Although living during the period of the impressionists, he went beyond their paradigms to create what he called "something more solid and durable, like the art of the museums.'' Cezanne professed his ideas on primitivism when he wrote: "Primary force alone, id est temperament, can bring a person to the end he must attain." He expresses this with emphasis on attainability of the primitive and basic in nature. Some define the primitive as a starting point rather than a point beyond what is now known to exist in culture and tradition. It anchors itself on the basic and concrete grounds for existence. His unique style can be given basis through the works of Gauguin who focused on a form of primitivism in his art, depicting life as it was in nineteenth century Tahiti. To gain a better understanding of Cezanne's form of primitivism, modulated primitivism as it was it is important to understand the concept and its context during the artist's lifetime. In this regard, Gauguin's works would provide an ideal basis in explaining the works of Paul Cezanne. Primitivism is an ancient concept which can be distinguished as chronological primitivism and cultural primitivism. Both concepts are positive with the one engaged with the philosophy of history and period of time in the local culture when the when the best situation of human life might have happened; and the other dealing the discontent of contemporary society with civilisation, and stipulating that simplicity (often exemplified by a distant and separate culture because civilised men do not call themselves primitive) are more desirable than what exists in the present. These concepts reached their height during the eighteenth century with large followings on the nobility of the savage. Writings by Rousseau in France and Herder in Germany made the concept of the noble savage popular in Europe during this period. It was in the nineteenth century that the utopian ideas of this concept wee tainted by the expansion for empire and subsequent missionary works. The positive connotations of primitivism were replaced by the ideas of "barbaric" and "savage". The nobility ensconced in the literary concept of the noble savage was expunged and replaced by the image of real savages which was less desirable and more to be feared. Missionaries capitalised on the paganism, violence and vices of their new native wards and potential converts. These negative traits were highlighted by both Protestant and Catholic missionaries alike. The death of missionary John Williams in 1839 further tainted the image associated with native populations. In 1843, an engraving that was printed in the Illustrated London News showed Polynesians in the midst of an unspeakable and idolatrous religious ceremony. The Polynesians were a new addition to the French colonies and William Vaughan commented that their diet of rats was perhaps "a mindless imitation of their frog-eating masters." Thus began the classification that primitive peoples not merely as separate from, but are of a completely different species from the white man. These new representations illustrate them as having a completely different path of development from their more superior European counterparts. In the 1840s, the Natural History of Society written by William Cook Taylor stipulated that white society was in constant struggle to return to perfection, while primitive cultures were taking the opposite direction towards degeneration. This was a view which gained support as when the art critic of Truth wrote in 1910 that Gauguin's painting Adam and Eve "Possessed a certain savagery like a brave war paint." He further added that Gauguin's "black Adam and Eve cheer us up by making us realise that there could have been no fall in the Garden of Eden, since there was nothing to fall from." A description of a nude female drawn at about the same time went, ""When wild in woods the naked savage ran.... By the way,' he asks, 'is it "naked" or "noble" I can never remember.' The words come from a proto-Rousseauistic passage of Dryden: "I am as free as nature first made man, Ere the base laws of servitude began, When wild in woods the noble savage ran." The writer said that in the case of Gauguin, "it does not matter, for this lady was undeniably naked and ignoble ...." There was substantial account of Gauguin's work in Julius Meier-Graefe's Modern Art and it gave an extensive account of life in Tahiti including Gauguin's sexual experience with under aged girls. He praised Gauguin for his "honest attempt to express the primitive and direct emotion of one who has lived as a savage among savages', yet the pictures remained for him 'unpleasant and unbeautiful". Most writers of the period did not make any distinction between the barbarian in life and the barbarian in art. Before Picasso and Fauves, primitive art was not given distinction from primitive artefacts like household items and weapons. Many art experts of the time tended to separate western art from primitive art, often concluding that savages are unable to accurately represent the forms of nature, and that they merely replicate from each other. Thus, this method among savages produces decorative systems which were distant from their originals in nature. This suggests that savage art degenerated from realism to abstraction. Robert Morley wrote in 1910 that Gauguin's art "resembles closely the productions which emanate from Benin City or the drawings cut upon coconut shells by the natives of tropical islands". Thus, Morley tried to make a connection between primitive art from Africa and those from Tahiti. He also separated primitive and neo-primitive art from western art, and this conception made Gauguin's work a failure in its conformity to western traditions and was thus perceived as retrogressive. Gauguin's works were described as "a recoil from all the conventions that have grown up in the art of the last three hundred years". Jacques Emile Blanche went further to deprecate Gauguin's art, "such aping of the barbarians by highly civilized Frenchmen or Englishmen [is] a simple fad, a decadent and morbid disposition ... totally deprived of any sort of promise for the future". Cezanne's works in the context of Gauguin's primitivism can be easily gleaned as similar in their simplistic and two-dimensional representation. Although compared to his contemporary, he depicts nudes as whites and not as primitive peoples. This is perhaps a means of modulating the impact that primitivism has on the canvass. Instead of the outright depiction of naked natives which attracted negative reactions from the western art world, Cezanne utilized naked white females especially in his Bathers series of paintings. In general, his paintings of women bathers had a unique treatment. He arranged his figures in large pyramidal groups. They are often overlapping with their backs to the viewer. The men however, face the viewer. His figures maintain their individuality and do not interact with each other. They also do not overlap but are as individual subjects presented in a group within a landscape. His primitivism style is expressed in the simplicity of his figures which are flat and two-dimensional, although he allows for the ideation of mass by providing bright tonalities in his subjects. Although Cezanne's figures were reduced to their basic shapes, he used bright colours which attest to his Impressionist roots. This gives his works a vibrance and freshness that is characteristic of Impressionist art. The swirling brushstrokes he employs also lends texture and a sense of life in his paintings. In fact, his brushstrokes convey his emotions and his state of mind. His strokes are described as repetitive, tentative, sensitive, delicate or exploratory. They are instantly recognisable very much similar to a person's handwriting. He uses planes of colour with small repeated brushstrokes which gradually form to build complex fields which give direct sensations to the eyes. His paintings evidence his constant struggle to deal with human perception. Merleau-Ponty (1972) relates Cezanne's psychological state as instrumental to his painting style. He wrote: "This loss of flexible human contact; this inability to master new situations; this flight into established habits, in an atmosphere which presented no problems; this rigid opposition between theory and practice, between the 'hook' and the freedom of a recluse-all these symptoms permit one to speak of a morbid constitution and more precisely, as, for example, in the case of El Greco, of schizothymia. The notion of painting 'from 'nature' could be said to arise form the same weakness" (Merleau-Ponty 1993). This assessment of Cezanne's psychological constitution intends to describe the painter's relationship with the natural. Preferring to be in isolation, his social ineptitude allowed him to look at nature from an observer's point of view. He views nature without involving himself, in a distant and separate manner. This can be compared to a voyeur looking at nature without nature being aware of his presence. This leads to the article of Joseph Weiss, Joseph Weiss, Cezanne's technique and Scoptophilia. Scoptophilia is defined as finding sexual arousal by watching others engage in sexual intercourse. Scoptophilia is more commonly referred to as voyeurism. In his Large Bathers, Cezanne presents the women as unaware about the presence of a person observing them, in this case, the painter. They are seen presented in a group but engaged in their own individual preoccupations. They are seen as mostly facing away from the viewer. This presentation gives a voyeuristic sense to the painting, that of someone watching naked women as they bathe, with the subjects oblivious of an external presence watching them. Primitivism is expressed in the flat, two-dimensional figures which were simplistically painted without details or features. In A Modern Olympia, Cezanne presents his main object as sleeping. The nude Olympia is likewise oblivious of an observer in her midst. Likewise, the allegorical figure about to cover her nakedness evokes a sensual feeling that her nudity would soon be hidden. This is consistent with the Scoptophilian idea of arousal evoked by the nakedness or the partial nakedness of someone being witnessed by the viewer who remains unseen and undetected. In the Temptation of St. Anthony, Cezanne once gain presents his objects as preoccupied with their activities, each maintaining their individuality although they have been presented within a group. The focus of all the figures are on St. Anthony, who is kneeling with his back to the viewer. The female nude frontally faces the viewer but her attention is on St. Anthony. Likewise, the devil takes on a frontal pose with his attention on the saint. The other objects which are likewise nude also focus on the kneeling figure which is the subject of their actions. The subjects of these three paintings were all depicted in natural wooded settings. Which attests to Cezanne's strong connections to his provencal environment in Aix-en-Provence. The objects are also simplistically painted as two dimensional, using bold and strong brushstrokes with evident curvatures. Likewise, the arrangement or composition of his objects are often pyramidal, directing the viewer towards the main object, which is usually the female nude. The contrasts attesting to this observation could be seen in the three paintings. In the Large Bathers, the nude females are arranged in a triangular composition. Trees and vegetation serve as frames to direct the viewer's focus on the nude figures. The pool of water that serves as backdrop also merges into the background allowing the simple figures of the bathers to stand out. In A Modern Olympia, the nude figure is central in the canvass with bushes and vegetation directing the viewer's attention to the reclining figure. The jar of wine and fruit also serve to frame the composition, likewise leading the viewer to the nude figure. The allegorical figure and the cloth she holds to wrap the reclining Olympia directs its action towards the sleeping figure, likewise achieving the effect that the nude deity is central in the overall composition of the canvass. In the Temptation of St. Anthony, all the objects are darker in shade compared to the nude female figure which is also placed centrally on the canvass. The location and the use of colour emphasizes the importance of the nude figure over all others, including St. Anthony, which with its kneeling posture, serves as the leftmost corner in the pyramidal composition of the painting. Although all the figures were painted in a two-dimensional and primitivist manner, the use of a lighter shade and location of the female nude in a natural setting gave it importance and draws the viewer's attention. His objects preserve their individuality. There is no interaction between his central figures nor do their actions overlap. In a sense, this technique supports the basic idea of primitivism wherein each figure is concentrated on its own actions and preoccupations. Although the focus of attention by the objects in the Temptation of St. Anthony are directed towards the figure of the saint, their individual actions are apart from each other. Each figure is undertaking his own action without overlapping or affecting the action of other objects in the painting. The same can be observed from the other two paintings. Although the allegorical figure's action is directed towards Olympia, it does not in any way interact with the action of the reclining and sleeping nude figure. The women bathers are likewise caught in individual poses with not one object relating with the action of another. Thus, Cezanne captures his objects singularly even though they are presented as a group making up the totality of the canvass. Cezanne's psychological constitution also contributed partially to his ability to capture his subjects in their pre-objective state. He is able to divest his subjects of their social masks and present them in their primitive state. According to Merleau-Ponty (1993), "It is clear from his conversations with Emile Bernard that Cezanne was always seeking to avoid the ready-made alternatives suggested to him: sensation versus judgment; the painter who sees against the painter who thinks; nature versus composition; primitivism as opposed to tradition." He is able to remove the corrective effects of judgment in his paintings and present the simple and primitive in his representations. Cezanne's paintings attempted to go beyond the paradigms of idealism and realism which greatly influence our judgments. In fact, his works are an indirect protest on idealism and realism, placing his objects into specific locations in the domain of l'tre sauvage. Cezanne uses visual perception as his primary vehicle to express himself and present his objects to the world. He uses his sight to gain a sensation of the subjects, which are then transferred onto the canvass. It is through the way he perceives things that his objects are interpreted onto his canvass through his brushwork. Reference: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Czanne's Doubt in The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader: philosophy and painting, ed. Galen Johnson & Michael Smith (Northwestern University Press, 1993), p.61. Read More