A Heavyweight Interpretation of the Regionalist Basis of Paul Cezanne's ArtNina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmye

Having visited the Jas de Bouffan on what was farmland outside of Aix-en-Provence when Paul Cezanne's father Louis Auguste Cezanne bought 14 hectares (97 acres) and built a villa on it in 1870. Louis had studio on the second story in the front built for his son before dying on 23 October 1886. Paul Cezanne (1830-1906) maintained a studio in Paris, but after fleeing the 1870 Franco-Prussian and subsequent Paris Commune, returned to Aix and increasingly viewed himself as a provincial (in the general sense of being uncomfortable with and disdainful of the metropole, in his case Paris) and Provencal (a patriot of the south of France).

In Cezanna and Provence: The Painter in His Culture University of Delaware art historian Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer pushes (convincingly) a strong thesis that Cezanne's style and subject matter after 1870 were aggressively Provencal and deeply influenced by what she calls a revival of regional pride and that I see as a vivid instance of the invention of tradition, positively valuing the local, attempting to revive crafts and celebrations, etc. (Such "inventions" are not concocted out of thin air, but reconfigure bits and pieces and even spirits of place related to what once was.)

Mont Sainte-Victoire appears in the background of very many Cezanne landscapes and was very much a symbol of the solidity of Provence. Remains of prehistoric peoples were being found in caves on Mont Sainte-Victoire. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer convincingly argues that the skulls in many Cezanne still-lifes are neolithic ones, indexing Provencal archeologist Antoine-Fortune Marion who was a friend of Cezanne and excavated Mont Sainte-Victoire. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer also explains how work on geology of Provence was reflected in Cezanne paintings, as he sought the "essence" under the appearance of the mountain and other aspects of the Proven§al scene.

Athanassoglou-Kallmyer also established beyond any reasonable doubt that painting rural card players was not just a celebration of rural life but that Cezanne's paintings of card players were made when the central government was seeking with considerable vigor to destroy the local (to Proven§e) small-scale industry of manufacturing playing cards and to reduce gambling.

Cezanne was all but unknown in the center of the 19th-century art world (Paris) until a one-man show organized by Ambroise Vollard in 1895. By that time, "primitive" regionalist art was in fashion (including Gaugain's Breton work). Impressionism was "old hat," as was the "fine" art of the Salon and Academy against which Cezanne and the Impressionists had revolted against. The raw, proto-cubist work by the "authentic" rural artisan from the South was celebrated.

The Cubists were drawn to tribal art, but also celebrated Cezanne as a forebearer. (This is not the place to go into how "primitivism" was embraced by "modernists," but it definitely was by Matisse and Picasso and Expressionists.)

I was especially interested by Athanassoglou-Kallmyer's argument that Cezanne had been alienated from his childhood friend, naturalist novelist Emile Zola before Zola based the failed artist in Le Ouevre on Cezanne. Zola became too grand for Cezanne's taste and palled around with Edouard Manet, who was way too smooth for Cezanne. Cezanne lampooned not only Manet but Zola, as Athanassoglou-Kallmyer shows (pp. 87-92). (Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres was the painter Cezanne most despised and Cezanne mocked the Ingres that remains prominently displayed in the main Aix art museum, the Musee Granet Ingres's 1811 Jupiter and Thetis.)

Some extensions of her case that identification with Proven§e is the key to understanding Cezanne's work seem to me overstretched. In particular, I do not see Hortense (eventually Mme. Cezanne) smiling in Figure 1-39. She looks stonier and grimmer in it than in Figure 1-37. Nor do I see Mme. Ginoux smirking in Figure 3-48 (her smile strikes me as more placid than Hortense's back in 1-39, and I also don't see how Athanassoglou-Kallmyer knows that the women in the background are prostitutes...) I don't see the shifting boosterism of the reborn Carnival that Athanassoglou-Kallmyer contends for, either. But she convinced me that what the subjects are wearing in Cezanne's paintings and what objects are his still lifes had a political (social politics) meaning, one that consistently championed an Arcadian Proven§al "tradition" against the reach of the centralizing state (and the tentacles of modern capitalism in the form of railroads).

I found the text very interesting, though I don't doubt that many people would appreciate the book just for its pictures (120 color plates, plus black-and-white photographs and representations of or from various fugitive publications). The book is heavy (3.6 pounds) with 11.1" x 9.4" pages. I found it worth the effort of holding up to read.

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BTW, there is nothing on display inside the Jas de Bouffan except a slide-show (on three walls). A third of the original land remains and there is a map with reproductions of views of the garden and house that Cezanne painted from particular spots in the garden. I wrote about visiting Aix-en-Proven§e at www.associatedcontent.com/article/820673/aixenprovence_in_the_footsteps_of_paul.html?cat=16 (with a photo of the Has de Bouffan). Also see my review of M.F.K. Fischer's book about living in Aix and Marseilles during the 1950s, Two Towns in Provence.

There are a dozen Cezanne drawings and paintings in the Musee Granet (along with much else, including a lot of paintings and sculptures by Giacometti). The places with a permanent Cezanne retrospective is the Musee d'Orsay in Paris.

Also see my review of Emile Zola's The Masterpiece, which ended his friendship with Cezanne (who, along with the by-then dead Edouard Manet was the basis for the painter in it.

Because Yahoo is unable to display them, I have removed the egoust from "Cezanne" and "Musee" (and misrepresented the "c" in "Provence."