ART REVIEW : The Drive Toward Clarity--Cezanne’s Diaristic Sketches

Paul Cezanne still seems an unlikely source for a cultural revolution. Shy and ungainly, he failed in the respectable pursuits that would have pleased the wealthy banker father who grudgingly kept him on the dole while Paul pursued an unpromising career as an artist and--for years--hid a liaison with a woman too common for family approval.

Yet Cezanne changed the way we look at things as definitively as Sigmund Freud changed the way we see our feelings. Just as Giotto crossed the border from medieval hierarchy to Renaissance realism, Cezanne breached the frontier between academic representation and the structured ambiguity of modern abstraction.

Today we know Cezanne’s intense clarity as surely as we know we have an id, ego and superego. We bow to the importance of Cezanne’s heroic apples turning into Picasso’s Cubism and opening out into the whole realm of theoretical abstraction as easily as we genuflect before Einstein’s theory of relativity.

What we don’t know--or tend to forget--is what was going on inside Cezanne as he struggled to present those magisterially painted views of Mont Sainte-Victoire or a self-portrait chiseled out of air. Now, until June 5, we get a remarkable look into the artist’s internal tangles in “A Cezanne Treasure: The Basel Sketchbooks” on view at the Museum of Modern Art. The show consists of nearly 150 drawings from the comprehensive holdings of Basel’s Kunstmuseum.

Cezanne drew almost diaristically, including everything from imagined erotic orgies to analytic studies of humble table tops to probing copies in the Louvre that bring life to pompous academic machines. They show us that his image as the stoic hermit of Aix--patiently painting the great mountain again and again--represents the harnessing of a pile-driver libido that bounced around from the bloody fantasy of “The Murder,” to the delicate empathy of his portrait of his dwarfed friend Achille Emperaire, to his near-childlike awe toward the authority of classic antique sculpture. When he drew from Roman busts such as that of the emperor Septimius Severus, the angle suggests he was--at least figuratively--on his knees.

The complexity of thought and emotion revealed by the drawings suggests Cezanne as a man of profound depths who plumbed them without quite knowing what he was doing: portrait of the modern artist as inspired naif or as Freudian analysand, revealing himself spontaneously through free association.

Freud was not interested in modern art--or so he thought--but certainly he would have found Cezanne an interesting example of someone ferociously driven by internal forces beyond his ken--maybe some kind of rage against a father who stubbornly refused to see that all his son wanted was to please him.

Cheap speculation. What Freud and Cezanne really had in common was a flinty determination to plumb internal chaos to arrive at truth so basic that it was at once sophisticated and primitive, ancient and new. That’s the way it goes with great ideas; once they are out, they appear so self-evident they seem to have always been there.

Cezanne gets pigeonholed as the creator of the cerebral in modern art when in fact he was the author of clarity, which is different. What kind of clarity? His extraordinary portrait of Achille Emperaire looks like an exercise in the clarification of psychological empathy, a tender revelation of nobility in a man physically shortchanged by nature. About the time we have decided that, we notice the pains Cezanne has taken to make the head look solidly round--like the art of the museums, as he liked to say. But as soon as it is solid, it becomes crystalline and nearly transparent, with pieces like the ear floating around and then rejoining on the surface where patterns--such as the shadow of the nose--have a life of their own.

The drawings often seem as schematic as exercises in a drawing book, but they never stop there. Cezanne shoved them around, trying to cram in just one more aspect of his total visual sensation, until a nude looks like it is made of moving air that has become a kind of quivering Silly Putty, or a landscape appears to be viewed through a cracked pane of glass whose fissures are also tree branches and horizon lines.

One thing we love about Cezanne is the complete lack of fanciness or ego in the work. He never seems to be trying to show off or “make a Cezanne.” The work seems utterly honest, unpretentious and devoid of exhibitionism while paradoxically unmistakable as Cezanne. The look comes from application to solving the problem of clarification.

Einstein would have understood that the miracle of Cezanne is that he clarifies not the simple but the complex. He clarifies the ambiguity of vision. He gives us the visual equivalent of the theory of relativity.