ART REVIEW : Portrait of Artist as a Mixed-Up Man

Today, the spirit of the French artist Paul Cezanne hovers above the plain of modern art magisterially detached like one of his paintings of Mont St. Victoire. He is the direct ancestor of modern art, the forebearer of Cubism, the very symbol of selfless artistic gravitas and maturity.

And that is why we rock back on our heels at the weirdly fascinating exhibition, “Cezanne: The Early Years,” at the National Gallery where it concludes a three-museum tour April 30. Even students of modernism have never seen such a focused examination of the young Cezanne as this 70-work compendium covering the period 1859-72. It turns out that when the artist was in his 20s and early 30s he was a very strange duck indeed, racked with sexual torments, goaded by violent impulses, transported by poetic vapors.

The earliest work is a series on the “The Four Seasons” finished in 1862 for the dining room of his father’s house at Aix-en-Provence. Each panel is inhabited by an Amazonian female fantasy figure that might have been painted by Henri Rousseau. They are engagingly naive giantesses with doll-like faces framed by skies full of mashed-potato clouds.

The show is laced with fantasy pictures clearly based on classic pastoral scenes or romantic orgies. There are lolling lovers with Nubian slaves, a rape or two and a version of “Lot and His Daughters.” But Cezanne strips the veil of poetry from these traditional motifs, revealing the animal qualities of sex and often putting himself in the picture.

There is inescapable autobiography afoot when he makes himself into St. Anthony being tempted by a nude figure of uncertain gender.

Erotic fantasy scenes blend into images of death, despair and insane violence that make the future patriarch of rational formalism into a precursor of--of all things--ropy modern Expressionism. In an early self-portrait, he looks like a psychopathic killer with Ping-Pong ball eyes and jaw muscles that seem to clench fitfully. He goes on to depict skulls, an autopsy and a triangle murder that might have been painted later by Soutine or an American Social Realist in the 1930s.

This dark, violent mood softens in pictures of outcasts such as “The Negro Scipion” which brings to mind the later themes of Picasso’s Blue Period. Cezanne’s masterpiece in this mood is a portrait of his friend, the dwarf painter Achille Emperaire. Cezanne painted the unfortunate man with noble empathy and unflinching candor, capturing his oversize head, wizened legs and strange footgear that looks to us like the tennis shoes of a willful oddball.

What is this all about? The curator--historian and painter Sir Lawrence Gowing--has cast the show in currently fashionable biographical and psychological accents. His essay ponders Cezanne’s relationship to his flinty, repressive father (whom Paul painted with all the awe he later brought to Mont St. Victoire). Gowing sees Cezanne’s troubled psyche reflected in his long friendship with Emile Zola, even wafting the suggestion of an early homosexual affair between the two artists. It hardly matters. Friendships can be as complex and profound as any physical liaison.

Evidently Zola and Cezanne played the odd couple, acting as alter egos for each other. Cezanne was the sensitive slob. He was a sullen bear among the artists at the Cafe Guerbois but once, when approached by the urbane Manet, he apologized, “I do not shake your hand M. Manet. I have not washed for a week.”

Zola, by contrast, was once described by the brothers Goncourt as having an “Almost hermaphroditic appearance, at once burly and frail.”

The friends shared an ambiguous attraction to women, finding them at once compelling and frightening, their coquettish ways masking a domineering virility of greater force than their own. Cezanne once enlisted Zola’s aid in winning over a maid who had captured his heart because she had “the body of a man.”

Such psychological considerations--interesting as they are--might leave us wondering what they have to do with art. In this case they certainly go a long way toward explaining the brooding, sometimes flaky contradictions of Cezanne’s early work. They provide general insight into the struggles of any artist who must choose between surrendering to his inner impulses or mastering them.

When we look at the structural solidity of even Cezanne’s oddest work, it is not too surprising that he finally chose to marry Hortense Fiquet and dedicate himself to the objective authority of art (which may have been a sublimation of the authority of his father).

By the time we get to the end of the exhibition and its excellent catalogue we see the powerful, calm Cezanne we know best. We understand that his obdurate formal dignity is always fed from a capped volcano of feeling. We understand why he said, “My method, if I have one, is based on a hatred of the imaginative.”

Cezanne’s fantasies were just too much for him. He had to choose the real.