BWW Reviews: The First Lady of Modern Art, MADAME CEZANNE at the Metropolitan Museum

The best way to take in Madame Cézanne is to put the biographical quibbles, the interpretive controversies, the psychological analyses that surround this show on hold. At least the first time through, just take in the art--and that art is incredible. The basis of this show is a body of portraits that Cézanne, between 1872 and 1900, created of his companion and eventual wife Hortense Fiquet; taken together, these paintings offer seemingly endless variations in form, tone, and depth, common subject or no common subject. Though Cézanne's pasty brushstrokes, kinked perspectives, and sculptural masses are all in evidence in these portraits, these works are more restrained and (frankly) more fine than his colorfully dissonant landscapes. His Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory alone is worth the trip, and is absorbing enough to make you forget that the real-life Madame Cézanne was a source of contention and an object of ridicule.

All of this is a curatorial feat on the part of the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Dita Amory, who organized the exhibition and edited its tightly coordinated, consistently illuminating publication. And she knows how much she has to push back against. The state of Hortense's reputation is bluntly summed up in Amory's catalog essay: "Ill humored, discontented, remarkably plain, sullen, remote, disconsolate--so critics, art historians, and the public have mythologized Hortense Fiquet in viewing her portraits." A broad and quick survey of the portraits will show where these myths came from: Hortense's features are alternately blocky and withered, her facial expressions are generally distant and disinterested, and her settings are thoroughly domestic. She just seems to sit dully there, doesn't she? Closer scrutiny, however, will show that Cézanne painted her with uncanny sensitivity--not with easy affection or cloying attachment, but with an attention to character that you might not expect from such a steely technician.

Born in 1850, Hortense was a nineteen year-old assistant bookbinder when she met Cézanne. Some of the earliest known paintings of her show her as she would appear throughout Cézanne's portraits: sitting and unoccupied, securely indoors. Yet there are exceptions to this, such as the miniscule oil-on-canvas Young Woman with Loosened Hair (1873-1874). In this simple image, Hortense's high forehead, rounded jawline, and blunt nose are unmistakable. Yet her hair is abundant, her skin is an impossible white, and her shoulders and arms are entirely bare--the closest Cézanne came to turning Hortense into a classical nude. He had other designs.

To see what exactly those designs were, make your way to Madame Cézanne's central gallery, where Amory has arranged sketches, notebooks, and one very important set of paintings. An overabundance of Cézanne's pencil-on-paper images of his wife can be found here, many of them renderings of her sewing or resting. The feeling is thoroughly domestic, though Cézanne refrained from drawing Hortense with her most obvious companions--himself and his only son Paul, whose images he sketched elsewhere. Gathering this many sketches and presenting them this coherently are yet more of Amory's successes, but she outdoes even these coups by getting four related paintings of Madame Cézanne in a red dress--one each from Sao Paulo, Basel, Chicago, and the Met itself--all in one place. The variations here are as obvious as they are intriguing: in the Basel portrait, Hortense's features are recessed and almost emaciated, a sharp contrast to the placid, mask-like demeanor of the Chicago version. The poses are almost identical, but there are inflections of mood so careful that they must be seen to be understood.

Yet the heavier drama of Cézanne's life found no place in these portraits. And drama there was; the artist kept Hortense away from his disapproving family, only married her in 1886 (fourteen years after young Paul was born), and lived separately from her for much of the rest of his life. His friends in the art world never thought much of Hortense, either. It seems odd, in retrospect, that anyone could think ill of a portrait sitter who could yield Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory--a painting that approaches sentimentality and that is rescued by the sureness of its technique. With the exception of the twining and preternaturally inspired sketch Madame Cézanne with Hortensias (1885), this is one of the few times when Hortense--her skin lightened, her eyes softened--is depicted with almost unequivocal tenderness. The darkened blues of Hortense's dress and the gold tones of her surroundings are among Cézanne's most beautiful color choices. Then there is the uncomfortable pushed-forward background; there are the scratches of paint that form Hortense's hands. A sympathetic portrait, but a portrait that keeps Cézanne's radical credentials intact.

As wrong and bizarre as it is to cast Hortense as a villain, this show neither can nor should reimagine her as a hero. Doing so would be as desperate as trying to put Leonard Woolf on the same level as Virginia, and an artist of Cézanne's self-discipline would have steadily worked his way toward mastery with or without Madame. Yet I will never share the disappointment of all those viewers and critics, then and now, who have wanted Hortense to be a seductive muse or have wished for an affair between Cézanne and Mary Cassat. The final virtue of the paintings in Madame Cézanne is that they picture an unassuming middle-class woman as an unassuming middle-class woman, and do so with complete conviction. They are more in the vein of Flaubert than of any of the moderns who dissected, analyzed, and re-analyzed Cézanne's compositions; through the most judicious distortions, these images capture an opaque subject, and become luminous art. Again, Paul Cézanne would probably have become a master artist without Hortense by his side--but probably not a master of this sort.

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