Cezanne: It's all about paint

Paul Cezanne, Still Life with a Ginger Jar and Eggplants, 1893-4, 

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

The Tate have done well out of their Cezanne exhibition, a sold-out crowd pleaser by a reliable 'big name'. More importantly, they have done well by the artist, presenting an unpreachy, semi-thematic chronology of his life and work which ticks most of the boxes. There is a nod to inclusivity, with contemporary artist comments, some of which work better than others. There are a few blind alleys: it is difficult to politicise Cezanne and the attempt here seems rather tokenist. There are some thin areas - I would personally have liked to see more portraiture. But generally it is a job well done.

An exhibition like this, by such a well-known artist, does not have to be clever or innovative. There is enough of a wow-factor just to stand in front of the paintings and be reminded of the colour and the brush marks, the scale and the subtle details which get overlooked in reproduction. But a great exhibition by a great artist perhaps needs to attempt something more, so that you leave feeling that you have not just re-energised your view, but you have actually had to completely rethink it. I am not sure that happens in the Tate show. Cezanne is still the reality-challenging, proto-Cubist 'father of modern art', still the purveyor of apples and mountains and vertical blue seas. 

Paul Cezanne, Self Portrait against a Pink Background, 1875, Musee d'Orsay

The exhibition begins with a self portrait, the only one there, despite his many iterations. The bald head and beard, a prematurely aged 36 year old, looking a little too serious, are so familiar he could be a member of the family. The caption points out  'flamboyant pink' wallpaper, a suggestive description which both seems unnecessary and inappropriate, and misses the point. The background is not background: it is as solid and integral and important as the figure. The fleshy pinkness of it is, if anything, more alive than the pallid forehead skin of the artist. The closer you get and the longer you look, the more the two forms play off each other, with a repeated colour here, a brushstroke there. The more the solidity, the reality of the two - one a three-dimensional solid, the other a flat plan - merge into the single constructed reality of the picture surface, and the physical tactility of the paint marks.

The second room contains a small, heavily impasto'ed still life with a blue cup from around 1866, an example of what the exhibition, quoting Cezanne, calls his 'ballsy' style. The paint is slapped on, almost angrily, the complete antithesis of the controlled regularity of hatched strokes which feature so prominently in his later work. The colour sings, richly sensual, so the everyday objects take on a jewel-like glistening as if the canvas has been gem-encrusted. And it is colour that remains key: zesty citrus, poison-red and acid-green apples, so intense and involving, so real and solid. Those cool, grey-greens and violet-blues which create an interior space, at once believable and unreal, in which Cezanne's spatial experiments seem calmingly normalised. Fall into the background of one of his large still lives and drown in the careful subtlety of it, the warming pinks that tinge the grey, the repeated resonances.

You almost don't need the nine other crowded rooms where people jostle to see more still lives, more views of l'Estaque, more Mont St Victoires. In many ways the landscapes are the least involving aspect of the show. His debt to Pissarro is large and lingering: all those lattices of tree trunks and branches. The orange, green, blue palette of his l'Estaque views seems unsubtle and the sudden intrusion of geometry which punctuates these landscapes strikes a discordant note, intentional or otherwise. It is not Cezanne's fault that these became such iconic inspiration to early Cubists, but the lingering taste for faceting, flattening and abstraction somehow stales these canvases. The connection between artist and subject, which seems so integral to the still lives is less immediate. And it is not until the late great dialogue with Mont St Victoire that I feel it renewed.

Paul Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-6, Philadelphia Museum of Art

Cezanne is usually presented as a painter of ideas, a man for whom subject was a vehicle for form, but so many aspects of his career seem to work against this view. His dark early subject matter, his preference for people he knew over professional models, his obsessive revisiting of what he loved; and most of all his intense, evocative, immersive love of colour. Cezanne comes across as a man who felt deeply, for whom the act of seeing - even seeing the everyday and the ordinary - was profound, perhaps even spiritual. It turned air into something tangible and solid: there are canvases where the sky and the mountain are fused into a mesh of pinks, violets and greys. It turned a piece of fruit into something eternal and significant. It monumentalised the everyday into a new meta-reality of richness, pattern and texture which defies the laws of physics and rationality. You have no choice but to take his pictures at faith value. The Tate's exhibition presents a surfeit of Cezannes but in the end, I really only wanted to be on my own with one and get a long, quiet, uninterrupted period of time to look. And look. And look. 

Is there any place for Pierre-Paul Prud'hon in a post #metoo art world?

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Venus and Adonis, 1812, Wallace Collection

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon (1758-1823) who died two hundred years ago this year is an also-ran in the history of art. A successful artist but not a great one, who might feature in studies of Neoclassicism or early Romanticism, but who barely justifies mention in more general surveys. More recently he has been recast by feminist art history as a prime example of stultifying, possibly even toxic, masculinity because of his close professional and personal association with Catherine Mayer. Mayer, a woman artist sixteen years his junior, suffered the all-too-common fate of having many of her works reattributed to Prud'hon by an art market seeking profit and an art academia which until recently found it almost inconceivable that women could paint.

In the middle of all this Prud'hon's work itself can get lost. He was a slow starter. Born in Cluny, his talent was spotted by local priest and he was sent to study in Dijon on a local council scholarship. He first competed unsuccessfully for the Prix de Rome in 1776, and spent three years in Paris from 1780, before finally winning the scholarship to Italy. 

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon The Glorification of the Government of Bourgogne, 1786, 

Musee des Beaux Arts, Dijon

Prud'hon favoured a soft style of sfumato shadows and rich tones and by 1801 he was known as 'the French Correggio', although as much for his well-known decorative schemes as for his colouration. He claimed his biggest influence was Leonardo da Vinci, for his Treatise on Art as much as his works - Prud'hon could only have viewed The Last Supper in person. The sculptor Antonio Canova, who became a close personal friend and tried to persuade the Frenchman to stay in Rome, was another key figure whose clean, light interpretation of classicism can be seen in Prud'hon's draughtmanship. 

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, The Union of Love and Friendship, 1793, Minneapolis Institute of Art

Back in Paris, Prud'hon found himself and his style out of step with Davidian Neoclassicism. He was determined to make a name, but chose to do so in the slightly old-fashioned field of classical allegory, rather than mythological narrative or antique history. What motived him as an artist were ideas, and in allegorical subjects he was able to condense ideas into a simple, easily read composition. His first Salon success in 1793, An Allegory and Love and Friendship, has an almost sculptural simplicity  with the two figures, their marble-like flesh highlighted, standing almost independently of the background landscape.

He painted portraits throughout his career, with little enthusiasm as a financial imperative although, ironically, they are now some of his best known work. Perhaps the most famous, is his representation of  Empress Josephine, semi-reclined in a romanticised landscape which suggests a kind of Rousseau-esque communication with nature. Characteristically, Prud'hon spend several years perfecting the image. Her pose is reminiscent of Canova's sculpture of Pauline Bonaparte as Venus but the dress and setting - the gardens at Malmaison - are more obviously contemporary. And despite the back-to-naturism, Josephine remains regal with her tiara and Imperial red. Prud'hon benefitted greatly from the patronage of the Bonaparte family, producing decorative commissions as well as portraits.

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, The Empress Josephine, 1805, Louvre

The Josephine portrait exemplifies another characteristic of Prud'hon's work: his proto-Romanticism. Arguably he was just following a growing contemporary trend as artists like Girodet and Gerard injected their classicism with more dramatic lighting, natural settings and increasingly dynamic compositions.  For the next generation, however, Prud'hon's work had more appeal: Gericault and Delacroix both cited him as influential because his brushwork had a looseness which other neoclassical artists lacked. Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, despite its characteristic allegorical subject has a drama and movement lacking in Prud'hon's earlier work. Strong chiaroscuro illuminates the contorted curve of the foreground nude and there's a dynamic cross canvas composition emphasised by the arching limbs, wings and flying draperies.

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Justice and Divine Vengeance Pursuing Crime, 1808, Louvre

The collaboration between Prud-hon and Mayer is almost impossible to untangle. It seems likely that Prud'hon worked on the initial stages - drawing and composition - and Mayer then took over the painting. Prud-hon was something of a perfectionist, who found it difficult to complete works anyway. He preferred drawing, and certainly preferred generating ideas to the hard graft of seeing them through. Mayer was looking for a way to exhibit history painting in a world which considered it an unsuitable genre for a woman. They mutually agreed that works would be exhibited under Mayer's name, and their years together were the most productive of Prud'hon's life. In a sense they were both exploiting, or benefitting from, each other, depending on one's point of view.

Pierre-Paul Prud'hon, Constance Mayer, (chalk), c.1804, Louvre

From a twenty-first century standpoint, the most unsettling aspect of Prud-hon's relationship with Mayer is their personal one. Prud'hon had a difficult private life: six children, an unstable and estranged wife and precarious finances. Mayer seems to have been drawn into this - in what exact circumstances we will never know - becoming a surrogate mother, housekeeper and, eventually, presumably, sexual partner. It is easy to see Mayer as a victim, but she appears determined and self-aware in her professional life; she had strong family bonds of her own and she was financially self-sufficient. What is impossible to ignore is the fact that she suicide in 1821, using Prud'hon's own razor, after he refused to marry her. 

So, what are we left with. Prud'hon organised an exhibition of Mayer's work after her death. He survived her by only two years. He also completed her final painting and exhibited it as his own. Their collaboration was complete and confusing right to the end. Perhaps some would argue that after two hundred years it is time for Prud'hon to step back and allow Mayer to share some of the art historical limelight. She made him the better artist. He caused her death. Ultimately, however, she benefitted from working with him, producing paintings, achieving status and gaining patrons she would never, because of when she worked and who she was, have been able to achieve herself. 

Art history isnot very comfortable wth collaboration, but Prud'hon and Mayer were a team. And a damn good team at that.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham: Endlessly Inventive Abstraction

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Red Painting, 1957, © Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust

Two significant exhibitions open in February 2023 which should finally lay to rest the myth that post-War Abstraction was an art form dominated by white, male Americans. The Whitechapel Gallery is showing 'Action Gesture Paint: Women Artists and Global Abstraction 1940-70' (Feb 9- May 7 2023) and in Newcastle, the Hatton Gallery has a retrospective of Wilhelmina Barns-Graham's work 'Paths to Abstraction' (Feb 11 - May 20). These are by no means the first exhibitions to showcase the work of women abstract artists. Dulwich's 2021 'Radical Beauty' looked at Helen Frankenthaler's woodcuts and in 2019 the Barbican quashed the belief that Lee Krasner was merely the wife of Jackson Pollock. However, coming on top of the head of steam generated by both the promotion of women's and global surrealism at the Venice Biennale and the break-out popularity of Katy Hessel's The Story of Art Without Men, this feels like a 'moment'. Perhaps women abstract artists can finally be seen and appreciated on their own terms and for their own work.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham (1912-2004) is hardly a household name despite a prolific sixty-five year career. Born in St Andrews, she struggled against her family's opposition and to her studying art and ended up spending an extended period at Edinburgh College of Art 1931-9, partly through ill health. She received numerous prizes, including a scholarship to travel in Europe in 1939, but the war intervened. Instead, in 1940 she and fellow Scot, Margaret Mellis, moved to Cornwall, becoming part of the St Ives School which included Barbara Hepworth and Ben Nicholson.  Barns-Graham was a talented draughtswoman and watercolourist, but during the 1940s in St Ives, she started to experiment with Cubsit-influenced abstraction, flattening and simplifying the landscape forms which remained an inspiration throughout her life. In 1948 she visited Switzerland, and produced the first in what was to be a series of over twenty paintings of glaciers.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham, Glacier Crystal Grindelwald, 1950, Tate, © Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust

She maintained a studio in St Ives until her death, but after the War she was increasingly out of step with the competitive environment there. She moved briefly to Leeds with her husband, the poet David Lewis whom she had married in 1949, but they separated after only six years. After inheriting a house in St Andrews in 1960, Scotland once again became her home. British abstraction was dominated by the St Ives artists and Barns-Graham's reputation undoubtedly suffered because she was an ambivalent presence there. Only three of her works, for instance, were shown in the major 1985 Tate exhibition on the School. But her independent stance allowed her work to develop more freely: one of the characteristics of her career is that she continually moved forward, producing some of her most exciting and colourful canvases in the 1990s and beyond.

British abstract art sometimes seems weighed down by post-War austerity, the poor relation of America in scale and colour. Barns-Graham, who began her St Ives career, painting pallidly-lit, sometimes almost monochrome landscapes and townscapes, initially favoured a similarly Cubist influenced abstraction. However, her work through the 1950s showed a desire to explore a range of styles, from her introduction of rich colour, to strong linearity and the use of crisply geometric small cubes and circles. That experimentation intensified with her move back to St Andrews, with canvases exploring bold colour blocks and formalist titles.

Wilhelmina Barns-Graham Oblongs Cobalt Blue on Violet 1969, Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster, © Wilhelmina Barnes-Graham Trust

She experimented with collage and screen printing, and increasingly returned to the drawing which had always been at the basis of her practice, for instance with a series of wave-inspired works - Water Movement - in the 1990s. Her last works featured bold life-enhancing colour, with titles like Boogie and Celebration at 90, as if she was determined that age would not wither her work. Barns-Graham is a genuinely inspiring artist, a woman determined to overcome personal difficulties, masculine egos and institutional prejudice because she had an unstoppable desire to express herself in paint. Women artists - Krasner being a case in point - are often more ready to embrace varied styles, a characteristic that was in the past criticised as somehow femininely fickle or indecisive. Barns-Graham exemplifies the virtue of that drive to create and innovate. It kept her producing right up to her death. It means there is literally something for everyone in her work. She really deserves to be better known. 

Barns-Graham is not included in the Whitechapel exhibition - an oversight surely - but over 80 artists are, including British painters like Gillian Ayres (1930-2018) and Lilian Holt (1898-1983). 

Judith Leyster and the Problem with Women Artists

Judith Leyster, Self Portrait, c.1630, National Gallery of Art, Washington

It is impossible to look at Judith Leyster's (1609-60) self portrait and not want to know more about her both as an artist and as a woman. She twists towards us, head tilted, mouth open, eager to engage us in conversation, perhaps to explain what she is painting. The brushes and palette sit easily in her fingers: her thumb, little more than an inelegant smear, grips strongly; the little figure on the brushes has a delicate lightness. The ruff around her neck generates a swirl of movement; somehow what should be a restrictive item of clothing instead becomes a character trait of liveliness. It's all a pose, of course, she would never paint in such formal clothes; the picture on the easel has already been changed from a self portrait to one of her  more marketable genre pieces. But it's also believably down to earth. This is a woman without vanity, a woman capable of competing with men, a woman who can be her own boss. 

And then we learn that this is also the woman who gave up painting when she married, a woman who spent the rest of her life simply supporting her husband's career. There is the crux of the problem with women artists - are they victims or trail-blazers, are they competing with men or displaced by them? Can they ever just be women who paint?

For the first twenty-seven years of her life Judith Leyster was a feminist icon. Unlike many women artists she did not just fall into the profession accidently, the daughter of a painter who provided cheap studio labour and apprenticeship for the family business. Her teacher, Frans Pietersz de Grebber's own daughter, Maria, had a moderately successful career through just such a route. Perhaps it was the presence of another young woman which made Leyster's father choose de Grebber when he decided Judith should learn the trade, a financially motivated decision after his own business went bankrupt. 

Judith Leyster, Merry Trio, 1629-31, private collection

Leyster was soon making a name for herself. By 1635, she was the only female member of the Haarlem Guild of St Luke; she had her own studio and apprentices; she was competing with Frans Hals. For six or seven brief years, she seemed capable of carving out a career. Yet we have tantalisingly few works on which to base this assumption. Even allowing for those lost to time, she never seems to have been prolific (and you needed to churn the art out to survive in the competitive marketplace of seventeenth century Haarlem). The works we do have are varied and variable, as if the twentysomething Leyster was still finding herself, and her buyers. She produces exuberant, loose-brushed figures like those of Frans Hals', like that self portrait. She has a good line in more humorous genre groups, like those of Hals' brother Dirck, or indeed of Jan Miense Molenaer, her future husband.

Judith Leyster, Serenade, c.1629, The Rijksmuseum

Her most exciting, innovative works are those which seem to take their inspiration from Utrecht, where Caravaggio's drama, compositional tricks and chiaroscuro were being emulated. Leyster's Serenade with its backlit theatricality and immediacy of performance is full of such elements, and the halo-effect is genuinely innovative, but her quieter explorations of light, using a single flame are even more effective. In A Game of Cards, the light source is only visible in reflection, the shadowy interior seems safe and warming rather than sinister; the apron-wearing woman, perhaps a servant having a rare moment of leisure, seems an involved equal in the game, looking across to an unseen companion with the same open expression we see in Leyster's self portrait. 

Judith Leyster, A Game of Cards, 1633, private collection

In 1636, however, Leyster, married. Her husband was a successful genre painter with contacts in Amsterdam and they moved there. We have very little evidence of her life after that. She had five children, only two of whom survived. In 1648, the family moved to a house in the countryside near Haarlem. There are various cases relating to money. Several art historians have suggested, not entirely convincingly, that Judith is recognisable as a model in her husband's works. There are only two Leyster paintings - a watercolour of tulips, and a recently rediscovered flower picture - which date from after 1636. 

Certainly, more Leyster works might be uncovered. Until the late nineteenth century, there were none: she had been effectively written out of history with all her paintings ascribed to either Molenaer of Frans Hals. However, we are unlikely to find a large body of missing paintings, and it seems much more likely that Leyster gave up painting independently, content to work with her husband in the studio, modelling, mixing paint, possibly even to contribute to his signed works. She also seems to have taken a lead in promoting him and dealing with his clients. There is no evidence that she resented or regretted this role, nor, I think, should we see it imposed on her by patriarchic expectations. The reality was the art for Leyster had always been about money and it made sound commercial sense for her husband, a more prolific and established artist, to be the family breadwinner.

I love Judith Leyster's work, even though it really only offers a tantalising glimpse of the painter she might have become. But I love her for her own sake, not as a woman defeated by her attempts to succeed in a man's world, not as a trailblazing feminist icon, and not as a thwarted genius. That is to misunderstand the world she lived in, and to misunderstand that exuberant, engaging person who painted herself doing a job she knew she was good at.

Catherine Read: Successful Eighteenth Century Portraitist

 

Catherine Read, Self Portrait, (Wikipedia commons)

Catherine Read (1723-78) was a successful British portraitist in pastels and oils in the second half of the eighteenth century. She was one of thirteen children born in Dundee to a wealthy family of Catholic, Jacobite supporters. After the failed 1745 rebellion, in which her uncle was executed for his involvement, the family, like many other Jacobite-sympathisers, left Scotland for Paris. There Read trained with the rococo portraitist Maurice Quentin de la Tour, as well as with Louis Blanchet and fellow Scot, Robert Strange. 

Catherine Read, British Gentlemen in Rome c.1750, Yale Center for British Art

In 1750 she moved to Rome. It too was a well-established Jacobite destination, but for Read it was also a cultural pilgrimage, her own version of the Grand Tour, taken by fashionable young men such as those she portrayed in 1750. Read gained support and commissions from the Stuart court-in-exile, from Italian aristocrats and from those British tourists. She copied a van Dyck painting of Charles I's children, in what must have been a deliberate attempt to stake her claim as a potential successor to the Stuart king's heirs. And a letter suggests that she was considered highly talented: 'Was it not for the restrictions her sex obliges her to be under, I dare safely say she would shine wonderfully in history painting', wrote Peter Grant, one of her patrons in Rome. 

Catherine Read (attributed), The Children of Charles I (after van Dyck), Bolton Museum Services

Read also secured the patronage of several prominent members of the Catholic church including Cardinal Albani, and through him she discovered the work of Rosalba Carriera. She visited Venice specifically to meet Carriera, a sign that she was already focussing on pastels, and that she was interested in meeting a fellow woman artist. By this stage Carriera was elderly and virtually blind, but she gave advice to the younger woman and it seems likely that Read painted her portrait. Read's letters however, reveal that she struggled both financially and socially. It was considered improper for unmarried women to go out alone and much religious art was out of reach to her because of her sex: 'she complains about the 'superstitious bigots' who forbade her from seeing works. Equally, her Italian clients seemed reluctant to pay a woman for their portraits, preferring to give gifts which Read was then obliged to sell. 

Catherine Read, Willielma Campbell, Lady Glenorchy, 1762, Dundee Art Gallery

Read moved to London in 1753, quickly becoming a sought after pastel and oil portraitist. Although in Rome she seems to have mainly painted portraits of men, she now became known as a portrayer of women and children, although whether by choice or because of social convention it is difficult to say. She sent an unsolicited portrait to Queen Charlotte, which impressed the queen so much that she commissioned others from Read, including a picture with an infant Prince of Wales in 1761. The Queen had a reputation for promoting women artists, employing about sixteen during her reign, and through her Read gained several other court commissions. Read also travelled to Paris and painted members of the French royal family, perhaps on the basis on her previous Jacobite connections. 

Engraving after Catherine Read, King George IV and Frederick, Duke of York and Albany, c.1765-70, National Portrait Gallery

Her work was widely engraved - a sign of popularity. She exhibited at the Free Society and was one of only two women in the inaugural 1760 exhibition of the Society of Artists, of which she was also an honorary member. Her reputation led Tobias Smollett to praise her pastels above those of Carriera. Perhaps most tellingly, Read was paid more for her portrait of Lady Glenorchy than Gainsborough received for a paired portrait of her husband. Although most of her works were of society figures, Read also painted 'women of letters' including Catharine Macaulay and Frances Brooke. 

In 1775, with her popularity in London on the wane, she travelled to India with her niece to visit one of her brothers, who was living in Madras, and gain access to the lucrative portrait market of the East India Company and the India rulers. It was while sailing back from there in 1778 that she died at sea.

Catherine Read, Frances Moore Brooke, 1771 (Wikipedia commons)

Catherine Read carved a successful career as a portraitist in the eighteenth century, first in Italy, then London, and finally in India. She came from a well-to-do family and would have had some personal income to fall back on, but nevertheless she must have made a living as a painter. She never married, there is no evidence that she struggled financially and she was able to leave money to her nieces. She also demonstrates the level of agency which women could achieve. She actively supported other female artists,  she lived independently and travelled to India with only a younger female companion.  

However, there were also restrictions which she could not overcome. Her portraiture was predominantly of women and children as it was difficult for a female artist to paint a man who was not a family member. Her oeuvre was restricted to portraiture because it was virtually impossible for a woman to be taken seriously as a history painter. And although she exhibited at the Society of Artists she never gained institutional acceptance. It took the exceptional talent of Angelica Kauffman to break these barriers.