How Cézanne helped invent the modern portrait

LATE in life, Paul Cézanne told his art dealer Ambroise Vollard that “the culmination of all art is the human face.” It’s a peculiar assertion, coming from the master of landscape and still-life, whom Matisse and Picasso revered as “the father of us all”. But Cézanne also painted scores of portraits over a 50-year career, and they tell a surprising story. As an unprecedented new exhibition persuasively argues, it is through this lesser-known aspect of his work that the master of Aix-en-Provence found his artistic voice.

“Cézanne’s Portraits” is the first exhibition in more than a century to bring his major portraits under one roof. Conceived by curators in three countries, it was a hit at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris and opened in late October at London’s National Portrait Gallery. It will travel to the National Gallery in Washington, DC next March. Not since Vollard showed 24 Cézanne portraits in 1910 have art-lovers been able to see so many of these paintings side by side. What they reveal is Cézanne’s continuous experimentation, and even a reinvention of the very genre of the portrait. Taken together, these paintings of others constitute a portrait of the man himself, and his evolution as an artist.

Cézanne was immediately interested in the human figure when he started painting in the 1860s. The earliest portraits in the show are of family members and of himself. Yet quickly his paintings began to betray as much interest in materials and form as in the depiction of a particular person. A series of thick, heavily modelled heads of his Uncle Dominique set the tone: the viewer watches the painter at work, attempting variation upon variation. These energetic works, plastered with a palette knife, are viscous and fleshy, marking a first step away from the traditional idea of portraiture, says the show’s lead curator, John Elderfield. Although the formal, commissioned portrait reflecting social status was no longer in vogue, the idea that a portrait should reflect a psychological likeness remained current. Cézanne, with his bold, flat use of colour reminiscent of Edouard Manet and Gustave Courbet, called even this into question.

After these “Defiant Beginnings”, as the exhibition terms them, Cézanne spent time with the Impressionists, lending his next portraits a looser approach, flecked with light. A painting from 1877 of Hortense Fichet, his lover and the mother of their son, wearing a striped skirt, stands out for its dappled beauty and formal balance; her face is composed of blocks of colour. “There is nothing quite like this in the previous history of portraiture,” Mr Elderfield says. Cézanne continues innovating with self-portraits using impressionistic strokes and dabs. But he is increasingly absorbed by the sculptural qualities of the human figure, more interested in the volumes of the face than its expression. By the mid-1880s, any idea that a portrait should reflect the mood or personality of the sitter is decidedly dashed.

Among the show’s most powerful and unsettling portraits are those of Hortense, who became his wife, and whom he painted repeatedly over the subsequent years. The works shock with their absence of emotion. Cézanne depicts his wife in a red dress as if she is no more nor less than a bowl of fruit: distant, geometric, rigid. This is precisely the point. Cézanne’s goal was to paint “the objective presence of someone—the vivid, raw permanent presence of the thing seen”, Mr Elderfield has said. For a decade the artist had been painting fruit and landscapes of similar heft. In these portraits he liberates the figure from the dictate of resemblance—either physical or psychological—and steps decisively into the modern.

The two final sections of the exhibition offer a joyous explosion of what most viewers will recognise as Cézanne’s mature style—from his famous bathers to the views of L’Estaque and Mont Sainte-Victoire. In his last decade he painted peasants near his home in southern France, along with chosen friends, using patches of shimmering colour like prisms to create a sense of depth and volume. Aspects of this softer touch and melding of figure and landscape appear in peasant models for his “Card Players”, for example. Delicate rainbows are clearest in the faces of two of his most contemplative portraits, those of Vollard and of the “Woman with a Cafétière”. The extraordinary final portraits of his gardener, Vallier, in both dark interior and blazing sunlight, confirm Cézanne’s ultimate achievement. In this new art of portraiture, there is indeed emotion—arising not from the subject’s face but from the painter’s brush.