Annotated Mona Lisa, The - Strickland, Carol [89]
NUDES. “The culmination of art is figure painting,” Cézanne said, and, in his last ten years, he was obsessed with the theme of nude bathers in an outdoor setting. Because of his extreme slowness in execution, his shyness, and a fear of his prudish neighbors’ suspicions, Cézanne did not work from live models. Instead he tacked up reproductions of paintings by Rubens and El Greco and drew on his own imagination rather than observation. The result — in a series of canvases — is abstracted figures as immobile as his still lifes.
Cézanne was unaffected when, in the last years of his life, recognition finally came. He continued to work just as doggedly in isolation, until the day he died. Modern artists now consider him an oracle who invented his own fusion of the real and abstract. “The greatest source of Cubism,” the sculptor Jacques Lipchitz said, “was unquestionably ... the late works of Cézanne.” Like Giotto, who pioneered realistic representation, Cézanne initiated a major — though opposite — shift in art history. Cézanne liberated art from reproducing reality by reducing reality to its basic components.
GAUGUIN: “LIFE IS COLOR.” “The man who came from far and who will go far” is what van Gogh called his friend Paul Gauguin (1848- 1903). Both were true. Gauguin had lived in Peru as a child, spent six years before the mast as a young man sailing to exotic ports, and — before he was through — counted the South Seas islands as home.
In another sense, Gauguin had come from a vocation as far removed as the moon from the artist’s life. For more than a decade, he was a prosperous Parisian stockbroker, a middle-class father of five who took up Sunday painting in 1873 and exhibited a thoroughly conventional picture in the Salon. By 1883, Gauguin had ditched his family for his new love — art — and jettisoned traditional painting for what he called “savage instinct.” Not long after, the former financial wizard painted his Paris apartment chrome yellow, with the Tahitian words for “Here One Loves” over the door, and paraded the boulevards with a monkey on his shoulder and an outlandishly dressed Javanese girl on his arm.
It was obvious from the beginning Gauguin’s life would be extraordinary. As an extremely gifted child always carving wood, a neighbor had predicted of him, “He’ll be a great sculptor.” At the age of nine Gauguin saw a picture of a hobo and ran away from home, yearning to amble down country roads with a bundle tied to a stick. “The boy is either a genius or a fool,” his headmaster concluded.
When Gauguin became a full-time painter at 35, he headed for Pont-Aven in Brittany, a backward province on the French coast where, he said, “I find the primitive and the savage.” He proceeded, as he said, “to restore painting to its sources,” meaning to primal emotion and imagination. In the process, Gauguin transformed art. His version of the crucifixion, “Yellow Christ,” shows Christ (with Gauguin’s own face) completely yellow, with the cross planted in Brittany surrounded by orange-colored trees. He used neither perspective nor chiaroscuro (which he dismissed as “hostile to color”). Young avant-garde painters (especially the group later known as the Nabis, including Vuillard and Bonnard) flocked to Pont-Aven to observe the master’s startling use of color. “A meter of green is greener than a centimeter if you wish to express greenness,” he told them, recommending this full approach to life as well: “Eat well, kiss well, work ditto and you’ll die happy.”
Gauguin, “Vision after the Sermon, or Jacob Wrestling with an Angel,” 1888, National Gallery of Scotland, Edinburgh. Gauguin followed his own advice, “Don’t copy too much from nature. Art is an abstraction. ” He stylized the Breton women witnessing a supernatural vision to make them symbols of faith. He painted the ground red, separating the “real” world of the women in the foreground from the “imaginary” world of Jacob wrestling with the angel by the