Influencing the course of painting
Andrew Wordsworth on two exhibitions which consider the origins of modern art
ertain pedigrees are above suspicion: who in their right mind would question Cezanne's status as the father of modern art? And if one had to find someone else to take his place, who could it possibly be? The organisers of an exhibition now on in Venice have come up with an original idea: they suggest that the man who most influenced the course of early 20th-century painting was none other than Pierre Puvis de Chavannes (1824-98).
All 36 rooms of Palazzo Grassi are brought into play to support this claim. With the assurance of Hercules Poirot revealing to the assembled guests that the least likely suspect is in fact the culprit, the exhibition sets out to demonstrate that this relatively unknown figure painter was a major influence on artists as varied as Gauguin and Seurat, Picasso and Matisse; and that he was an important model for painters working in countries as far apart as Russia, Norway and the United States. The basic premise is that, with his firm drawing and simplified compositions, Puvis liberated the human figure from the naturalistic context of 19th-century painting. In so doing, he offered younger painters not only a large vocabulary of sculptural images which they could then develop and reinterpret, but also the sense of a new relationship between the human body and the natural world.
This is a wide-ranging exhibition which, like a good anthology of poetry, offers some pleasant surprises and discoveries — one of them being Scandinavian painting, so often ignored or underrated, and which for once is fairly represented. However, the scope of the survey also creates problems. For although paintings are selected according to a common denominator — the human figure in a natural setting — the differences in style and treatment are so great as to undermine the idea of shared aims and values. While it is clear that the language of 19th-century naturalism could not con tain the different movements — Symbolist. Post-Impressionist, Expressionist or whatever — that evolved at the end of that century, it makes little sense to try and establish a family tree capable of explaining the birth and growth of all these styles — though this is precisely what the catalogue does, proposing Puvis as patriarch, an Abrahamlike figure fathering tribe after tribe of painters.
Even within the context of Parisian painting there was intense debate. While many French artists would have concurred with Puvis in paying special attention to the human figure — and in particular to the female nude — only the most superficial reading of this period could suggest that they were all working in the same direction. For example, Puvis's clean, well-behaved and characterless nudes are light years away from Toulouse-Lautrec's prostitutes. And while Puvis may have shared with Degas a rigorous academic training, and a wonderful sureness of drawing, the two men parted company fairly soon. Degas's treatment of the body became more and more daring: by opening up the contradiction between surface colour and anatomical form (particularly in his pastels) he proposed a new pictorial language which would influence many 20th-century painters — Francis Bacon among them.
Puvis's style was essentially decorative, and the exhibition is right to point out the relation between his work and that of Gauguin and Matisse, with their tendency to use flat areas of warm and pleasing colour, together with simplified forms painted without tension or violence. But the proposed link with Picasso is much more suspect — it's hard to see what the aggressive and rebellious Spaniard could have had in common with the man who painted frescoes with such edifying titles as 'Rest', 'Work', or 'The Sacred Wood'. Picasso may have borrowed certain elements from Puvis, but then he was an inveterate magpie who borrowed or stole from anyone if it suited him.
But it is Cezanne who more than anyone else calls into question the theme of this exhibition. Puvis's canvases of women bathing in a river are hung near to Cezanne's Ilaigneuses', yet the paintings seem to belong to different worlds. It's not just that Puvis's models are elegant and well-proportioned, while Cezanne's women are resolutely lumpish and unresolved, the whole dynamic of the painting is radically different as well. Puvis constructs in a tradi tional 19th-century manner, organising individual elements, each of which is con sidered separately, into a composition which finally generates a collective meaning. Cezanne moves in the opposite direction. From the outset he conceives of his painting as a synthetic whole, and he orchestrates the different elements so as to establish the most sat
isfying relation between them. He places his figures against the trees so as to create a tension between the trunk of the human body and 'Le Pont de Maincy', 1879-80, by Cezanne. Mtisee d'Orsay. Paris, can be seen in Rome the trunk of the tree;
or he develops rhymes between knees, breasts, and buttocks, modelling each curved form as if it were an apple placed on a napkin. Cezanne consistently rejects the humanist values which underpinned 19th-century painting, and which Puvis's painting upholds, and similarly he refuses the narrative devices and literary references that are vital to Puvis.
So where does this leave the debate on the origins of modern art? By a happy coincidence, an exhibition has just opened in Rome which considers the modernity of Cezanne's work. Anyone lucky enough to be able to visit both Venice and Rome in the next few months therefore has the chance to take the argument a stage further. The Rome exhibition is compact. with 64 works that show the main themes that Cezanne worked on in the course of his career. One of the interesting features here is a number of watercolours and drawings, which remind us that for him the act of painting was always a question of studying, learning and recording — rather than of working towards finished and marketable pictures.
Watercolour, though, not only provides a technique for noting immediate sensations; it also offers a principle — that of weightlessness and transparency — which allows the artist to analyse form more fully, by dissolving the solidity of objects and establishing new relationships between the surface and structure of things. It is surely for this reason that towards the end of his life Cezanne used oils more and more as if they were watercolours — diluting the paint until it was very thin, and then building up texture with fine tissues of translucent colour. The exhibition offers a number of examples of this evolution in Cezanne's technique, which not only laid the groundwork for the glinting, shimmering surfaces of Picasso's Cubist canvases, but have also made it possible for generations of artists to watch Cezanne's thought processes at work, and to appreciate better the essential facts of nature that he tried to lay bare.
`Cezanne is the father of us all,' declared Picasso, and no one contradicted him. Yet while Cezanne was — and has remained — the perfect example of a painter's painter, his overriding preoccupation with the faithful rendering of form and colour did not interest everyone. The Venice exhibition is useful in that it reminds us of the broader picture, of the wide variety of currents that together led to modern art. To this extent the two exhibitions are complementary rather than contradictory: together they offer an interesting double portrait of a culture on the verge of crisis.
From Puvis de Chavannes to Picasso and Matisse, Towards Modern Art, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, until 16 June. Cezanne, the Father of Modern Art, Complesso del Vittoriano, Rome, until 7 July.
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