Paul Cézanne, The Large Bathers, 1906, oil on canvas, 82-7/8 x 98-3/4″ / 210.5 x 250.8 cm (Philadelphia Museum of Art)
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Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:05] Since the Renaissance — think of Michelangelo’s “David” — the body had been sacrosanct, the human body had been accorded the most attention, the most respect in the history of art.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:15] That’s right, the body was a primary vehicle for artists to convey ideas and emotion.
Dr. Zucker: [0:22] But at the very beginning of the 20th century, in the last years of Paul Cézanne’s life, he begins to deconstruct the body.
Dr. Harris: [0:28] We’re looking at Paul Cézanne’s “Large Bathers” in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. The subject of bathers is one that has a long history. Think of paintings of Diana and Actaeon, by artists like Titian and Rubens, for example; artists like Degas were grappling with how to paint the nude in a modern environment.
[0:49] I think Cézanne is also picking up that challenge: how do you paint the modern nude?
Dr. Zucker: [0:55] When we think about Cézanne, we think about an artist who began as an Impressionist, whose emphasis might have been on the modern world.
Dr. Harris: [1:01] Even though he’s worked on this series of bathers for years, the figures are remarkably unfinished, where we see sized canvas underneath in so many places, where faces and forms of the body are barely sketched in, are barely begun. The figures are being manipulated and moved and shifted in order to fit into some overall composition that he has in mind.
Dr. Zucker: [1:27] Cézanne seems to be reaching for a kind of classicism You had mentioned Titian, and this painting seems to be reaching back to those grand traditions.
Dr. Harris: [1:36] Right, and if we look at the Titian of Diana and Actaeon that Cézanne probably just saw a print of, it does seem as though Cézanne is thinking back to that Titian, to architectural forms, to the pyramid of the Renaissance, to the way that Titian opened up the central space of that composition to bring our eye into a deep recession of the landscape.
Dr. Zucker: [1:57] Titian, the great late Renaissance Venetian, is known for his glazing, for his ability to create chiaroscuro, to create the turn of the body, flesh that has a translucency, and Cézanne’s figures seem as if they’re made out of plaster, they almost seem as they’re fresco, they are so flat and so unfinished.
Dr. Harris: [2:14] If we think about Titian we think about the sensuality of the body, especially the female body, and here we have female figures who are anything but sensual. They’re architectonic. They seem frozen in their poses. Their bodies are elongated. In some cases, malformed. In some cases, we seem to see multiple sides of the body at once. This is anything but a luscious, sensual Venetian image.
Dr. Zucker: [2:41] Cézanne is also refusing the mythic context. In the foreground, we might be in a classicized Arcadian landscape, but on the far shore we can see the back of a horse and a man walking away from us towards a church, and we realize that this is modern France.
[2:56] And so there’s this very peculiar pictorial construction that’s offering us in the foreground, at this grand scale, this classicizing Renaissance subject matter, and then in the distance something that might be in Aix-en-Provence.
Dr. Harris: [3:07] And all painted where huge areas of the canvas are unfinished. Outlines of forms are unstable and repeated and seem to move and shift. Cézanne seems to be modeling the forms of the bodies with warm and cool colors instead of using traditional chiaroscuro.
[3:26] He’s building on Impressionism, doing something classical, and in a way setting the stage for the abstraction that will emerge in the 20th century.
Dr. Zucker: [3:36] That’s the real achievement of this painting, taking classical forms and making them subservient to the abstraction of the canvas. Cézanne is not copying the Titian. He may be inspired by it, he may be referencing it. He’s not looking at nudes in his studio and being faithful to the shapes of their bodies.
Dr. Harris: [3:53] This is not based on optical experience. It’s not based on the scene.
Dr. Zucker: [3:57] That’s right. This is opening form that allows for abstraction. You can see why this kind of painting, which was shown the year after Cézanne’s death in a retrospective in Paris, would have been so important to Matisse and to Picasso.
Dr. Harris: [4:09] It was shown in 1907, the very year that Picasso completes “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” the first painting that begins to deconstruct space and open up form in the early 20th century.
Dr. Zucker: [4:20] It is the foundation upon which Cubism is built. And so, the possibility for paintings to be about the act of painting in a very formal sense as opposed to the representation of nature that had been so much a characteristic of the 19th century.
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