Cézanne, Cubism and Giacometti (2).

Cézanne, Cubism and Giacometti (2): Figures.

Illustration 1: 'Self-Portrait', c. 1880, Paul Cézanne; National Gallery, London.

Cézanne's portraits are exceptional for their sense of detachment and impersonality. One might say they attempt to erase the ego of each subject. In 'Self Portrait', c. 1880 (Illustration 1), the head and shoulder are represented as spherical forms, with reiterations of mini-hemispheres: a domed forehead, eye-socket and nose.

' ... to treat nature through the cylinder, the sphere, the cone ... ' - Cézanne.

Directional brushstrokes describe rounded surfaces as planes, producing a faceted, mask-like appearance, reinforced by the glassy right eye. This blocks the viewer's inclination to make inferences about psychology or mood. I would argue that the painter has reduced character to the level of form; or that form has become character.

Illustration 2: 'Portrait of Ambroise Vollard', 1899, Paul Cézanne.

This is most apparent in 'Portrait of Ambroise Vollard', 1899 (Illustration 2). The struggle to convincingly depict Vollard's forward-projecting knee, the weight of his body folding into a chair or the positioning of his head on the torso's receding plane, makes the sitter a remote but uniquely individual presence.

Illustration 3: 'Portrait of Ambroise Vollard', 1910, Pablo Picasso.

Picasso's 'Portrait of Ambroise Vollard', 1910 (Illustration 3), shows the extent to which the artist imitated, but also veered away from, Cézanne. In its 'Analytical' phase, the Cubist image is like a mirror made from overlapping, shattered fragments; each piece offering glimpses of the model, but from separate angles.

Illustration 4: 'Seated Nude', 1909-10, Pablo Picasso; Tate Modern, London.

Whereas with 'Portrait of Ambroise Vollard', 1899 (Illustration 2), we trust the artwork to be a 'construction from nature' (Cézanne), the modernist tendency is to use the model merely as an adjunct to a construction (the painting). The result is what Avigdor Arikha described as a 'chequerboard' surface:

' ... although it [Cubism] sprang from Cézanne, it also departed from him by separating the act of seeing from the act of painting the visible' - Arikha, 'Cézanne: From Tremor To Chequerboard' (1976).

For all of Cubism's formal innovation and complexity, Picasso's 'Vollard' appears to have become little more than an emblem of a real person.


When Alberto Giacometti turned away from Surrealism and Abstraction, c. 1935, one of his key points of departure (besides Ancient Egyptian, Etruscan and Oceanic Art) was Cézanne. Giacometti's breakthrough sculptural busts and figurative paintings can be viewed as a twentieth-century re-imagining of Paul Cézanne's uncertainty before the life-model. André Breton said: 'Everybody knows what a head is!'. Yet, Giacometti's great 'lesson' is that the essence of an object, considered phenomenologically (and most especially the human being as object), is unknowable. His work imparts this belief as a truth more profound than art itself.

Illustration 5: 'The Artist's Mother', 1937, Alberto Giacometti.

'The Artist's Mother', 1937 (Illustration 5), establishes a sense of anxiety regarding the model's spatial positioning. A subject that should be most familiar is rendered alien - lost in an endlessly shifting visual field. The labour to temporarily 'hold' the physical reality of a living body produces facial characteristics that are obscure. Curiously, this quality - which can be detected in 'pre-classical' art - seemed more 'life-like' to Giacometti than the 'modern', Western method of photographic realism.

Illustration 6: 'Caroline', 1965, Alberto Giacometti.

Late works, eg. 'Caroline', 1965 (Illustration 6), close-down the space between artist and female model, subjugating the dominance of the viewer's gaze to her reciprocal stare. This elicits an ungraspable spiritual presence that is contained within the feminine, and human, form.