Hortense Fiquet Cézanne is one of the great mystery women in art. She sat for 29 paintings by her husband and smiles in none of them. More often than not, she is portrayed indoors, a matronly woman with her hair primly parted in the middle and her dress buttoned up almost to her chin. Yet there is something appealing about her plainness. She is nothing like her contemporaries in Impressionist pictures, who pass their days at boating parties and picnics, their long dresses billowing in the breeze, sunlight warming their skin. Madame Cézanne, by contrast, looks as if she does not get out of the house much and could use a break.
The good news is that Hortense Fiquet is about to have her moment in the sun. 'Madame Cézanne,' which opened this week at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is the first exhibition devoted to Paul Cézanne's portraits of his wife. It is a remarkably comprehensive show that brings together drawings, watercolors and 24 paintings: nearly every existing painting of her, not counting the two that belong to the nonlending Barnes Foundation and remain on permanent view in Philadelphia. Organized by Dita Amory, the Met show revisits those mythic years in late-19th-century France when Cézanne was working in relative obscurity, developing a style of painting that would later be hailed as the source of all things modern. His wife was his most frequent model - and awaits rescue from decades of dismissive and even misogynistic scholarship.
She has been belittled as sullen, shallow, unfeminine and fat. Earlier scholars often mentioned that Cézanne himself joked that Hortense, as everyone called her, liked nothing except 'Switzerland and lemonade,' a comment that can be used to mean anything.
John Rewald, the Cézanne expert, claimed that Hortense had no influence on her husband whatsoever. Based on hearsay and the entrenched chauvinism of his era, Rewald described her as a clotheshorse who cared little for art. In his biography of the artist, he repeats the baseless rumor that Hortense, who was living in Paris, failed to materialize at her husband's deathbed in Aix-en-Provence because she had a pressing appointment - with her dressmaker.
The negativity that surrounds her life story extends to the paintings as well. It has often been said that Cézanne's portraits of Hortense are less sexy than the apples in his still lifes, less animated than the expressively blurred pine-tree branches in his views of Mont Sainte-Victoire. On the other hand, to learn about Hortense Cézanne is to come up quickly against the limits of biography. The gaps and omissions in her life story are more striking than the facts. She left no diaries or date books, and only two of her letters are known to survive.
Cézanne's art was itself a defiant exercise in anti-biography. When he painted a portrait, he wasn't trying to produce a realistic likeness or capture a personality. Rather, the central drama of his work lies in the attention he paid to form. In art-history textbooks, he is invariably pegged as a proto-Cubist who laid the groundwork for abstract painting and sought 'to treat nature in terms of the cylinder, the sphere and the cone,' as he put it, a comment I found completely baffling in my student days. It left me with an image of an artist-geologist wandering the south of France with an X-ray machine, trying to uncover Euclidean shapes in every tree and hillside. What was so radical about that?
You can no more find cylinders in Cézanne's paintings than you can find unicycles. He invented a new kind of pictorial structure that seemed to give every mark equal weight and integrity. He liked to paint the same motifs from slightly different angles, to explore 'the rotating point of view,' to borrow a phrase from Jasper Johns, another master of restrained emotion who, as it turns out, is lending two graphite drawings by Cézanne to the exhibition at the Met.
Cézanne's portraits of Hortense span a period of 20 years, and she looks different from one painting to the next. Although she is always seated, she can variously evoke a melancholy Madonna, a severe school principal or an androgynous boy with no chest. The Met show reunites the four dramatic paintings known colloquially as 'Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress.' In each of them, she sits in the same bluish room, wearing a country dress with long sleeves and a tie belt. They culminate in the version owned by the Met, in which she leans stiffly to the right, composed and imperturbable as an earthquakelike force sets her chair and the walls around her at a slant.
In general, Cézanne favored female models who were solid and stocky, as if their physical heft enabled him to concentrate on form rather than flesh. This is especially true in his drawings. He liked to sketch his wife's head as a weighty geometric orb topped by a little bun of hair. 'I paint a head like a door,' Cézanne once said, without irony. His friends bestowed a callous nickname on his wife: La Boule, which is French for 'the ball.'
Who was Marie-Hortense Fiquet, her name at birth? She met Cézanne in Paris early in 1869. She was a 19-year-old bookbinder and artist's model from a working-class family. He was 11 years older and lived on a meager allowance from his banker-father. By most accounts, he was gruff, withdrawn and suspicious. He harbored an aversion to being touched.
His artwork seemed overly intense as well. At the time they met, he had been painting for a decade: not the airy landscapes of his later years, with their brushy patches of green and ocher, nor the chunky, sky-blue bathers. Rather, his early work is dark and psychologically disturbing; it abounds with fantasy scenes of rape, murder and bacchanalian orgies.
Cézanne kept his relationship with Hortense hidden from his family. He claimed that his father, who wanted him to be a lawyer and pushed him through law school, would cut off his income if he knew. The charade continued for years, even after Hortense gave birth to Paul Jr. in 1872. Cézanne would remove himself for months at a stretch to his parents' house in his native Aix-en-Provence. Hortense and the boy would be left in Paris, or would come to stay in Aix too, but discreetly, in a different house. He finally married her after they had been together for 17 years.
Today, it is easy to see Hortense in sympathetic terms. The useless, do-nothing wife derided by John Rewald sounds more like a beleaguered single mother trying to scrape by in the big city. She spent countless hours posing for her husband, who worked slowly and was said to let as much as 20 minutes lapse between the application of one brush stroke and the next. The notion of Hortense as a clotheshorse defies logic when you recall that she is dressed modestly in the portraits and married a man who had no taste for material trappings. Cézanne was 56 years old when Ambroise Vollard gave him his first one-man show. It seems likely that Hortense was independent and self-possessed, that she provided Cézanne with enough space for him to develop his work, which became classical and monumental in his later years.
Granted, husband and wife lived apart, in different cities, long before death finalized the arrangement. Cézanne died in 1906, at 67, a few days after catching pneumonia. He was buried near his parents in Aix-en-Provence. He had, unkindly, written Hortense out of his will, although their son stepped up to provide for her until her death in 1922. She had always preferred the city to the country, and was buried in Paris, at the Père Lachaise cemetery; Paul Jr. lies beside her.
At the Metropolitan show, some viewers will no doubt discern marital tenderness in the portraits of Hortense. Others will counter that Cézanne was manipulative and pressed his wife into service as a model simply for the sake of convenience. In truth, she is a Rorschach test and, in the absence of documentation - not a single letter survives between Cézanne and his wife - any conclusion you draw about the emotional tenor of their marriage is likely to reflect more on you than on them.
In the end, all of the labels - model, mistress, muse, wife - fit poorly, and it is hard to envisage Madame Cézanne springing from her wan, flattened existence in her husband's paintings into breathing life. She remains, despite our best efforts to see her in the round, a homely middle-aged woman trapped in a web of brush strokes. Still, common sense rules in her favor. You suspect she believed in Cézanne's greatness, and now it is our turn to believe in hers.
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