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Cezanne's Trees and House: Mirror and Skull
My purpose in writing is to discuss "hidden" imagery in a landscape watercolor by Paul Cezanne, House and Trees, circa 1890. The topic of unintended images in a painting can be an interesting subject that rapidly turns annoying and irrelevant, but in this case the occurence is so intriguing that it's worth the adventure. The route to this discussion, however, first requires a detour to consider another work of his, a landscape painting on canvas.
Cezanne's late landscapes depict wooded areas that can initially seem rough, remote, and unpeopled, but one often soon notes a distant roof or village, a bridge or road, or even a trail through a wooded area. So his circa 1889-99 painting Forest Interior, a masterful work in the collection of the San Francisco Fine Arts Museums at the Legion of Honor, is a little different in that no trace of humans can be found among the rocks and trees. There is, of course, the assumed presence of the human in the hatched, constructed manner of the paint strokes, and in the painter's stance before this scene to paint it, who remains alongside the viewer while looking at the painting if one acknowledges him. But there is actually no other trace of the human depicted in this painting: there are no trunks remaining from sawed trees, no holes from quarried rocks, no path to walk.
Cezanne's paintings, however, often seem to be operating at several levels: his still lifes can have the characteristics of landscapes, with tablecloths gathered in peaks emulating perhaps his most famous motif, Mont Saint-Victoire; earlier paintings addressing historical subjects get frothy or dour modern treatments; portrait subjects seem ancient, as if carved from stone and dressed in aprons like tablecloths, or stiff and erect as trees; the paintings of bathers are as much about the landscape as they are about the figures. But Forest Interior surprises because the human presence is buried deeply in the painting's imagery, and the painting becomes more about the essential unconscious place of the body in nature, rather than the place of landscape in human consciousness.
The rocks in Forest Interior are pieces of human figures, and there are easily four rock clusters that can be identified as torsos.
Note that all of the figures are headless and limbless; they are immobile bodies without intelligence or function. Three female figures lay and stand together in one section; the male figure has his back to the other three. The rocks are completely integrated into the wooded scene, but as figures they are monstrous, unnatural. They are casually strewn as if old and long abandoned, yet the color and poses suggest that there is still blood under the flesh. How much of this figuration is conscious on Cezanne's part, how much of this apparent figuration is my imagination, and how much of this figuration is naturally suggested by the shapes and colors of boulders found in southern France?
Now, Forest Interior is an absolutely superior painting, even when just read as a landscape, as a constructed image alternating between depiction and abstraction, as a tightly woven composition, and as a complete, coherent container of the continually resolving and dissolving dichotomous relationship between the painting as picture and object. Certainly there are many who have no patience for the reading of rocks as figures hidden in a landscape, much less as figures that are sexually symbolic, especially as symbols emerging from the artist's unconscious. I'm not sure how much more patience I have for it myself, and my analyst credentials are strictly of an amateur status. But my reading of this painting asserts itself so strongly that it is undeniable, and there is evidence to suggest that this view is not entirely out of line.
Cezanne's alleged fear of women has been much discussed. Evidence of this is found in the poems he wrote as a young man, and in letters he wrote to Emile Zola. Cezanne told Renoir that female models frightened him. Mary Tompkins Lewis in Cezanne (Phaidon, 2000) writes that, "Historians of Cezanne's art have long noted the prominence of violence and romantic fantasy in his paintings from the restless years of 1867-9. A number of these works feature striking scenes of sexual savagery, murder, and death." And although Cezanne did father a son, he did not marry the mother, Hortense Fiquet, for fourteen years, and even after that often spent long periods of time away from his family, perhaps suggesting ambivalence towards his wife.
Given all of this, then, it may not be completely out of line to acknowledge the torsos in Forest Interior. Of course, there's no way to know whether or not Cezanne intended this. Did he himself see the boulders as figures? Did he intend to create a sexual drama? Was he trying to make a point about Man and Nature, which wouldn't have been a stretch for someone who painted other symbolic paintings such as Still Life With Black Clock, and The Abduction?
Let's turn now to Trees and House (Maison parmi les Arbres), ca. 1890, a watercolor on paper in The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection. Trees and House is on the verso of a sheet, the front of which contains another wooded scene, also titled Forest Interior (Sous Bois), ca. 1890. The image used below is scanned from Cezanne in Focus: Watercolors From The Henry and Rose Pearlman Collection, Princeton University Art Museum, 2003. (A wonderful collection of digitized Cezanne's is online at Expo Cezanne.)
The watercolor Forest Interior presents foliage in the foreground, behind which are several trees, some quite vertical, others arching and intertwining, and there is the indication of a path and perhaps some fence posts. All of this is painted in the diagonal pencil and brush hatching common to the technique Cezanne used to create an overall surface of interwoven marks, allowing blank paper to show through in patches to create depth and light. Trees and House, while much less worked than Forest Interior, uses the same motif, except for the definite human presence of the house at the far right; here is a scene that is less rustic, more domestic in feeling.

This scene at first appears to be a landscape, but because of the presence of the house it instead becomes a view of property; someone has built a house and owns this land. Perhaps the trees on the property have been thinned to create the clearing in the foreground. The artist's position, looking back at house, means he is not isolated, not far from place or people; in fact he may have simply walked fifty yards from the house, turned around, and started working. The pencil lines are roughly, hesitantly sketched, and the thin layers of color are quite liquid and flat without much layering, which takes place mostly in the darkest areas of the thickest middle tree.
It wasn't long after first seeing Trees and House that I began to see buried images emerging. Once I saw and could identify these buried images, and considered their connections to other works by Cezanne and to other themes in art history, I could no longer merely accept this watercolor as a view of a house and trees. The trees and grass in the foreground create the outline an oval that is joined by a handle of pale green from the right; I see this as a handheld mirror. And the house has three windows placed as two eyes and a nose, and a horizontal patch of green is a mouth; I see this as a mask or skull. In the following image I have emphasized these images with red highlights.

The mirror is laid flat, as if on a table or bureau. We don't see ourselves, or anyone or anything else reflected in it. It may reflect the empty sky, or, perhaps it reflects nothing, only holding the possibility of reflection if picked up and used. Its emptiness is ghostly, lonely, almost threatening. Focus on the mirror and the trees emanate in the periphery as beams light or color, as something shining back at the sky. The mirror shape may be a complete accident; perhaps human consciousness is so powerful, that even when looking at inanimate objects we can't help but place ourselves in the scene, as if nature, in our minds, is really there to reflect back ourselves.
The house as a mask or face-- facade-- isn't an uncommon idea. The way this house is drawn-- barely defined, a rectangle not fully drawn but only hinted at-- strongly suggests the contours of a skull. The home, a place of comfort, instead becomes an empty shell, a blank stare, alone and off to the side, when paired with the mirror, which can't reflect the face; that is, the mirror cannot validate its presence of a self. Trees and House, then, turns from being just another landscape to a complex psychological space.
Neither the mirror or skull would be images foreign to Cezanne; skulls especially are featured in many of his still lifes. There is also precedence for mirrors and skulls in the genre of vanitas paintings. Text regarding a still life by 17th century Dutch painter Pieter Claesz in the Getty Collection notes:
To the modern viewer, this small still life appears to be an assortment of strange objects placed on a wooden table. But to the seventeenth- century Dutch observer, this painting conveyed the theme of vanitas: objects that symbolized the vanity of worldly things and the brevity of life. The skull and bones refer to death, the books and writing instruments to excessive pride through learning, and the fragile glass goblet of wine to temporary pleasure. The golden cup on its side suggests immoderate wealth.
The online art dictionary ArtLex provides the following definition:
Vanitas - Latin for vanity, refers to a type of still life consisting of a collection of objects that symbolize the brevity of human life and the transience of earthly pleasures and achievements (e.g., a human skull, a mirror, and broken pottery).
Two noted and well-documented paintings that prominently feature mirrors are Jan van Eyck’s Wedding Portrait of Giovanni Arnolfini (1434) and Diego Velázquez Las Meninas (1656). In both of these paintings the images reflected in the mirrors reflect action related or ancillary to the event the painting depict but that can't be shown directly to the viewer who looks straight ahead at a scene, not at a 360 degree environment. Van Eyck shows objects around the remainder of the room that can't be contained with the picture. Velasquez uses the mirror to reflect an image that is also outside of the painting: the painter who is making the painting we see, presumably a self-portrait. And there are plenty of examples of mirrors in paintings: Manet's Before the Mirror (1876) at the Guggenheim and Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1881-82) at the Courtauld Institute Galleries, London; Picasso's Girl Before a Mirror (Femme au miroir) (1932) at MOMA; Balthus' Les beaux jours (1944) at the Hirschorn; and any number of Roy Lichtenstein's paintings and sculptures featuring the mirror image, for example, Mirror #2 (1970). These are just a few examples of many that can be named.
The mirror in Trees and House is different from these other examples in that it appears as a second image; the mirror, a tool for seeing, is "depicted" here by not actually being depicted, and it reflects nothing. It is an image-- a clearing among trees, and an abstraction (oval and line), a construction of paint with multiple associations. And it is a symbol, but a more pure and less obvious kind of symbolism. One has to find the symbol, and then when found and read as a mirror, and taken in the context of art history and symbolic imagery as precedents, the mirror-symbol is in a complex psychological relationship to the equally abstract house as found symbol, which is a skull, and these together evoke reminders of the condition of life, death, vanity, and temporality, and the human as a piece of nature, frail, vulnerable, and feint.
As with the San Francisco Forest Interior first discussed here, it is of course impossible to know Cezanne's intentions regarding Trees and House, unless perhaps he wrote about it in a letter to someone, or told someone about it who recorded his thoughts. I know of no such record. Certainly, Scott Alan, one of the many commentators about various works in the Cezanne in Focus catalog, makes no note of this in discussion of the watercolor. I find it extremely fascinating that, as far as I can tell, what I have just pointed out has not been discussed; fascinating, hopefully, in that this has not been noticed before, and not fascinating, I hope, because it reveals some psychological wackiness is me. But let me go a little further.
Years ago a friend working on a PhD in psychology was required to administer multiple standardized tests as practice with voluntary subjects. One test was the Rorschach test, which is a standardized ten card set. As I took the exam I freely described image after image I saw in the first few cards, requiring her to furiously record my answers. Finally she looked at me with just a hint of exasperation and asked if I was making this up. No, I wasn't; I thought the point was to be open and give it my all. I didn't know that there was supposed to be some limited range of images, so I figured the more the better. Nothing was too much of a stretch; if some reading later proved irrelevant it could be discarded. So that's what I want to do with the Cezanne, just push it a little farther. At the risk of taking a plausible discussion about buried imagery into the realm of fantasy, let me point out two more buried images related to the vanitas theme that I've identified.
First, in the thickest middle tree, right in the middle of the trunk, is a dark section built up from several washes that is half of a smiling face, split almost right down the middle; I have colored it in blue and black. Submerged, a little ghostly, this puckish face, a little mischievous or even devilish looking, looks directly at the viewer, a kind of taunting jester. Are we being mocked or enticed? If we feel mocked it is because this character puts us in our place. If we are being enticed, it is in reaction to the dangerous risk of being held captive to vanity and youth while ignoring our mortality and responsibilities. By being half-hidden the face never fully reveals its state or motives. The woods were, I think, quite lively places for Cezanne; is this a man-in-the-moon, man-as-tree kind of anthropomorphism?
Secondly, the forked tree, second from the left, is a wishbone, which I have outlined in green. The wishbone is of course a symbol and object of chance-- fortune, luck, and loss. The shape also echoes the mirror shape, but as a wishbone it furthers the theme of vanitas suggested by the presence of mirror, skull, and laughing head.
Despite being a wonderful little landscape study, I think Trees and House is most interesting for the other ways it can be read, and for the ways it shows us how better to read paintings. I don't think it is possible to look too deeply at paintings, nor to look at them in too many different ways. These paintings by Cezanne, in particular, reward this kind of deep looking, and the tack I have taken here-- probing hidden imagery, wondering about sub- or unconcsious motives-- is only one of many different ways of looking.

On February 09, 2005 I wrote:
Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog.
This not entirely true. At the time I wrote this I had already known, thanks to Tom Moody, for several months about abe linkoln's and jimpunk's Screenfull, another weblog which is an artwork, a web space in the weblog format-- regular posts in reverse chronological order-- totally devoted to being an artwork, not a place about art:
Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together, maybe in the mode of Brion Gysin's and William Burroughs' cutups, not to mention Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Negativland, Bruce Conner and Jess, and Superbad. But Screenfull had slipped my mind, or I had blocked it out, perhaps because even though Screenfull is a work(s) that takes a form I know well and understand, it is not exactly my cup of tea any more.
Not to take anything away from abe, jimpunk, and Screenfull, to be sure, but the pop quotation, the smirking ironic comment, the technique of ripping five things into several pieces and reassembling them into something raw and casual, just isn't something that interests me a lot as an artist; I see that in my past as juvenile, puerile, mean-spirited, and obvious.
This assessment does not mean, however, that I don't check in with Screefull a couple of times a week. And you, dear reader, might consider doing the same. Turn up the volume!
I have added this text as an update to the February 9, 2005 post.
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Square Rainbow, 2005, HTML, 340 x 340 pixels

Untitled 1-8, 2005, HTML, 420 x 580 pixels each (source)
 :
On 20050207 I posted two drawings, one from 20030207, the other from 20030903, that had been inserted into one of my goofy fake gallery views. I had forgotten about these drawings, but the great thing about weblogs and photo album software that scans your disc is that you find things you hadn't thought about in awhile
So I looked at these drawings, and remembered how they're done. These are from a period when I would draw little motifs in fields in HTML tables, and then copy and paste small sections all over the table, and then copy another small section and paste it in areas around the table, building up a kind of density, repeating small sections over other sections. It's a technique almost more like rubber stamping, and there's a kind of building-up of density and a patterning that can emerge, but the repeated images get halved, disrupted, broken.
I describe an easy technique to try, but it's also kind of maddening to actually get a decent, final, coherent image. It often requires a little manual tinkering to make a composition that feels contained within the four sides of the rectangle.
So there are several things I wanted to do with the eight drawings in this series:

Sliabh Ruadh, 2005, oil on canvas, 16 x 12"

In progress, 2005, oil on canvas, 18 x 14"

Untitled (Red & Gray), 2005, oil on canvas, 16 x 12"


Untitled Pair, in progress, oil on canvas, 18 x 14" each

Album 2 (Blue & Green), 2005, watercolor & ink on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each

Album (Red & Blue), 2005, watercolor & pencil on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each

Album 1 (Blue & Green), 2005, watercolor & ink on paper, 5 leaves, approx. 10 x 8.75" each


Three of four canvases, in progress, tentatively titled "Carpenter's Blues," oil on canvas, 18 x 14" each.
Folks who have known me for some time know my weblogging practice has changed a lot in the past couple of years. Folks who only know me via this current weblog would probably never know my practice changed. What has changed is that I don't link to other weblogs anymore, which for a weblog is deadly, since linking is the juice that makes the traffic flow.
This weblog, Look, See, is an art-centered weblog; I post a daily HTML drawing, the occasional written piece, and occasional links and images of work that interests me. Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog (20050227 update: see note below). Look at any of the weblogs linked from, for example, Modern Arts Journal; not a one is art itself; they are about art. Look, See is the studio wall, the studio floor, the racks, the filing cabinet, the slide library, the hours alone sitting on a chair staring, the worry about subject matter, the search for meaning and something interesting to look at.
My first weblog, XYZ, was a Manila site hosted on the NT desktop machine on which I worked at the time. That weblog is no longer accessible. I have the archives but I don't need or want to make it accessible. XYZ lasted about ten months, from approximately March 2000 to January 2001, during which time I developed the daily habit of writing, quoting, and linking. Many of the posts were about educational technology, the field in which I worked.
After XYZ, I moved to another Manila site hosted at Berkeley by the Interactive University (a group I worked with through December 2004), called A Place to Write, Nothing Fancy, launched February 21, 2001, and which eventually became, as art and HTML drawings took over, A Place to Work, Nothing Fancy. In the first year or more of APTWNF I still wrote a lot about educational technology, and in particular about weblogging and community, weblogging and personal authoring, and possible roles of weblogs in education. The knowledge gained through regular weblogging resulted in two articles written for Berkeley Computing and Communications: Weblogging: Another Kind of Website (July 2001); and Weblogs: A Swiss Army Website (March 2002).
When the idea of making simple images with HTML tables first occurred to me sometime in 2000 on XYZ, I of course had no idea that this would result in work that would completely take over my weblog and choke out any other content. But it makes sense; what I see, what I make, what I want to do comes first. That is my temperament as an artist, the same attitude I had working in my studio alone all during the 80's after getting out of art school. And so Look, See, begun in October 2003 under my domain name in order to move away from a university hosting service, is a central place in my life, and a place of my work.
I write all this as a way of explaining why I don't link to others, even when there are some who deserve linking and pointing out and a pat on the back, except for a few static links on my nav bar (I have come to hate all of the weblog terminology: "blogroll," "blogosphere," and just the word "blog," all so new, different, out there, separate; most people who write about weblogs and use this terminology don't seem to have a real clue about the voice of the author and the meaning of personal authoring and ownership of one's own production). I sometimes wonder if I'm missing something by not engaging in the kind of dialog that can be core to weblogging, something I well understand and once practiced, but I also know myself well enough to have decided for now that the best thing for me to do is to try to avoid distraction by putting my head down and plowing ahead without the sword of strategy and the girdle of theory, and without worrying about how well I'm explaining myself and who I am including.
And also I write all this as a way of setting the context for the remainder of this post, which is a list of links to other sites, most reciprocal, actually, as many of these sites have mentioned or linked to Look, See recently. In fact, a smattering of very recent links to Look, See and emails from a few folks made me decide to point back and highlight what a few others are doing.
Updated 20050227:
On February 09, 2005 I wrote:
Look, See is not an artblog as that label is coming to be understood: a weblog about art; it is instead a place for an art practice. And that is what makes my weblog different than, as far as I can tell, any other weblog.
This not entirely true. At the time I wrote this I had already known, thanks to Tom Moody, for several months about abe linkoln's and jimpunk's Screenfull, another weblog which is an artwork, a web space in the weblog format-- regular posts in reverse chronological order-- totally devoted to being an artwork, not a place about art:
Screenfull is a media mashup, a collision of borrowed (stolen) images, video, and audio that have been cut and torn and jammed back together, maybe in the mode of Brion Gysin's and William Burroughs' cutups, not to mention Schwitters and Rauschenberg, Negativland, Bruce Conner and Jess, and Superbad. But Screenfull had slipped my mind, or I had blocked it out, perhaps because even though Screenfull is a work(s) that takes a form I know well and understand, it is not exactly my cup of tea any more.
Not to take anything away from abe, jimpunk, and Screenfull, to be sure, but the pop quotation, the smirking ironic comment, the technique of ripping five things into several pieces and reassembling them into something raw and casual, just isn't something that interests me a lot as an artist; I see that in my past as juvenile, puerile, mean-spirited, and obvious.
This assessment does not mean, however, that I don't check in with Screefull a couple of times a week. And you, dear reader, might consider doing the same. Turn up the volume!
I have added this text as an update to the February 9, 2005 post.
Three 1-6, 2005, HTML, 260 x 420 pixels each
This short series of six drawings came out of a desire to use the triptych format in response to a visit to the Legion of Honor on Saturday, January 29th to see Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet!
There are two specific works I've been thinking about. First, a panel by Luca di Tomme that is not actually a triptych but the composition of which divides into three areas (see below), left, center, and right. I'm attracted to the two clumps of figures, the primary colors, the way the mountains in the back split apart and form as they get higher a gap that is a heart shape. The women are on the left, the men on the right. There's neat movement and tension in the three figures on the left of the cross and the two figures on the right of the cross; Jesus looks down at the collapsing Mary, which pulls the eye down and to the left, in a kind of softening or release, and the two rigid men on the right, their weight on their left feet (our right), shoulders high on our left, low on our right, anchor the cross and Jesus, pulling the viewer back to the right. This painting is only about 16 x 23 inches. It's easy to imagine that it's a single panel from a larger work of many panels.
The second work I've had in mind this past week is one for which I can't find a digital image or any record (at thinker.org), and I didn't write down anything about it; I do want to find out more about it and am researching that. Is is a free-standing, portable, triptych altarpiece, roughly two feet wide by sixteen to eighteen inches high, that is not painting at all; it's enamel on panel, probably copper, all black and white, or grisaille. I am guessing that it's French, 16th century. It stands in a case around which one can walk; the back side is rough black wood, and it's obviously meant to be closed for travel so that it can be setup as needed as a temporary altar. It is a beautiful, lustrous work with terrific drawing, texture, and light.
A little searching found this, which is very helpful:
All the enamel before this date (end of 15th century) had been sunk into cells or cloisons. Two discoveries were made; first, that enamels could be made which require no enclosing ribbon of metal, but that merely the enamel should be fused on both sides of the metal object; secondly, that after an enamel had been fusedto a surface of metal, another could be superimposed and fused to:the first layer without any danger of separation from each or from the metal ground. It is true that such processes had been employed upon glass on which enamel had been applied, as well as upon pottery; and it is probably due to the influence of a knowledge of both enamelling upon metal and upon glass or pottery that the discovery was made. In most of these enamel paintings the subject was laid on with a white enamel upon a dark ground. The white was modulated; so that possessing a slight degree of translucency, it was grey in the thin parts and white in the thick. Thus was obtained a certain amount of light and shade. This gave the process called grisaille. But strange to say, it was not until a later period that this was practised alone, and then the model-ling of the figures and draperies became very elaborate. At first it was only done in a slight degree, just sufficiently to give expression and to add to the richness of the form. For the enamellers were thinking of a plate upon which to put their wonderful colours, and not only of form. The painting in white was therefore invariably coloured with enamels [http://15.1911encyclopedia.org/E/EN/ENAMEL.htm].
Searching on a few names in the article referenced above one of the closest images I can find, in terms of the enamel grisaille technique, and from the same period, is I by Jean III Penicaud, mid-16th Century, French:
http://www.insecula.com/oeuvre/O0008156.html

Here are two totally fictional gallery views that I made in 2003 but never used. I had forgotten about them, but thanks to Picasa I can now see every image on my hard drive. Coincidentally, the top one is dated exactly two years ago today- 20030207. The bottom one is dated 20030903.
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I had heard a poem on the radio titled "How to Kill" while driving to work in the morning.