February 28, 2005
Cezanne's Trees and House: Mirror and Skull
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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.
- Starting in the lower middle of the painting is a large, half-oval boulder that is a belly with a navel at the lower edge. Above this rock are two small half-ovals side by side that can be read as either breasts, buttocks, or knees, depending on the viewers orientation. This torso, which I'll identify as female, can be extended by the bushes, cleft, and shadow below the navel which altogether read as the pubic area, a pose not far from Courbet's controversial L'Origine du monde, 1866.
- These two same smaller rocks can be read as knees, or a thigh and knee, of the rock-torso just above them to the left. This torso, again female, outlined vertically along its left edge in dark red-blue gray, is sitting up; the green leaves of the tall far left tree half at the right place to suggest a chest or breasts. Above these leaves is an arching vertical line originating in a lighter area, which reads as an armpit.
- The stack of three boulders at the painting's extreme left edge is another female torso, from lower thigh up to shoulder; just below the middle of the largest center boulder in this stack is a fleshy, soft feminine stomach and navel, which leads down past hips into the pubic area. This torso is like a Greek figure that has lost its head and all of its limbs
- One last cluster of rocks is in the lower half of the far right edge, which can be read a couple of different ways. The easiest way is to see the two ovoid shapes as the buttocks of a figure bending over out of the painting. But what I find more strongly suggested is a male torso in profile, facing right, slight bent over with the head and legs out of the picture, and the smaller half-oval shape sent into and conforming to the larger rock that contains it is a large, strong shoulder.
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.
February 27, 2005
Recognition: Correction
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.
February 26, 2005
February 25, 2005
February 24, 2005
February 23, 2005
February 22, 2005
February 21, 2005
February 20, 2005
Serape
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February 19, 2005
Serape
Serape Instructions:
- Copy the complete body of HTML below
- Paste into a plain text document (for example, on Windows use Notepad, on Mac use TextEdit)
- Save the file to the Desktop as "20050219Serape.htm" (no quotes)
- Locate "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" on the Desktop and double click to view in browser
URL (http://www.chrisashley.net/weblog/archives/week_2005_02_13.html#000686) in the message (depending on how you send it and how they recieve it the recipient will hopefully see a nice picture rather than many lines of code).
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Chris Ashley: Serape, 2005, HTML, 379 x 393 pixels
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Serape, 2005, HTML, 379 x 393 pixels
February 18, 2005
Square Rainbow
Square Rainbow Instructions:
- Copy the complete body of HTML below
- Paste into a plain text document (for example, on Windows use Notepad, on Mac use TextEdit)
- Save the file to the Desktop as "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" (no quotes)
- Locate "20050218SquareRainbow.htm" on the Desktop and double click to view in browser
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Chris Ashley: Square Rainbow, 2005, HTML, 340 x 340 pixels
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Square Rainbow, 2005, HTML, 340 x 340 pixels
February 17, 2005
Untitled 1-8
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:
- Use the technique describe above, see how it worked for me this time.
- Make an integrated image, one that feels whole, despite its collage-like process.
- Do some more drawing with the blue and gold palette inspired, in particular by Wang Ximeng's (1096-1119, Song Dynasty) A Thousand Li of Rivers and Mountains (see 20040905 post this weblog).
- Work in a horizontal format, which is not my tendency
- Enliven an image with another color- the red: how to work that in, make it fit, and still be both disruptive and coherent.
Documentation
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"
