One of Balzac's most famous tales, Le chef-d'oevure inconnu ("The Unknown Masterpiece"), relates the story of a painter named Frenhoffer, whose lifelong attempt to portray "the perfect woman" gradually drove him out of his mind. For years he had told his fellow artists about the progress of his work, but when he died and they finally entered his studio, all they discovered on the canvas was a chaos of colors out of which, as though from under a many-colored blanket, there protruded a single, graceful female foot.
The painter Emile Bernard relates that he referred to this poignant story one evening over dinner with Paul Cézanne. As soon as Bernard brought it up, Cezanne leapt from the table and struck his chest repeatedly, thus silently identifying with the unfortunate Frenhoffer. "He was so moved that his eyes filled with tears."
Bernard's recollection could well strike one as rather incomprehensible today, as the landscapes and still lifes of Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) have become such a fundamental reference for twentieth-century Western painting that one is inclined to take them for granted. It seems difficult to imagine they did not spring full-fledged from that great protuberant dome of his--or that they did not at the very least arise out of highly promising beginnings. The chief merit of the strange and remarkable exhibition Cézanne: The Early Years 1859-1872, which opened in London and is now at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., is not so much the pleasure it affords the eye (though there are some very successful works on view), but the fact that it allows the visitor to discover how extremely odd, disquieting, and, on occasion, downright awful the early work of this seminal artist could be.
The exhibition reveals that works which may appear bad because they are singularly gauche, or because they afford the viewer an all too direct access to the intimate discomforts of the youthful artist, actually contain the seeds of something utterly original, something that when it later assumed its mature form was self-evident.
In this sense Cézanne's fate was utterly different from that of the fictional Frenhoffer with whom he so intensely identified. Frenhoffer drifted from vision to madness, whereas Cézanne rose from a despair close to madness to find a sense and balanced vision--at least in his art. His response to the Balzac story meant, therefore, that he himself had lived through a Frenhoffer-like torment and despair; indeed, he continued to share the fictional artist's constant sense of dissatisfaction--and it was this bitterly felt frustration that made him weep. Balzac's protagonist revealed the deeper reality of Cézanne's everyday experience.
Astonishingly Revealing
The earliest paintings being shown at the National Gallery are four decorative panels done in 1860, when Cézanne was twenty-one. There is much amateurish awkwardness in them--but this hardly seems surprising to find in the work of an untrained artist. He advanced rapidly, however. The following year, at age twenty-two, Cézanne painted a strangely disquieting self-portrait, based on a photograph that is reproduced in the catalog. The work is still awkward but is astonishingly revealing of Cézanne's character. The lowered head and glowering, resentful face, the bloodshot eyes, the hard, sullen mouth, the bulging forehead
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