Emotion, Color, Cézanne (The Portraits of Hortense)

Susan Sidlauskas

Emotion, Color, Cézanne¹ (The Portraits of Hortense)
by Susan Sidlauskas

The body of Cézanne scholarship is among the weightiest in modernism. Yet, despite that fact, there is a group of paintings by Cézanne that remain mysterious and resistant to theorization—the twenty-six oil portraits which the painter produced of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, between 1872 and 1894.² I suspect that this gap in the scholarship has something to do with the fact that these paintings collectively defy the expectations usually attached to the portraits of the great male artist's female companion—a sub-genre unto itself.³

A Brief History
Cezanne's refusal to conform Fiquet Cézanne to the type of the adoring helpmate has been routinely understood to be not the result of the artist's own pictorial decisions, but rather the failure of the woman who inspired them: her failure to ingratiate, to entertain, and above all, to seduce. As Joseph Rishel once pointed out, Fiquet Cézanne has never been identified as the artist's muse.⁴ In fact, some writers seem to have regarded her as a veritable "counter-muse," an uncooperative helpmate who not only failed to provide sufficient inspiration for the artist, but who acted as a positive hindrance to achievement. This is an extreme, but perhaps comprehensible, reaction to paintings which are admittedly difficult. With a handful of exceptions, the portraits at first appear collectively to be enigmatic, even remote. Their stubborn opacity frustrates viewers accustomed to anticipating the disclosure of self that the nineteenth-century portrait is generally assumed to offer—especially when the subject is a woman fixed in the controlling gaze of a male painter. Over the years, Fiquet Cézanne has been much maligned for her regrettable lack of beauty (that being historically one of the ultimate arbiters as to whether a woman was worthy of being painted), as well as for her sour disposition, and her failure to smile—a refusal to ingratiate which in many accounts seems to be considered the most damning offense.⁵ In the criticisms directed at Fiquet Cézanne's portrayals are contained reactions that range from stupefaction to anger, boredom to pity. Because her representations evade the usual interpretive categories, Fiquet Cézanne has been either demonized or objectified, while her portraits remain largely unseen, often limited to the role of "illustrations" in the troubled personal history of Cézanne. In general, there have been two stances towards the paintings of Fiquet Cézanne: benign neglect, with a number of relatively brief discussions in catalogues and one article about the possibility of dating the portraits through her dress; and on the other hand, a distinct sense of aversion, even hostility, which has been directed towards the person of Fiquet Cézanne, about whom we actually know very little.⁶

We have almost no account of her life before she met the painter, other than the fact that she was born in Saligny in the Jura, the daughter of a bank clerk.⁷ She and Paul Cézanne met in 1869, in Paris; she, a nineteen-year old artist's model, he an ambitious, though unfocused young painter from Provence, eleven years older and living on an allowance from his autocratic father, a hat-maker turned wealthy banker. Cézanne's hesitations about women in particular and sexuality in general, were already deeply entrenched. Nonetheless he and Fiquet Cézanne began an affair and three years later produced a son, named Paul after his father. For years, Cézanne tried desperately to conceal his liaison, and his illegitimate child, from his father, fearing that funds would be cut off. His father, (who had, himself, fathered Cézanne out of wedlock), seems to have known of his son's family despite the subterfuge, and never interrupted his financial support. Fiquet Cézanne and the child lived mostly in Paris while the artist lived mostly with his family in Aix. When the couple did finally marry in 1886, it was just a few months before the death of Cézanne's father, an event that left the painter and his sisters quite wealthy. While they lived together only sporadically, they do seem to have taken vacations together on a fairly regular basis. She appears in his sketches until just before his death, and Cézanne's letters to his son make it clear that they were in contact until the end of his life.

The correspondence of Cézanne's own peers established early on a narrative of Fiquet Cézanne as an impediment to be overcome. She was described with casual contempt in the letters that flowed back and forth between two of the painter's closest childhood friends, the critic Paul Alexis and the novelist and critic Emile Zola. Alexis referred to Fiquet Cézanne several times as "La Boule," (the ball), an undoubtedly unflattering nickname that has never been explained, and reported that Cézanne had confided that his wife liked nothing besides Switzerland and lemonade.⁸

Some years later, Roger Fry, the eminent English art critic who forged Cézanne's reputation as the father of modern painting, wrote briefly about the painter's most enduring individual human subject, after himself. Writing to a friend about the life of the artist he was struggling to frame, Fry confided, "It's complicated to begin with, and life changed him enormously. Perhaps that sour-looking bitch of a Madame counts for something in the tremendous repression that took place."⁹ Jack Lindsay, a later biographer, was even less decorous than Fry. He expressed incredulity at Fiquet Cézanne's relationship with the painter, and proceeded to enumerate all of her supposed flaws: her addiction to cheap romantic novels, her coarse skin and heavy chin, her reputation as a chatterbox, and her merely superficial interest in people and things. But it was, above all, her "stunned stupidity," confirmed, for the writer, by the impassivity of the portraits themselves, that enabled the relationship to continue.¹⁰ Lindsay was only the most explicit of those who cited the uningratiating representations of Fiquet Cézanne as explanation for Cézanne's legendary difficulties of temperament. Thus the painter's "misanthropic, cranky, and strange" nature, to quote the artist Emile Bernard, is elucidated, and thereby forgiven.¹¹ Perhaps the most damning of all critiques emanated from the dean of Cézanne studies, John Rewald, who insisted that Fiquet Cézanne had no impact whatsoever on the painter's art or life, an assertion which was followed, without irony, by the observation that Cézanne's subject matter, shortly after he met Fiquet Cézanne, revolved around scenes of intermingled eroticism and violence, such as The Murder (1867-1870, Walker Art Gallery, National Museums, Liverpool).¹²

To this day, authors remain unsure about how to position Fiquet Cézanne in relation to her husband. The most typical practice continues to stress her irrelevance to Cézanne's life and work, as John Rewald did with such blithe assurance. Such an interpretation is usually reinforced by reports of the couple's long periods of estrangement, their incompatibilities of class, temperament, and geographical preference, and the assumption that their sexual life together ended after the birth of their son.¹³ Yet, at times some of these very same authors emphasize that the only reason Cézanne painted his wife so often was her availability: she was conveniently "at hand," much like one of the artist's artificial floral arrangements or sugar bowls. This assertion would seem to depend, contrary to popular belief, upon both Fiquet Cézanne's frequent presence and a positive disposition towards her husband. In a more general way, such constancy is also at odds with the mythology of the isolated, ascetic founding father of modernism, whose devotion to his work would seem to preclude the trappings of any kind of domestic life.¹⁴

Regarding the Self
I would argue that painting Fiquet Cézanne allowed her husband to explore his equivocal approach to humanity while side-stepping the conventional strategies of portraiture. Cézanne did not, for example, depend upon a consistent or identifiable physiognomy. He did not try to mine the subject's inner life, and he did not utilize the conventional, especially conventionally female, inventory of expressions, postures and ornamental accessories. In nearly thirty portraits, Fiquet Cézanne rarely looks the same twice. And whatever psychological revelations we might try to extract are starkly inseparable from the paint strokes that compose them—an interdependence that renders these marks both critical and difficult to isolate for analysis.

Most commonly it is Picasso who is credited with emancipating the portrait from the limits of resemblance and the claims of identity. William Rubin has used the words "transformation" and "conceptual portrait" to describe the artist's paintings of his mistresses and wives, friends and family. Rubin concluded that Picasso's portraiture, "casts the very concept of identity into doubt. It is no longer fixed, but mutable," a condition, I would argue, that in fact is anticipated by the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne.¹⁵ She was a shifting force against which the artist could measure his own mutating self. Cézanne did not see his wife as an object, as an apple, or a "pat of butter," as some critics have assumed. (D. H. Lawrence even credited Fiquet Cézanne's "appleyness" as her most appealing quality.)¹⁶ On the contrary, she was as changeable as any motif—animate or inanimate—which he set before him. Cézanne did not objectify his human subjects; rather he injected a capacity for near-human empathy and response into everything he painted, including the sugar bowls, skulls and artificial fruits which he collected in his studio. In his portraits of his wife, he preserved her changeableness, and the porousness of each remembered interaction. To think of the images of Fiquet Cézanne as "inexpressive," as is almost always said about them, is to misunderstand them. If we look at her representations a bit differently, we can see that in them are concentrated everything Cézanne felt about nature, which he defined once as "man, woman, still life."¹⁷ The paintings Cézanne produced of his wife—which are exceeded in number only by those he painted of himself—forsake resemblance, jettison conventional notions of identity, and test the very boundaries of how the self, along with the non-self who confronts and resists it, is defined, contained, and represented. Fiquet Cézanne's lack of fixedness is, in part, the subject of the series; an expression of the instability inherent in any human contact, of the unpredictability of being mirrored, resisted, complemented, and challenged, all at once, by another individual.

In this article I consider the wider implications of theories of "emotion" in late nineteenth-century culture and I show that Cézanne's paintings of his wife were constituents of those same ideas, which straddled psychology, biology, aesthetics, and philosophy of mind, now realized materially in paint.¹⁸ Hysteria—as Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot publicized and represented it in the pages of the Nouvelle iconographie de la Salpêtrière—has become the model of choice for most discussions of emotion in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁹ But Cézanne's portraits assert the need for more flexible paradigms of how attitudes of mind can be represented—even invented—in all their changeability. In his paintings of his wife, Cézanne's color-strokes became representational structures for authentic modern emotions, whose contradictory and multivalent nature merited a different form of display than the "terror" and "joy" that had been part of both Charcot's model and Charles Le Brun's pictorial encyclopedia of emotion two centuries earlier.

How Cézanne's radical new understanding and usage of color found their most concentrated expression through the forbearance of his oft-maligned wife has a great deal to do with the artist's love of the masters whose works hung in the Louvre, and with Rubens in particular. Rubens's saturated color inspired Cézanne not only to experiment with new ways to convey meaning through color, but to articulate the experience through metaphors of ingestion, as I will discuss in more detail later. In Cézanne's hands, color came to signify surface and depth at once, a new kind of mobile, revelatory skin, one that suited the man whose youthful nickname was "l'écorché."²⁰ One of Cézanne's favorite images from Rubens's Marie de Medici cycle was the episode that shows Henri IV receiving the portrait of Marie, gazing in rapt devotion at the image of the woman who, in turn, looks out knowingly at us (Henri IV Receiving the Portrait of Marie de Medici, 1621-25, Paris, Musée du Louvre).²¹ In one of Cézanne's several drawings after the image, he shows only the flying figure, the god Hymen, who hovers before Henri, grasping the picture frame.²² Rubens's original "painting within a painting" is entirely absent. Cézanne renders it here as a tabula rasa, on which he could inscribe his own bride—or a variant thereof. I want to conjure a series of images which metaphorically fill that empty frame: a selection of the portraits that Cézanne painted of his wife in which color is the armature upon which emotion is structured in all its multiplicity, scope and unseen, but sensed, potential. Cézanne caused color to pulse, occlude, unmask, dramatize, insinuate, unsettle, and solidify—sometimes all at once—within and across the screen of Fiquet Cézanne's face and form.

The Structure of Emotion
Cézanne's painting career coincided with nearly a half century of feverish writing and experimentation about the nature of emotions, a collective enterprise which preoccupied scientists, philosophers, and psychologists, as well as writers, actors and artists. All parties queried in various ways and with diverse agendas: what are emotions—physiologically, neurologically, intellectually, historically? How did one convey emotion through external signs: through gesture, bodily movement, and the fluctuations of the eyes? And how did one recognize and identify the emotions? (Observation, experimentation, and mimicry were all offered as possible strategies for understanding).²³

Théodule Ribot was one of the most influential nineteenth-century French writers on the psychic constitution of emotion. In his book, The Psychology of the Emotions, he described the emotions as "organized manifestations of the life of the feelings," a phrase which resonates with Cézanne's own aspiration to what he famously called "the logic of organized sensations."²⁴ The painter reportedly avowed to his young protegé Joachim Gasquet that "art which does not have emotion as its principle is not an art…Emotion is the principle, the beginning and the end, the craft, the objective, the execution is in the middle."²⁵ In his conversations with Gasquet, and also in his writings, Cézanne inflected "emotion" with a meaning that encompassed more than the discrete experience of his own sensations before nature. Emotion was tied to Cézanne's sense of his place within the larger enterprise of art-making and viewing, as well as to its magisterial history—the palpable history that was contained for the artist in the paintings of Rubens, Titian, Veronese, and Tintoretto, and in the more recent efforts of Delacroix. While the painter certainly had no ambition to repeat the complex narratives and allegories of his artistic forebears, he did want to find a way to capture the emotional sweep and intensity of their efforts, an intensity embodied for Cézanne in the way they orchestrated the colors they used. For this painter, emotion was simply not representable without color.

Since Charles Le Brun first published his Traité d'expression in 1667 (Paris), artists had been concerned with how to codify and represent emotion. The overblown rhetorical gestures that filled Le Brun's own paintings were eventually supplanted by the more narrowly focused physiognomies of Caspar Lavater which, in turn, were superseded by the theatrical postures of the acting teacher François Delsarte.²⁶ In 1868, critic and novelist Edmund Duranty would shape the realist program of the telltale unconscious gesture and facial expression, a strategy that was taken up with the most acuity by his friend Edgar Degas, who became the consummate purveyor of disaffection, ennui, and anxiety in the modern city.²⁷

Right around the same time, Charles Darwin, the scientific heir to Le Brun's encyclopedia of expressions, attempted to codify all human and animal expression. Not only did he claim to identify all the muscles implicated in every one of these expressions, he tried to understand just what internal and external events had inspired those micro-movements in the first place. Darwin argued for the universal readability of most emotional expressions—the similarity between the Australian aboriginal and the western European's manner of expressing anger or disgust, for instance, or the predictability of smiling across cultures. Darwin also wanted to understand the evolutionary rationale for emotional expressions: how they had persisted over time, even when the original evolutionary need had ceased to be immediately relevant. (In mid-nineteenth-century England, the expression of terror was unlikely to be inspired by a marauding bear, or a thundering mammoth, for instance).²⁸

Darwin's Expressions of the Emotions (1867) was furnished with photographic illustrations by Dr. Duchenne de Boulogne who, for his 1862 Mécanisme de la physionomie humaine (Paris :J.B. Baillière) had experimented with applying mild (one hopes) electrical shocks to the facial muscles of several subjects, thereby underscoring the predictability of those muscles:²⁹ As Ribot summarized Duchenne's importance in The Psychology of Emotion, " [he argued] that every emotion has, so to speak, its accurate, precise, and unique note, produced by a unique local modification."³⁰

Writers such as Ribot, and the Scottish physician Alexander Bain (author of Emotion and the Will), as well as psychologists Wilhelm Wundt of Germany and James Sully of England, all built on Darwin's work—indeed all considered his research indispensable.³¹ But they struggled to formulate a more nuanced conception of emotion that took into greater consideration cultural and gender differences, the unpredictability of human behavior, and the ability of the will to deflect or to control emotion. Also critical for these researchers was the recognition that the human personality with all its attendant emotions was an often unstable "complexus" to use Ribot's term, an aggregate of many conflicting sensations and ideas.³² Writers agreed that emotion was vital for creativity, which meant that the artist was susceptible to fluctuations of intense emotion. As Ribot put it, "Artists and dilettanti are exceedingly delicate instruments, vibrating continually to every sound"—testimony that Cézanne's nickname "l'écorché" certainly affirmed. Moreover, the painter's early work demonstrates precisely the kind of emotionalism that Ribot invoked: "[A]rtists naturally have intense representations and feel things violently; they dream of orgies, love adventures, sanguinary dramas, self-devotion, virtues and vices of all sorts."³³ Certainly, orgies, love adventures and what might be called "sanguinary dramas" appear in abundance in Cézanne's early paintings. Almost to a writer, scholars have characterized the paintings of the artist's youth as intensely, even histrionically, emotional But then, as the standard narrative goes, Cézanne painted alongside Pissarro in Pontoise, and everything changed. As Lawrence Gowing summed it up: "his ferocity was sublimated under another star."³⁴

Rhetorical legibility had been a time-honored tradition in French history painting, and some academic practitioners still favored the aggressively theatrical style of enacting emotions in representation. But Paul Souriau, a philosopher whose writings combined scientific and aesthetic interests, argued that the theatricality of a represented gesture virtually guaranteed its inauthenticity, especially where the expression of emotion was concerned.³⁵ In The Aesthetics of Movement, he wrote, "Painters of the French School have been justly reproached for giving their characters attitudes that are overly emphatic, exaggerated and artificial. It is principally because they have sought expression in volitional attitudes, that is to say, in those attitudes we take to show our feelings on the outside. There was a confusion between mimicry and expression. Really expressive attitudes are those that do not intend to express anything, but are unconsciously determined by a deeply felt emotion."³⁶

The Color of Emotion
At first, it might seem as if the portraits of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne—all 26 of them—express nothing at all. Indeed, their supposed impassivity, even paralysis, is one of the defining truisms most often voiced about them, second only to the subject's stunning lack of beauty, which is seen as the greatest of flaws in the figure of the muse—the customary role for the artist's wife. But keeping in mind Souriau's words about the near-invisibility of "deeply felt emotion," I want to demonstrate how the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne are actually replete with expression—an expression that was and is constituted through the sometimes incremental, sometimes sweeping, even jarring, application of color strokes, which shifted continuously from the transparent to the opaque, and back again.

I would like to introduce this idea by looking at two of Fiquet Cézanne's portraits, each of which represents the subject in a seemingly transparent state of mind. At first, the images appear less ambiguous than the others in the series. But despite their slightly more overt clues to mood, they confirm the difficulty of assigning a singular meaning to any of Cézanne's portraits of his wife. However, they do serve the critical function of teaching us how to look at these paintings, and extract meaning from their idiosyncratic but revealing pictorial structures.

Fig. 1 Paul Cézanne, Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down, 1890-92. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art

In a portrait now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down, of ca. 1890-92 (fig. 1) the subject's head is tilted significantly to the left; her eyes gaze off in the same direction; they possess a melancholy, almost mournful, cast, as does the down-turned mouth. The idiomatic phrase for sorrow—that someone "has a long face," seems borne out by the elongated oval of Fiquet Cézanne's countenance. When Ribot wrote about melancholy in The Psychology of Emotions, he described it as a kind of primer of the emotional inventory: an emotion that was almost always recognizable. He also believed that melancholy was profoundly contagious: "If you remain seated for a long time in a melancholy attitude you will be overcome by sadness."³⁷ When Darwin, two decades earlier, had assessed the facial cues for "Low Spirits, Anxiety, Grief, Dejection, Despair," he observed that usually after someone's acute suffering subsides, they "remain motionless and passive…circulation becomes languid; the face pale; the muscles flaccid; the eyelids droop, the head hangs on the contracted chest; the lips, cheeks, and lower jaw all sink downwards from their own weight. Hence all the features are lengthened; and the face of a person who hears bad news is said to fall."³⁸

Portrait of Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down has been explained by some writers as an expression of the pity Cézanne felt for his wife, a continuation of the habit of denying significance to the choice of Fiquet Cézanne as a portraiture subject. Alternatively, Meyer Schapiro suggested that the artist may have been emulating the grief of a bereft medieval mourner.³⁹ Indeed, there is a drawing in Adrien Chappuis's catalogue raisonné of Cézanne's drawings of what may be a female saint, or perhaps the Virgin Mary, whose head tilts toward the right (but at a very similar angle); her eyes are closed and hair streams down alongside her face beneath her veil.⁴⁰ On the very same page is a sketch of Fiquet Cézanne, placed so that she appears to loom over the smaller head, the secular trumping the sacred. (I should say that Fiquet Cézanne's features in the images her husband drew of her rarely resemble her countenance as painted—a disjunction which is a subject for a separate chapter.)⁴¹

Among twenty six oil paintings, and scores of watercolors and pencil drawings, this is the only image in which Cézanne represented his wife with her hair down. Customarily, the woman who let down her hair, often sitting at her dressing table, was preparing for the arrival of her lover. And of course, streaming hair was also an accompaniment to grief. More mundanely, by the 1880's, it was not entirely uncommon for a fashionable woman to wear her hair partially down in public, perhaps under the light restraint of a bonnet or band. But this does not seem to have been the case with Fiquet Cézanne. With this one exception, her hair was always pulled back or up in a topknot or chignon. In part, this often severe hairstyle is one of the few consistencies within a series of otherwise always shifting appearances.

A deep sensuality is inferred here from the color and shape of the mouth—despite its melancholy frown. A clear luminous rose tone defines the upper lip; a slightly paler, dappled pink the curving pout of the lower. And the eyelids are almost seductively rimmed by a line of deep violet blue. The mouth is composed of a variety of color patches—mostly rose and ocher, with faint traces of violet blue and gray green—that seem to have been pressed upon the canvas, rather than applied carefully with a small brush, thus making the lips appear faintly bruised, a conflation of seeing and imagined touching that is typical of Cézanne.⁴² The orchestration of violets, blues and greens surrounding and inflecting a cluster of warm ochers and roses will recur in many of the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne. Historically, this is precisely the same range of tones that Rubens juxtaposed in both his portraits and in his allegorical representations of women. (Men's skin is often constructed in a range of russets, reds, and chestnut browns, rather than the roseate shades Rubens uses for women's skin.) Here, Fiquet Cézanne's chin, whose roundedness is punctuated and framed by a comma of green blue, seems to quiver as we observe it. So, too, does her left cheek appear to swell outward, with its projecting patch of crimson framed by the retreat of blue violet shadow just before her ear.

Cézanne paints his wife's face simultaneously as a mask and as a screen of revelations; the discontinuities are suggested by the unevenness of paint build-up across the face—the sense that we can peer beneath the surface, at the same time that the exterior boundary of the face is fortified by a broken line of violet blue. The initial mask-like effect of Fiquet Cézanne's face is also enhanced by the soft-edged band of deep violet grey shadow that curves around the jaw, cutting deeply into the neck, and also by the near-flattening of her left ear. Cézanne painted the pale ochers, ivories and corals of his wife's rounded forehead directly on top of her hairline, obscuring both the edge he drew earlier and left behind, and the one he painted later. The contour of Fiquet Cézanne's face is visible just beneath the top layer of ocher "skin." Her eyebrows seem pinned to her face at different heights. Their clarity gives them an uncommon force, as if they are brackets that hold everything else on the surface in place. If the eyebrows disappeared, or receded any further, the face would fall completely. Because Cézanne painted ocher and rose skin tones over the brows, the two asymmetrical arcs seem revealed to us through those depths, as if we had to glimpse past another layer, to bring them into focus. Reportedly, Cézanne said to his young interlocutor, Gasquet: "… nature isn't at the surface, it's in depth. Colors are the expression, on this surface, of this depth. They rise out of the earth's roots; they're its life, the life of ideas."⁴³ Those eyebrows of Fiquet Cézanne's appear to emanate from the depths—at the same time that, paradoxically, they prevent the surface from dissolving by adhering to all adjacent planes. In The Psychology of Emotion, Ribot made a comment analogous to Cézanne's in spirit: "We descend from the surface to the deeper strata, in order to arrive at the fundamental and irreducible fact at the root of all emotion: attraction or repulsion, desire or aversion, in short, motion, or arrest of motion."⁴⁴ Ribot's comment has a particular relevance to the sensation of movement we sense in Cézanne. In his painting, there is less a "progression" from the protective surface to the "truth" beneath; rather there is a continually shifting conjoining of the two: surface and depth, revelation and obstruction—a marriage in which the seams show. Jacqueline Lichtenstein has pointed out in The Eloquence of Color that there is nothing to be found beneath the colors that are on the surface of a painting but the raw canvas itself.⁴⁵

In this portrait, oscillation extends to the subject's level of exposure. Fiquet Cézanne appears alternately vulnerable and fortified. The stripes of her collared dress intensify a sense of restraint, for they seem to stiffen and shore up her body—despite the slight curve of the wide stripes that are aligned over her breasts. And the broadness of the shoulders, which fill almost the entire breadth of the painting, lend a certain stability and authority to the image. Her tilted head and shadowed neck appear cradled within the striped collar on the left, but are far too exposed on the right, where the slack collar seems to pull away from the skin. Somehow, here Fiquet Cézanne appears simultaneously monumental and diminished.

Many years ago, Robert Herbert argued for the content of Monet's layered and calculated brush strokes (in the Nymphéas series, for instance, Herbert argued that the corrugated strokes stood for the water's surface, the dark spaces between ridges for the depths below, and the translucent glaze on top for the elusive, moving reflections of clouds on the water's surface).⁴⁶ I would argue that Cézanne's juxtapositions of color-strokes—very different in texture, tone and consistency, of course—also body forth meaning in a way that is neither literally descriptive nor reductively abstract. The paint-strokes applied by Cézanne's brush occupy a third realm, in which meaning is forged through the sheer multiplicity, force and subtlety of their interactions. The strokes—not their mimetic capacity—are the agents of meaning, a meaning which by its very nature must be as contradictory, multifold, and impossible to characterize with precision as emotion itself.

Fig. 2 Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 1885-86. Oil on canvas. Aix-en-Provence, Musée Granet

We might imagine, at first, that a dominant emotion issues forth from the Musée Granet's Portrait of Madame Cézanne (1885-86) (fig. 2). The gaze that emanates from the large liquid eyes rimmed in yellow-orange seems one of baleful reproach. The tilt of the head is less acute than that within Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down; the slight pitch produces what seems more like accusatory annoyance than melancholy, particularly since the subject's eyes are directed more forthrightly toward the viewer. The slight asymmetry of the gaze does not mute its intensity. Fiquet Cézanne's face seems to shift in and out of focus, as we might perceive and then lose a trace of emotion. Blue shadows frame the heavy jaw and doubled chin, fade into ocher and pale crimson, reappear again to rim the hairline and the ear on the right, then dissolve into the background between face and frame. The dress is the same violet-blue as the shadows, which set into relief the blood red of the pigment that appears to wrap around her neck. The same dried blood color is repeated on the shoulder on the left, and within the interior of the nostrils. As was true in Delacroix's Death of Sardanapalus (a reproduction of which Cézanne had in his studio) in which the Romantic painter used a deep red color throughout the composition to suggest violence without ever representing the bloody consequences of the actions depicted, Cézanne's selectively placed red pigment insinuates a sense of disturbance within the portrait, without ever explicitly conveying an explanation for the harrowing emotion that is intimated by the subject's gaze.

The yellow orange of the eyelids, both upper and lower, contrasts jarringly with the deep violet grey of the oversized irises, and with the azure blue that creases the eyelid. As we observe the eyes more closely, we see that the apparently direct gaze of anger, or at the very least, annoyance, is deflected somewhat by the facial asymmetry that Cézanne constructed. Fiquet Cézanne's left eye swells beyond its encasement, the iris spilling out; her right eye seems more recessive—a slight but significant disjunction between the two sides of the face that Cézanne will later exaggerate even more strongly.

The mouth is slackly down-turned, with a projecting lower lip that makes the expression seem petulant. Cézanne's orchestration of slightly repellant colors with an unwelcoming countenance could almost be used to illustrate a Darwinian analysis of the signs of anger or hatred, which called for wide-open, bright eyes and an unlined forehead.⁴⁷ But Cézanne's expression is, as always, both more equivocal and more mobile. Fiquet Cézanne's face seems to lengthen as we observe it. There is an almost visceral tension created between, on one hand, the riveting eyes framed by the curving brow, and on the other, the downward-turning mouth and heavy, blue and green shadowed chin. The violet rose wedges that become the sides of the prominent nose rise and separate to become the yellow and pale crimson arcs of the eyebrows. But the attention to the upper part of the face generated by this sweeping rhythm, and the large scale of the eyes, is countered by the weight of the deep "shadows" that curve around the chin and jowls, pulling them downward, a trajectory that is reiterated by the mouth's pouty lower lip. The face thus appears viscerally "heavy" to the eye of the viewer, freighted and ponderous, pulled down.

The other portraits of Fiquet Cézanne that I will look at shortly are somewhat more diffuse in their effects, as well as more varied internally. Their "diffusibility"—to borrow a phrase of Alexander Bain's—can be aligned to emerging nineteenth-century conceptions of subjectivity.⁴⁸ By the 1880s, the human personality was understood to be a far more fluid construction than had earlier been envisioned, formed by ever-changing external phenomena and internal pressures. Both Ribot and Bain had voiced their belief that defining the emotions as individual, separable sensations just couldn't, and shouldn't, be attempted. Ribot wrote, "… we are led to ask, whether the human person itself is also not un tout de coalition, a whole by coalition—the extreme complexity of which veils from us its origin, and the origin of which would remain impenetrable, if the existence of elementary forms did not throw some light upon the mechanism of that fusion…The human personality…is a concrete whole, a complexus. To know it, we must analyze it. But analysis here is disastrously artificial, since it disjoins groups of phenomena which are not juxtaposed, but co-ordinated, their relation being that of mutual dependence, not of simple simultaneousness." Ribot conceded the difficulties of building an intellectual framework, or simply a narrative structure, to order, and rationalize, the personality. "Physical personality," he wrote, "or more precisely, its ultimate representation, appears to us, not like a central point from which everything radiates and to which all returns (the pineal gland of Descartes), but like a prodigiously tangled and inextricable maze in which histology, anatomy, and physiology get lost at every turn."⁴⁹

The ‘Complexus'
We might imagine that the nuances of color application in two portraits from the 1880s now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art suggest fluctuations in the density, and strength, of the subject's perceived emotions, mingled with those of the painter who beholds them. Cézanne's paintings of his wife embody that sensation of multiple, co-existing impulses, somehow knit together into a mobile, changeable whole. This is the "complexus" of Ribot's phrase, the aggregrate that cannot be reduced to a singular unity or expression. Cézanne's color patches could, of course, be characterized as a random distribution of warm and cool tones, but the evidence suggests that the painter thought long and hard about how to locate the tiniest fleck of color. His eye for what constituted a revelatory "feature" was both idiosyncratic and novel, to be sure—but not, finally, illegible or impossible to understand. In both portraits at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the face of Fiquet Cézanne seems a mix of the transparent and the opaque, as if the paint has the capacity to encompass what is masked, as well as what is disclosed. Any human interaction is a constantly shifting parry of revelation and withholding, and Cézanne imagined that modulations of cool and warm tones had the ability to convey both states. In a general way, his painstaking orchestrations of contrasting hues are his "sensations" materialized in paint, as he so often insisted. But they also, potentially, give visual form to the pulse of emotion across the expanse of a familiar face —to those impulses, memories, traces of experience, hesitations, feints, and disclosures which Cézanne believed were, by inference, available on the surface. In these portraits, the painter fully exploited a range of hues of equal chromatic brightness, with only a handful of concessions to what we might call "local" color. Instead, the contrasting hues form a delicate, lattice-like patchwork of blues, greens, ochers, pale crimsons, and off-whites that propels the eye across and around the expanse of Fiquet Cézanne's cheek (this is especially true in the painting in which the subject possesses a long narrow face and a tapering nose). The sensation of imminent movement, instigated by strokes of paint rather than by the illusionistic appearance of a downy cheek, is a kind of analogue, and rebuttal, to the customary tactile illusion usually sought in the skin, costume, and accessories of a "worthy" woman's portrait. While Fiquet Cézanne's features, as her husband configures them, may initially appear to be unanimated, the colors that compose the ever-shifting surface of her face are exceptionally vital and compel us to reconsider the very notion of pictorial expressivity.

As Cézanne struggled to represent his own perceptions of the "complexus" that was his wife, he was participating, whether intentionally or not, in a reform of one of the traditional principles of women's portraiture: the flattering use of color. Fiquet Cézanne was not painted as a beautiful woman, as we are often told; and this absence of beauty is matched by a pointed lack of painterly virtuosity—at least as it was more commonly represented in the sheen of a satin gown, the gleam of a russet curl, the dewy softness of an unwrinkled cheek. Cézanne thereby trumped the expectation that the woman's endowment as a painted beauty was matched by the artist's ability to paint beautifully. As he defied the usual, flattering capacities of color in portraiture, he elevated the ambitions for color's potential to convey meaning.

Chromatia
From the classical era, color had been associated with the decorative, the ornamental, and, thus, the superficial. That the superficial was also feminine stemmed from centuries of color's ranking as vastly inferior to that sign of intellectual and masculine achievement: drawing. The opening salvo in this long-standing subjugation was fired by no less than Plato, who insisted that "A painter is first and foremost a grinder and mixer of multicolor drugs."⁵⁰ In The Eloquence of Color, Lichtenstein writes that there is an ancient distinction between "natural" and "artistic" (i.e., artificial) color; color is pharmakeia when nature provides it and chromatia when it enters into the composition of a painting.⁵¹ In Cézanne's own era, Charles Blanc, whose book the painter owned, argued that color was the "feminine" part of art, not to be taken seriously, and he arrogated color to a strictly subordinate role to "masculine" drawing.⁵² Lichtenstein has traced the history of equating the danger of color with the danger of women, who were associated with any form of ornamentation. "When ornament becomes makeup on a canvas, painting becomes a woman—a woman of the most dangerous sort, illegitimate like the pleasure whose symbol she is [i.e., a painted woman, a courtesan']."⁵³ Eventually, after years of abuse within the academy, color began to have her defenders: one of the most vocal was Roger De Piles who, as Lichtenstein points out, championed color "…because it allows painting to represent things that move, things that are unstable, the whole world of diversity too subtle or delicate for the hand to grasp and that thereby elude drawing's mastery."⁵⁴ As a painter, Cézanne's objective was to make color the vehicle—not for superficial effects—but for the most profound meanings. He wanted color to vault to the top of the academic hierarchy, supplanting drawing, which he believed was "always abstract."⁵⁵

In fact, Cézanne perceived color as a living entity, a kind of organism. As he himself put it, "There is only one route for rendering everything, for translating everything: color. Color is biological, if I can put it that way. Color is living, all alone it breathes life into things." As he and Gasquet stood before Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana in the Louvre, Cézanne confided to the young writer, "I sometimes feel that colors are like great noumenal entities, living ideas, creatures of pure reason…With whom we might correspond."⁵⁶ Cézanne felt that he imbibed these "entities" almost as if bodily, every time he stood before one of the masterworks by Rubens, Tintoretto, or Delacroix that he so revered. The Veronese Marriage Feast at Cana was nominally about Christ's first miracle, turning water into wine—the substance which, in turn, is used to stand for the Savior's blood in the Catholic mass. This reference to transubstantiation would not have been lost on Cézanne, a devout and deeply superstitious Catholic. In fact, the artist's language about his bodily experience of color has affinities to an account of a mystic's fusion with the deity.⁵⁷

Cézanne, by referring to the beloved painters of the past, dramatized his sense of his own achievement, as well as his indebtedness. But aside from the self-consciousness about history which the artist possessed for the duration of his career, the colors that issued from these paintings had the potency to transcend time, place, and their own materiality. Boundaries between self and other dissolved, and Cézanne imagined himself somehow one with the colors that composed these paintings, a fusion which he articulated in almost primal terms. Gasquet recalled Cézanne's words at the Louvre: "I like muscles, beautiful colors, blood. I am like [Hippolyte] Taine and what's more I am a painter. I am a sensualist." Cézanne believed that there was "a state of grace in colors…you can feel all these shades of colors running in your blood," he insisted. "You feel reinvigorated. You become yourself, you become part of the painting." Standing before Delacroix's Women of Algiers, Cézanne continued the metaphor of ingestion in explicitly physical terms: "…all this luminous color, it seems that it enters the eye like a glass of wine running into your gullet and it makes you drunk straight away. You don't know how it happens, but you feel much lighter. These shades are uplifting and purifying…One color passes into the next, like silks."⁵⁸ It was as if Cézanne was somehow taking in the "noumenal entities" of saturated color directly into both his mind and his body—a very different way of both thinking about and experiencing color than the analyical treatments so favored by artists such as Signac and Seurat.⁵⁹

This sense of fusion seemed especially acute when Cézanne was engaged in the experience of painting a portrait. His own language, as filtered through Gasquet, suggested that he was somehow absorbing not only the colors before him, but the very substance of the person they composed. The same kind of attachment Cézanne projected onto the paintings in the Louvre was activated by the presence of his subject. In one instance, the subject was Joachim Gasquet's father Henri, himself an old friend of Cézanne's. The artist described to Joachim Gasquet a kind of visceral and mental exchange that occurred between Henri and himself as he proceeded with the portrait—as if the respective bodies of the painter and subject, along with their vital fluids, fleeting thoughts, experiences, states of mind, and abiding temperaments, were all somehow absorbed and merged through a kind of reciprocity in which the portraiture subject commingled with the artist's own persona, and was re-projected through paint. "I feel," Cézanne reportedly said to Joachim Gasquet, that "with each brush stroke I give it, there's a little of my blood mixed with a little of your father's blood, in the sun, in the light, in the color, and that there is a mysterious exchange, which he isn't aware of, which goes from his soul into my eye which re-creates it and where he will recognize himself." Cézanne believed fervently that the smallest brush-stroke had to be properly calibrated to conjure up the "personality" before him: "Between you and me, Henri, I mean, between what makes up your personality and mine there is a world, the sun, events, what we have in common, our habits, our flesh, reflections. I have to dig all through that. That is where, if the slightest brush stroke goes awry it changes everything."⁶⁰

Reciprocity
We are lucky to have preserved Cézanne's reflections as he painted the elder Gasquet. Sadly, no comparable words remain concerning his portraits of his wife—unless we count Cézanne's quite possibly apocryphal remark that Fiquet Cézanne "liked only Switzerland and lemonade."⁶¹ To encapsulate the spirit of most commentary on the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne, I share Bernard Dorival's frustration with Cézanne's portraiture: "He was almost completely indifferent to his models, who were monotonous or insignificant, and sometimes both…As against Delacroix, Cézanne did not try to portray remarkable people with a complex inner life; otherwise, why would he have painted his wife so often?"⁶² Dorival and the many other unsympathetic critics notwithstanding, it seems likely that the same kind of exchange which the painter described as having occurred with Henri Gasquet, would have been activated in the case of his wife, and perhaps with even more intensity. At the very least, through this prolonged series of portraits—surpassed in number only by his self-portraits—Cézanne could have explored all the possible variations of intimacy and distance, of knowing and not-knowing, of touching and holding at arm's length, that are possible when one sentient human being looks exhaustively at another. It is often said that it was Fiquet Cézanne's passivity that made her an appealing subject for her husband, the idea being that her personality was so nondescript, her presence so void, that Cézanne could project whatever he wished onto her.⁶³ I am convinced that the reverse is true: that while a certain quietude and containment on his wife's part did allow Cézanne to give freer rein to his projections, his craving for reciprocity demanded that he feel comfortable with the live bodily and psychological presence of his subject. Cézanne's interaction with Georges Clemenceau provides a counter-example. The painter attempted the premier's portrait, at the instigation of Claude Monet. After two successful sittings, Cézanne confided to Gasquet that he "hit a wall…You see the model had worked on me, inside." Clemenceau had been too vivid a presence, with his constant chattering, his lively gossip; he was "as malicious as a wasp," Cézanne claimed.⁶⁴ It is as if Clemenceau's sarcastic wit acted as a kind of barbed armor that the painter could not penetrate. While Cézanne likely anticipated resistance to the fusion he attempted, he perhaps could not navigate the outright propulsion of another's personality.

How might Cézanne have translated his love of the old master's color into his own map of the simultaneously resistant and porous human psyche? Let us imagine the painter standing before a Rubens in the Louvre— say, Marie de Medici's Disembarkation at Marseilles—studying the patches of the roseate flesh of one of the naiads, whom he drew over and over. He translates Rubens's relatively seamless-appearing surface into a constellation of vibrating strokes: roses, whites, ochers, and surrounds the area with curving strokes of green and blue, perhaps violet and gray. Cézanne's approach was thoroughly idiosyncratic; he modulated, separated, analyzed each incremental stroke in a way that was intended to deepen and dramatize the color relationships; but he also shaped an aggregate of colors that was intended to be true to the "complexus" that was his subject, as he perceived it over time. With Gasquet, Cézanne continually came back to this point that meaning lay in deliberate color juxtapositions, not in what the color ‘described.' Standing before Veronese's Marriage Feast at Cana, the painter advised his young friend, "A picture doesn't represent anything. It doesn't need to represent anything in the first place but the colors. As for me, I hate that, all those stories, that psychology, that symbolism. Goodness knows it's there in the painting, painters are not imbeciles, but you have to see it with your eyes...That's all the painter wanted. His psychology is the way he makes two colors meet. That's his personal history, his truth, his depth."⁶⁵ Cézanne went on to complain to Joachim Gasquet about journalists who felt entitled to write about painting, even though they had no understanding of how the process actually worked: "And God help them if they can't see how you can make a mouth look sad or a cheek smile by joining a green shade to a red one."⁶⁶

Fig. 3 Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 1885-87. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Louis E. Stern Collection

Mobility
We can see precisely how this juxtaposition might have worked by looking carefully at the Philadelphia painting of 1883-85 (fig. 3). It is possible to imagine a discernible "jump" from the subject's full, slightly pursed red lips to the green commas of paint around the mouth and at the contour of the chin, just as Cézanne described it to Gasquet. The contrast between the colors promotes a sense of the mobility of the mouth, and the elasticity of the skin around it. The visual signifiers of change suggest the fluidity of subjecthood.⁶⁷ The mutual intensification generated by juxtaposing complementary colors was a fundamental idea within the color theories that were so popular during these years, and had in part derived from Delacroix's predilection for setting a green next to a red, and a blue beside a yellow—a color strategy that Cézanne deliberately emulated. The younger painter likely knew the books of Charles Henry and others whom Signac and Seurat, for example, used a bit more programmatically.⁶⁸

The philosopher Paul Souriau, who was an almost exact contemporary of Cézanne's, regretted that painting was compelled to render the "harmonies of color at a standstill."⁶⁹ But this is precisely the limitation that Cézanne transcended. In his capacity to create movement through color juxtapositions, Cézanne achieved what Souriau believed was impossible: he orchestrated the rhythms, harmonies, even discordances of color to produce meanings that were generated by the interactions themselves. The co-mingling between artist and sitter constituted an "interworld"—to borrow a phrase of Merleau-Ponty's—whose traces were memorialized in the finished canvas.⁷⁰ Souriau's description of how the eye took in a painting mirrored Cézanne's technique of calculated, distinct color juxtapositions. The philosopher pointed out that, "When we look at something, we think we are moving our eyes in a continuous motion, but in reality we are jerking them…First we fix our eyes on a flower on the carpet, then we jump to another. And we think this displacement of our eyes is continuous because our attention goes successively to the different points of the subject."⁷¹ The jump from crimson to green that I described in the Philadelphia 1883-85 portrait depends on just such a staccato movement of the eye, which then leads to the syncopated, multi-directional movement across the rest of Fiquet Cézanne's face and form.

Her face in this painting is very different in proportion and shape from either that of Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down, or the Musée Granet's Madame Cézanne. The Philadelphia painting seems to have been configured principally around the expressive flashpoints of eyes and mouth. The pale ocher and amber patches that frame the mouth on the far side prevent it from receding, which makes the face seem even broader. The cheekbones are high; the jaw squared; the forehead relatively narrow—strikingly distinct from the dome-like brow of Madame Cézanne with her Hair Down. It is as if Cézanne built an armature to cushion and frame the most active and mobile agents of perception and response.

Fiquet Cézanne's large eyes are pools of blue and black, flecked with pale brown, coral and white. The subject's face seems to quiver with the effort of looking so intently. And looking, as Cézanne imagined and practiced it, was an intensely demanding activity, one which caused his own eyes to bulge, bloodshot, from his head. Infra-red photography of an earlier version of the face under the layer of paint indicates that Cézanne actually enlarged the eyes, in the process of making the portrait, and he also adjusted the mouth, bestowing upon it a more sensual contour and fullness. Fiquet Cézanne's left eye seems poised directly on the rim of her face, which further dramatizes the intensity of her visual engagement. The scale of the brows was also enhanced in the final painting, while the nose and mouth were softened. The curve of green pigment that gives the pale crimson of the lower lip its sensation of movement, was present from the beginning, as the Philadelphia Museum of Art's infra-red photography shows, which suggests that Cézanne wanted to exploit as fully as possible the expressive intensity of the complementary colors.

Counterpointed to the large areas of acidic green that form much of Fiquet Cézanne's right cheek are concentrated areas of blood red pigment: in the scarlet of the lower lip; in the interior of the nostril and along the edge of the neck; in the fluted collar of the blouse. (In the original layer of paint there was a floppy bow that obscured the neck; the blouse is now fastened, more loosely, with a button.) It is a fundamental tenet of Cézanne's practice that he never wanted to paint anything pre-conceived. That extended not only to the physicality of the person who was his portraiture subject, whom he needed to see afresh every time he sat to paint, but also to the particular state of mind, the series of imagined emotions that flitted across the face he was observing so acutely. In this portrait, it is as if the surface of Fiquet Cézanne's face is being molded as we watch it by the pliancy and intensity of her expression; as if her features are straining forward with the effort of looking. Thus, the entire face—a face whose actual proportions were obviously deeply familiar—is observed anew, re-imagined, and recast in paint, according to the painter's shifting perceptions. Green and pale ocher are the principal colors of the face, and skin is layered over hair, in the kind of fragmentary masking that Cézanne frequently applied. Multiple pentimenti still visible show that Cézanne drew and redrew the contour of the nose, and the angle of the brows. The tip of the nose is bare canvas, and its side contours bend at a different angle, suggesting that the face is about to turn the other way. We gaze upon the viscerally transformative effects of emotion—as they shape the exterior—just as Cézanne saw and sensed them.

Like the painter, we can only guess at the content of the emotions that Fiquet Cézanne experienced, and which her husband sensed, and perhaps even misinterpreted. But we are assured of their presence, even as we are convinced of their changeability. Cézanne was careful to stress the care he took to convey the complexities of emotion—simple direct expression was not possible, nor was it even desirable, as it grossly oversimplified the human psyche's capacities for emotion. Calculation and patient modulation were necessary to achieve the most resonant—and the "truest"—representation. Cézanne assured Gasquet: "…if I am only emotional, I slap your eye on sideways. But if I weave around your expression an infinite web of little blues, some browns that I see, that work together on my canvas, I make you look the way you look…And if I were unemotional and cold, if I drew and painted as they do at the École, I would no longer see anything…Every time I stand in front of my easel, I am another man and always Cézanne…How can those others imagine that with plumb-lines, academic drawings, and ready-made measurements established once and for all they can grasp changing, shimmering matter?"⁷²

Fig. 4 Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, 1886-87. Oil on canvas. Philadelphia Museum of Art, The Samuel S. White 3rd and Vera White Collection

Capturing that "changing, shimmering matter" without stilling its mobility seems to be a central preoccupation in the third of the Philadelphia portraits of Fiquet Cézanne (fig. 4). When Souriau wrote about emotion, he observed that different temperaments would naturally respond differently to certain stimuli: "There are some rather coarse temperaments that are never moved by moderate feelings, but must be shaken by violent passions in order to become expressive. And there are more delicate temperaments that vibrate at the least emotion and are affected from head to toe. It is then a real aesthetic pleasure to see how the most fleeting nuances are reflected in their mobile, transparent faces."⁷³ Here, Cézanne appears to have made a pictorial structure for the kind of facial transparency that Souriau imagined. In all the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne, passages of what seem to be "local color" are interwoven with areas that are mimetically incoherent, producing a surface that suggests what Michel Foucault called "the entire visible surface of knowledge," where, the writer continues, "things in fragments, outlines, pieces, shards....offer themselves, though very partially, to representation."⁷⁴ It is not that Cézanne abandons content here by attending to the individual strokes of color, strokes which in no way conform to the usual understanding of a figurative "detail" or "description." In these paintings, meaning is framed in a manner that demands, and repays, incremental, meditative attention. A fluent but measured gaze across the surface of the canvas reveals that the perceptual "movement" caused by the juxtaposition of contrasting colors, especially complementary colors placed together, becomes a new metaphorical strategy for conveying expression. Meaning lies in how strokes are juxtaposed and contrasted; in how they punctuate, incite or arrest a rhythm.

To be sure, Fiquet Cézanne's expression is not "legible" in the same way that a painting such as, for instance, Boucher's portrait of Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson, Marquise de Pompadour (1758, Cambridge, Mass., Fogg Art Museum) might be (although this subject's expression is hardly uncomplicated).⁷⁵ Yet if considered without the need to literalize features, the face and figure of Fiquet Cézanne are revealed to incorporate fluctuating densities and layers of color that stand for the variations and accretions of expression over time. Several years later, Georg Simmel would write about the revelations that were available to those who carefully studied the human face: "It is the fact that what is uniform and fixed as well as what is fluid and varied within our soul becomes visible as absolute simultaneity, as it were, the one always in the form of the other." Simmel believed that the revelations contained in the face must be imaginatively excavated to become available. He wrote, "If we discount a large number of modifications, then what we see of a person is the lasting part of them; as in a section through geological strata, the history of their life and what it is based upon as the timeless dowry of nature are revealed in their face."⁷⁶

Here, Fiquet Cézanne's entire head, not simply her face, seems mobile, and sometimes contradictorily so. The potential for a sweeping movement, abetted by the elongated nostril that points to the right, is undermined by the arresting, slightly crossed eyes, and the deep curve of the out-thrust chin, which gives an implacable look to the set of the lower lip. Competing impulses toward movement and stasis—revelation and retreat—vie for primacy. Souriau wrote about the contradictions of emotions experienced at the same time: "…sometimes, in states of mind that are more complex, excited feelings conflict with depressive ones. For example, consider the coward who gets insulted and trembles with powerless rage: anger pushes him forward, fear, backward; and this psychological conflict is expressed by vibratory gestures of an unpleasant effect."⁷⁷ In Fiquet Cézanne's portrait, blue pigment frames, and seems to gently vibrate against, the jawline of the left cheek, which also intensifies a sensation of imminent movement—and complements the apparent openness of her right cheek, on our left, with the shadow of closure. A flicker of gold trails up into the head and hair, whose topknot is composed, somehow, of a significant amount of bare canvas. There are traces of a circle under the right eye, and the blue shadow gives weight to that side of the face; although it does not entirely recede as it might be expected to. Fiquet Cézanne is both present to us, in the seeming transparency of her offered cheek, and engaged elsewhere, half turned-away, which seems an appropriate, if equivocal, resolution for the woman who sat for the man who never believed that he could, or should, anticipate what he saw before him as he began to paint.

Fig. 5 Paul Cézanne, Portrait of Madame Cézanne, c. 1885. Oil on canvas. Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Nationalgalerie, on loan from Bettina Berggruen

There is a companion to this painting: a smaller image now in Berlin, in which Fiquet Cézanne wears the same jacket and approximately the same sketchy top-knot. (fig. 5) While the Philadelphia painting shows us a subject who is aloof from her maker, even though she could swivel her head at any minute, the Berlin portrait delivers her direct gaze—or rather, it seems to. At first, the portrait looks breathtakingly confrontational, even aggressive in its directness. But then we realize that it is only the subject's right eye that is so acutely focused. Her left eye is masked, hooded and recessive. Even the iris of that eye is painted over, by the blue white that surrounds it, as if to deliberately obscure any revelations it might offer. The lid of this eye seems thickened, and flaccid.

Coloristic divisions deepen across the face. The left side of the subject's face, on our right, seems somehow older, slacker, and is composed of nearly cadaverous colors—cool blues, violets, greys and greens. Despite the slash of rose in the middle of the cheek, the expanse of skin does not seem warm to the touch. Cézanne gives us the subject as an aggregate, un tout par coalition, as Ribot would have it, melded into a shifting, unstable form which curiously possesses its own idiosyncratic integrity. It is not just the eyes that seem to project and retreat, respectively. It is the entire expanse of the half-face into which they are set, which renders the countenance a far more unstable entity than it initially appears, given the compelling intensity of the gaze.

Cézanne believed that there was a duality to be found in every face, because every human psyche can be engaged in more than one preoccupation at a time. His experience of painting Henri Gasquet reveals his thinking on this disjunction. "Look Gasquet," Cézanne said to the son, "here's your father…He's sitting there, isn't he? He's smoking his pipe. He's listening with only one ear…His eye is not the same…[Y]ou see how this tiny, minuscule spot of color which forms a shadow under the eyelash is out of place…Good, I'm correcting it." Cézanne struggles to get the expression of one eye exactly right. He is at first dissatisfied. "But then my light green nearby, I can see it stands out too much...I tone it down...I carry on with almost invisible touches all around. The eye is more convincing…but now…the other one, it seems to me to be squinting. It's looking. Its looking at me. Whereas this one is looking at his life, his past, you, I don't know. Something which isn't me, which isn't us." According to Joachim, Henri Gasquet piped up at this moment, "I was thinking about the trump I held yesterday up to my third trick." Cézanne exclaims victoriously, "You see!...By putting some part of myself in your father, I would have my complete statement. And I would use suggestions of shadow and light. I would come close to reality…That's what I really want…Otherwise, in my own way I would be doing what I criticize the Beaux Arts for. In my brain I'd have my preconceived person and I would be tracing the truth over him. Whereas it's myself that I want to trace over it." Cézanne spoke wistfully of what other painters might do in the future with the portrait: "They'll make photographs. Don't misunderstand me but they'll do photographs of souls, of characters, of a man. And then from these impressions others will derive a great art, a glowing psychology, a philosophy of mankind."⁷⁸

The End of Interiority
A "glowing psychology" of emotion seems an apt way to describe what Cézanne, in fact, did achieve through the portraits of his wife, despite his skepticism about his ability to do so. Traditionally, color is non-mimetic; yet, despite that long-standing assumption, nowhere was it expected to conjure mimesis more convincingly than in the painting of a woman's face. When Cézanne set aside the mimetic properties of color, he rejected as well its literal, and literary, associations, searching for something more profound to put in their place. The end of interiority in portraiture—as Cézanne envisioned it—was contingent upon the ascendency of color as an agent of meaning. The painter fabricated his own "noumenal entities", which can touch us through the portraits of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, if we accept their invitation to absorption.

I would like to thank the members of the French Cultural Studies Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania, who offered very useful comments on a version of this essay. I also thank the audience at the symposium, "The Ends of Portrayal" at the University of Delaware in September of 2003, and especially Margaret Werth for extending the invitation to speak there. An audience at Rutgers University made many intriguing and thoughtful suggestions for extending the argument. I thank Petra Chu and an anonymous reviewer for their editorial suggestions. I also thank Robert Alvin Adler for his fastidious and patient editing. I am grateful to Alison Chang for her efficiency and care in gathering illustrations. Finally, I thank the members of my reading group for their always astute comments and long-standing support: Elizabeth Bartman, Ülkü Bates, Anne Lowenthal, Lucy Oakley, and Lisa Vergara.

1. I intend my title as an homage of sorts to Richard Shiff's article "Sensation, Movement, Cézanne," which has influenced my thinking about ways to conceptualize emotion and color. See Richard Shiff, "Sensation, Movement, Cézanne," in Terence Maloon, ed., Classic Cézanne. Exh. cat., (New South Wales: Art Gallery of Sydney, 1998), pp. 13-27; p. 14. My article is an excerpt from a book in progress on the portraits of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne by her husband. Specifically, this article is drawn from a core chapter about a group of the portraits in relation to the representation and theory of emotion during the late nineteenth century. Other chapters are organized around the themes of materiality and touch, sexuality and gender, the history of the portraits' reception, and the drawings of Fiquet Cézanne. The book, Cézanne's Significant Other, is forthcoming from University of California Press. I am using the form "Fiquet Cézanne," which encompasses both the unmarried and married states of my subject, to avoid the cliché of using the artist's last name, along with the model's first—although I have taken the authorial privilege of using the subject's first name in the title; the alternative seemed too unwieldy.

2. Scholars differ on exactly how many portraits of Fiquet Cézanne there are, with the list ranging from twenty-four to forty; the latter number probably includes drawings and watercolors, as well. See John Rewald, with Walter Feilchenfeldt and Jayne Warman, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné, 2 vol. (New York: Harry Abrams, 1996). In addition to the oil paintings, there are two watercolors of Madame Cézanne, and scores of drawings. See Wayne Andersen, "Portraits of Madame Cézanne," Cézanne's Portrait Drawings, sec. 2 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1970), pp. 72-113.

3. The handful of studies which have mentioned the portraits of Fiquet Cézanne include Linda Nochlin, "Cézanne: Studies in Contrast," a review of the 1996 Cézanne retrospective in Art in America, vol. 84, no. 6 (July 1996), pp. 56-67 and 116, which includes a discussion of Fiquet Cézanne, pp. 65-66; Anne H. Van Buren, "Madame Cézanne's Fashions and the Date of her Portraits," The Art Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 2 (1966), pp. 111-27; Bob Kirsch, "Paul Cézanne: Jeune fille au piano and Some Portraits of his Wife, An Investigation of his Painting of the Late 1870's," Gazette des Beaux-Arts, vol. 110 (July-August 1987), pp. 2-26. None of these are extended studies of the paintings themselves. While there has been some discussion of the portraits in relatively brief catalogue entries, rarely has any of them been analyzed in depth. An exception is Rudolf Arnheim, Art and Visual Perception (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press), 1966, pp. 27-31. Arnheim writes a formal analysis of Madame Cézanne, Art Institute of Chicago, ca. 1890-94; a sensitive study of the work's oscillation between stasis and movement. Although Richard Shiff does not include an extended discussion of the meaning of the portraits of Cézanne, he does analyze a number of them in ways which have been helpful to my thinking. See Richard Shiff: Cézanne and the End of Impressionism: A Study of the Theory, Technique, and Critical Evaluation of Modern Art (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), and also Richard Shiff, "Cézanne's Physicality: The Politics of Touch," in Salim Kemal and Ivan Gaskell, eds. The Language of Art History (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991).

4. Joseph Rishel and Françoise Cachin, Cézanne. Exh. cat. (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1996), p. 318. Sidney Geist is the only author to insist that Fiquet Cézanne actively inspired her husband. On his understanding of how her pregnancy influenced Cézanne, see Geist's Interpreting Cézanne (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 72-75. On Fiquet Cézanne's role in Cézanne's Temptation of Saint Anthony, 1870, Bührle Collection, Zurich, see Geist, pp. 110-116, and also see pp. 126-27 on how Cézanne felt conflicted between his mother and his wife. About Fiquet Cézanne, Geist writes, "She occupies an immense region of his imagination, a realm where the boundaries between art and erotic impulse are indistinct…the constancy of his imaginative focus was such that he transformed all things and relations into signs for Hortense…Hortense is implicated, by allusion, metaphor, cryptomorphism, and manifest portraiture, in a fifth of the paintings Cézanne made after they met," p. 153. Geist's idiosyncratic and untheorized speculations are commented upon by Griselda Pollock in "What Can We Say About Cézanne These Days?" Oxford Art Journal, vol. 13, no. 1 (1990), pp. 95-100. The painter Elizabeth Murray made interesting comments on Fiquet Cézanne, as she appears in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Madame Cézanne in a Yellow Chair, c. 1890, in an interview with Michael Kimmelman: "There is a mixture of fear and love…She's not really sitting in the chair, and sometimes it seems as if she weighs about 500 pounds and other times she looks like a hollow dress with arms and a head sticking out of it…The image seems to be all about uncertainty...And all this emotion, this angst, this frustration, is in the picture." New York Times, October 21, 1994, pp. C1 and C28.

5. That a woman should appear to be pleased, and/or willing to be pleasing, was traditionally part of her appeal in portraiture. For an overview of recent discussions on the controversial role of "beauty" in portraiture, see the following: Patricia Simons, "Women in Frames," History Workshop: A Journal of Socialist and Feminist Historians, 25 (Spring 1988), pp. 4-30, reprinted in Norma Broude and Mary Garrard, eds. The Expanding Discourse: Feminist and Art History (New York: Icon Editions, 1992), pp. 39-50; Elizabeth Cropper, "The Beauty of Women," in M. Ferguson, M. Quilligan, and N. Vickers, eds. Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); Mary Sheriff, The Exceptional Woman: Elizabeth Vigée-Lebrun and the Cultural Politics of Art (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

6. In this vein, see especially the critic Roger Fry's comments, cited below in note 9. The lengthiest discussion on Fiquet Cezanne remains Ann H. Van Buren's "Madame Cézanne's Fashions and the Date of her Portraits."

7. For the biography of Madame Cézanne, see John Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, trans. Margaret H. Liebman (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1948), p. 77. Also see Jack Lindsay, Cézanne: His Life and Art (London: Evelyn, Adams, and McKay, 1969), esp. pp. 131-132.

8. Paul Alexis to Emile Zola, quoted in Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, p. 114. Rewald's book supplied this article's biographical information of Cézanne's early life. It has been speculated that "La Boule" might allude to Madame Cézanne's supposed love of gambling—in particular to the balls used in the outdoor game of bowling; also, "boule" was the name for a rounded loaf of bread. There is one drawing illustrated in Wayne Andersen's Cézanne's Portrait Drawings in which the subject's downcast head is juxtaposed to the rounded shape of an apple or orange. We have no evidence of Cézanne himself having used this nickname. See Andersen, p. 92, cat. 61: Portrait of Madame Cézanne, "with a sketch of a round object, probably an orange." Collection Adrien Chappuis.

9. Roger Fry to Helen Anrep, 1 May 1925, in The Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), p. 568. The book the author was at work on was Cézanne: A Study of His Development.

10. Lindsay, The Life and Art of Cézanne, p. 131. Lindsay does insist, however, that Cézanne's involvement with Fiquet Cézanne was a defining feature of his life and art.

11. Emile Bernard, quoted by Richard Shiff in Cézanne and the End of Impressionism, p. 125. On Bernard's and Maurice Denis's meeting with Cézanne, see ibid., pp. 125-140.

12. Rewald,, p. 77. Rewald writes, "This change in Cézanne's emotional life does not appear to have influenced either his art or his relationships to his friends."

13. See, for instance Rishel and Cachin, Cézanne, p. 318. Rishel does add, however, that the marriage between Cézanne and Fiquet Cézanne may not have been significantly different from many other nineteenth-century bourgeois marriages.

14. On this point, see Nochlin, "Cézanne: Studies in Contrast," pp. 65-66.

15. See William Rubin, ed. Picasso and Portraiture: Representation and Transformation. Exh. cat. (New York: Museum of Modern Art; New York: Harry Abrams, 1996), p. 13.

16. D.H. Lawrence, "Literature and Art," in Phoenix: The Posthumous Papers of D.H. Lawrence, ed. Edward D. McDonald (New York: Viking Press, 1936), p. 580.

17. John Rewald, ed., Paul Cézanne Letters, trans. Margeurite Kay (New York: Da Capo Press, orig. 1941, 1995), p. 313, from a letter to Louis Leydet, written in Aix, 17 January, 1905.

18. Important writings of this period that addressed the emotions would include: Hippolyte Taine, On Intelligence, trans. T.D. Haye (New York: Holt and Williams, 1872); Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (New York: Appleton, 1913); Théodule Ribot, The Psychology of the Emotions, (New York: Walter Scott / Charles Scribner and Sons, 1917); Théodule Ribot, Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. Albert H.N. Baron (Chicago: Open Court, 1906); Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (New York: D. Appleton. 1885); Alexander Bain, The Emotions and the Will (London: Longmans, Green, 1865); Alexander Bain, Mental Science: A Compendium of Psychology (New York: Arno Press, 1973); Wilhelm Wundt, Lectures on Human and Animal Psychology, trans. J.E. Creighton and E.B. Titchener (London: Swann, Sonnenschein; New York: Macmillan, 1907); James Sully, The Human Mind: A Textbook of Psychology (London: Longmans, Green, 1892); and William James, The Principles of Psychology (New York: Henry Holt, 1890; New York: Dover Publications, 1950). Jonathan Crary makes William James' work on perception the centerpiece of a suggestive discussion of Cézanne's Pines and Rocks, c. 1900, Museum of Modern Art. He also delves into the culture and history of theories of perception and attention during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. See Crary's Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999), esp. chap. 4: "1900: Reinventing Synthesis," pp. 281-359. About Cézanne's relationship to the work of thinkers such as William James, Crary writes, "One of the discoveries that [Cézanne] made over the next decade is that perception can take no other form than the process of its formation," pp. 287-88.

19. Foundational late nineteenth and early twentieth-century studies on hysteria include: Jean-Martin Charcot, Leçons du mardi à la Salpêtrière (Paris, 1892); and the same author, L'Hystérie, ed. Etienne Trillat (Toulouse: Edward Priat, 1971); and the following lectures and essays by Sigmund Freud, published in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press, 1953-74): "On the Psychical Mechanism of Hysterical Phenomena: A Lecture," (1893), vol. 3; "The Aetiology of Hysteria" (1896), vol. 3; "Fragments of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria," (1905), vol. 7; "Hysterical Phantasies and their Relation to Bisexuality," (1908), vol. 9, "Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis," (1909), vol. 11; and "Some General Remarks on Hysterical Attacks," (1909), vol. 9. Important studies that address the cultural, theoretical, and historical issues raised by hysteria include: Georges Didi-Huberman, L'Invention de l'hystérie: Charcot et l'iconographie de la Salpêtrière , (Paris: Macula, 1982); Debora Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin de SiPcle France: Politics, Psychology, Style (Berkeley and London: University of California Press, 1989); Charles Bernheimer and Claire Kahane, In Dora's Case: Freud, Hysteria, Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985); Mark Micale, Approaching Hysteria: Disease and its Interpretations, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995; Elisabeth Bronfen, The Knotted Subject: Hysteria and its Discontents, (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), which has an excellent bibliography of literary, artistic, and theoretical studies that have addressed the notion of hysteria. Also see J. Laplanche and J-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York and London: W.W. Norton, 1973), pp. 194-97.

20. On Cézanne as "écorché", see Joachim Gasquet, Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations, trans. Christopher Pemberton, intro. Richard Shiff (London: Thames and Hudson, 1991), pp. 40-41. Cézanne did many drawings of an écorché thought to be by Michelangelo at the time (which plays a critical role in Cézanne's Still Life with Plaster Cupid, 1895, London, Courtauld Institute of Art) and made sketches of Jean-Antoine Houdon's Écorché.

21. On the complexity of gender associations within the Marie de Medici cycle, see Sarah Cohen, "Rubens's France: Gender and Personification in the Marie de Medici Cycle," Art Bulletin 85, no. 3 (September, 2003), pp 490-522, esp. pp. 492-94 on The Presentation of the Portrait of Marie de Medici to Henri IV, 1622-25, Louvre, Paris. On this painting in particular, see also Geraldine Johnson, "Pictures Fit for a Queen: Peter Paul Rubens and the Marie de Medici Cycle," Art History 16, no. 3 (1993), pp. 447-69.

22. This drawing is catalogued as no. 1025 in Adrien Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphic Society; London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), vol. 1, and vol. 2, p. 236, After Rubens: Allegorical Figure of Hymen, ca. 1892-95, W. Raever collection, Basel.

23. See Alexander Bain, "Sympathy," in Mental Science, Part III, The Emotions, chap.11, pp. 278-82.

24. Ribot, Psychology of the Emotions, p. 347.

25. See Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, p. 213.

26. Le Brun's ideas on the emotions were introduced in his "Sur l'expression des passions," Academic lecture, 6 October-10 November, 1668, rep. in Nouvelle revue de psychanalyses 21, (Spring 1980). See also Casper Lavater, Essays in Physiognomy, trans. T. Holcroft (London: Ward, Lock and Bowden, 1880); and François Delsarte, Système de François Delsarte (Paris), n.d. (Before 1877)

27. Louis-Emile Edmond Duranty, "Sur physionomie", La Revue libérale, 25 July,1867, pp. 499-523. Edgar Degas's painting Sulking (ca. 1868, New York, Metropolitan Museum of Art) is thought to represent Duranty, scowling furiously, and thus exemplifying one of his characteristic physiognomies.

28. Charles Darwin, The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals, (New York: D. Appelton, 1913). In chapter one, Darwin introduces the idea of "Serviceable Associated Habits," whereby a gesture or reflex remains long after the initial reason for it has ceased to be relevant, pp. 27-49.

29. Ribot's discussions of Duchenne de Boulougne are in Psychology of Emotion, pp. 5 and 124-25.

30. Ibid., p. 125

31. See the references in note 18, above.

32. Ribot, Psychology of Emotion, p. 91: "Every primary emotion is an innate complexus expressing directly the constitution of the individual; the emotions are organized manifestations of the life of the feelings; they are the reactions of the individual on everything which touches the course of his life…primary emotions are analogous to the perceptions."

33. Ribot, Psychology of Emotion, pp. 361. On the artist in particular, Ribot also wrote, Essay on the Creative Imagination, trans. Albert H. N. Baron, (Chicago: Open Court Publishing; London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1906).

34. Lawrence Gowing, Cézanne: The Early Years 1859-1872. Exh. cat., (London: Royal Academy of Arts, 1988), p. 5

35. Paul Souriau, The Aesthetics of Movement, trans. and ed. Manon Souriau (Amherst, MA.: University of Massachusetts Press, 1983), p. 101.

36. Ibid., This passage was cited in Richard Shiff, "Sensation, Movement, Cézanne," p. 22 and p. 27 note 35.

37. Ribot, Psychology of Emotion, pp. 91 and 96.

38. Darwin, Expressions of the Emotions, pp. 176 and 178.

39. Meyer Schapiro, Paul Cézanne (New York: Harry Abrams, 1962), p. 70.

40. Chappuis, The Drawings of Paul Cézanne, vol. 1, illustrated as cat. no. 664, vol. 2, p. 180, "Two Heads of Women, ca. 1883-86, (a) Top: head, tilted forward, of a woman—probably Mme. Cézanne; (b) Smaller head of a woman, copy after an unidentified source." This drawing was in the collection of Paul Cézanne (fils), before reverting to Chappuis, and then to Berggruen, Paris.

41. Wayne Andersen considers many of the drawings of Fiquet Cézanne "mannish." See his Cézanne's Portrait Drawings. On page 79, cat. 37, he writes, "in a number of portraits, Madame Cézanne is rendered in mannish lines." The relationship between the drawings of Fiquet Cézanne and the twenty-six oil portraits is complex, and not yet fully explored. It seems that Cézanne ages his wife far more naturalistically, if we can apply that word, in the drawings. In sketches, Fiquet Cézanne is often presented as a rather dowdy, middle-aged woman with rolling double chins, a plain dress, and perfunctorily styled hair. See, for example, cats. 53 fac., 54, 60, 66, 68, 85 fac., 90 fac., and 91 fac. Anderson's abbreviation "fac." after a catalogue entry indicates a facsimile reproduction of the original drawing.

42. See Shiff , "Cézanne's Physicality," pp. 129-180. Shiff writes, on p.158, "not only identifiable parts of the representation shift between figurality and literalness, but also sensory modes. For touch and vision are caught in a reciprocal figuration: it is touch that is figuring vision and vision that is figuring touch."

43. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, p. 166

44. Ribot, Psychology of Emotion, pp. 91-92.

45. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, The Eloquence of Color: Rhetoric and Painting in the French Classical Age, trans. Emily McVarish (Berkely: University of California Press, 1993), p. 50.

46. Robert Herbert, "Method and Meaning in Monet," Art in America 67, no. 5 (September 1979), pp. 90-108.

47. See Darwin, Expressions of the Emotions, pp. 240-45.

48. See Bain, Emotion and the Will, chapter 1, p. 2.

49. Ribot, The Diseases of the Personality, pp. 2-3, and pp. 149-50.

50. Quoted in Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, p. 54.

51. Ibid., p. 52.

52. See John Gage, Color and Culture: Practice and Meaning from Antiquity to Abstraction, (1993; repr., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), p. 174). Gage is quoting from Charles Blanc's Grammaire des arts du dessin: Architecture, sculpture, peinture (Paris: H. Laurens, 1867), a book which we know Cézanne owned.

53. Jacqueline Lichtenstein, Eloquence of Color, p. 190.

54. Ibid., p. 165.

55. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, p. 166. Gasquet reports Cezanne's comments about drawing, in contrast to color: "Drawing, on the other hand, is a complete abstraction. So that it must never be separated from color. That would be like trying to think without using words, just figures and symbols. Fullness of drawing always corresponds with fullness of color. When you come down to it, where in nature do you ever find anything drawn?"

56. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, pp. 120 and 124.

57. See Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture, (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), who briefly discusses Cézanne's conversion to the Catholic church in 1891, pp. 223 and 295, n. 152. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer points out that while Cézanne was deeply influenced by his devout sister, he did not cease to be critical of the clergy. For extensive discussion of the relationship between Cézanne and Gasquet, see esp. pp. 2, 4-5, 55, 121-22, 179, 241.

58. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne; on Taine and Veronese, p. 133; on the "state of grace," p. 180; on becoming part of the painting, p. 192.

59. For discussion of relevant color theories, see Gage, Color and Culture, pp. 202-210. For a concise but excellent overview of Georges Seurat's use of color theory, see Robert Herbert et al., Georges Seurat, 1859-1891. Exh. cat. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1991), pp. 388-393, Appendices J, K and L.

60. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, pp. 151-53.

61. This remark is noted in Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, p. 113.

62. Bernard Dorival. Paul Cézanne, trans. H. H. A Thackwaite (New York: Continental Book Center, 1948), p. 57.

63. I reiterate John Rewald's insistence that Cézanne's relationship with Hortense Fiquet had no impact at all on his painting, or his life with his friends. See Rewald, Paul Cézanne: A Biography, p. 77. I devote an entire chapter of my forthcoming book to the history of the portraits' reception, especially in relation to the larger questions surrounding the history of women's portraiture.

64. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, p. 212.

65. Ibid., pp. 152 and 185.

66. Ibid., p. 212.

67. One could argue that this kind of animation takes place in all of Cézanne's portraits, as well as in his still lifes. When the subject is the human face—and Fiquet Cézanne's face in particular, which seems especially mobile—I would argue that the expressivity of color has an even more critical role.

68. See Herbert, Seurat, as in note 59.

69. Souriau, Aesthetics of Movement, p. 136.

70. This phrase is from Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology and Perception, trans. Colin Smith (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962) , p. 357. The philosopher wrote, "I enter into a pact with the other, having resolved to live in an interworld in which I accord as much place to others as to myself."

71. Souriau, Aesthetics of Movement, p. 126.

72. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, pp. 52-53

73. Souriau, Aesthetics of Movement, pp. 104-5

74. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Random House, 1970), p. 239.

75. On the Boucher painting, and the entire issue of color and the feminine, see Melissa Hyde, "The ‘Make-Up' of the Marquise: Boucher's Portrait of Pompadour at her toilette," Art Bulletin, 82, no. 3 (September 2000), pp. 454-75.

76. Georg Simmel in Simmel on Culture, ed.by David Frisby and Mike Featherstone (London and New Delhi: Thousand Oaks,1997), p. 113.77. Souriau, Aesthetics of Movement, p. 103

78. Joachim Gasquet's Cézanne, p. 214.

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