Cézanne and the Salon

As we look forward to the opening of the Impressionist exhibition at the National Gallery of Victoria, Barrie Sheppard explores the connection of Paul Cézanne with the art world of the period. Barrie writes: The first Impressionist Exhibition was held on April 15, 1874, in a vacant artist’s studio on 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris. Two hundred works were exhibited from artists such as Monet, Pissarro, Sisley, Cézanne, Degas, Renoir, and others. Manet, who was associated with the group, didn’t exhibit. Monet managed the event.

The group, frustrated by the continued refusal of the Paris Salon to exhibit their works, had been encouraged to mount their own exhibition by the promotion of their works by the art dealer and gallery owner, Paul Durand Ruel. Ruel had shown interest in works by Monet, Sisley, Degas and Renoir (he purchased 23 of Renoir’s works), and had mounted an exhibition of their works in London in 1873.

In planning the exhibition, the artists involved initially felt that it should be strongly orientated to the aesthetic of the group, and that it should be limited to artists who showed adherence to it. Cézanne argued that it should be limited to those whose works were the most startling. However, on the advice of Degas, a more conciliatory, diplomatic view was adopted to limit the possibility of the exhibition being seen by the public as a mere reaction to the artists involved having been rejected by the Salon, reacting from “sour grapes”, as it were. As a consequence the banal title, “Co-operative Company of Artists, Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc., was chosen, a name which didn’t convey much at all.  For the rest, it “is history”. Their works were dubbed by a hostile critic as unfinished, being “mere impressions”, and, as we know, the name “Impressionists” stuck.

No one felt the frustration with the Salon more than Cézanne. He was scornful of the judges’ refusal to consider any work that didn’t adhere to Neo-classical and Romantic, academic style. So steeped in that style was it that it became known to many as the “Salon Bouguereau” after the painter William-Adolphe Bouguereau, its most prolific and committed contributor. Cézanne was scornful of another of its exemplars – the Neo-classical, Romantic, Jean Augustus Dominique Ingres.

Cézanne considered Ingres a minor painter, steeped in tradition – an icon of cultural conservatism dating back to the Renaissance, whose portraits flattered his sitters with their high “finish”. Cézanne believed a portrait should never be so “finished’, and that likeness should be eschewed in favour of capturing the sitter’s temperament, together with the artist’s emotional response to it.

When studying law at the University of Aix en Provence, there only to please his father, he painted a mural on the salon wall of the family home– Jas de Bouffan. It consisted of four panels containing figures representing the four seasons, painted in traditional style. The skills he demonstrated impressed his father sufficiently for him to allow the young twenty year-old to abandon law school and study art in Paris. Cézanne playfully signed the mural “Ingres 1811”, no doubt with his father in mind, but, perhaps, also with underlying derision of the kind of art typified by Ingres – an art out of date.

The conservatism of the Paris Salon reached a peak in 1863 when a particularly draconian jury rejected 3000 works from a total submission of 5000. The rejected artists and their supporters were so outraged that the Emperor felt compelled to intervene, the consequence of which was that, though the jury’s decision did stand, an exhibition of the rejected works was mounted in an alternative venue. It became known as the “Salon des refuses”. Crowds flocked to it to see what the fuss was about, but remained largely indifferent. It was panned by the critics and nothing new eventuated from it. It was never repeated.

Following more rejections, Cézanne wrote to Count Nieuwerkerke, the president of the Salon jury, requesting that the Salon de refuses be re-instated so that the public could make their own judgements about works rejected by the Salon. The Count didn’t reply. Cézanne followed up with a further letter repeating the request, commenting scornfully  that if he were the only artist in it he, would still want the public to know that I have no wish to have anything to do with those gentlemen of the jury, any more than they have no wish to have anything to do with me. And then, I trust. Monsieur, that you will not continue to keep silent. It seems to me that every appropriate letter deserves a reply. Nothing came of his second letter either.

Cézanne’s first submission to the Salon was in 1865, believed to be his somewhat humble still life, Bread and Eggs.

It was rejected – the first of many rejections spanning 20 years, with the exception of a work in 1882 when one “slipped through” by agency of a friend on the jury, the artist Jean Baptiste-Antoine Guillemet, who claimed it was the work of one of his pupils. Members of the jury then had the right to accept a work by their pupils. That right, however, was withdrawn the following year. It isn’t known which of Cézanne’s works had “slipped through”, as the absence of records makes it difficult to establish authoritatively which works he submitted to the jury in any particular year.

We do know that in 1866 Salon he submitted a portrait of the poet and art historian Antony Valabrègue. Legend has it that Manet asked what he was preparing for the exhibition, to which he replied “A crock of shit!, no doubt imagining how the jury would receive it.

The painting caused an outrage, prompting one juror to exclaim it had been “painted with a pistol”. Even Monet castigated it, the blatant palette knife work confirming his view that Cézanne was “a bricklayer who painted with a brick”. The oils used were considered “clotted”, the colours outrageous, the vermillion highlighting of the nose drawing particular scorn.

Cézanne was clearly taking on the Salon, probably courting rejection. On the last day for submissions he had arrived with his paintings in a wheelbarrow. From it he ceremoniously removed the paintings, unveiling his portrait of Valebrègue in front of a gathering of curious onlookers.  Needless to say the jurors rejected it.

Though associated with the “Corporative Company of Artists…” Cézanne, we know, was more than an Impressionist, despite the fact that Pissarro was his mentor for some years, advising him, for example, to lighten his palette, to avoid the use of black, and to use only the primary colours and their derivatives. It was an influence Cézanne gratefully acknowledged.

The two men were firm friends. Cézanne frequently visited Pissarro’s summer residence at Pontoise Auvers outside Paris. They painted en plein air there together. They admired each other’s work, shared painting techniques, both applying paint similarly, daubing it on to the canvas to create “patches” of colour, and agreeing that harmony of the tones across a composition was paramount.

Of course, there were differences. Pissarro, an Impressionist, was interested in natural light, its changeability and the current colour theory; whereas Cézanne’s interest was in what he saw as something more “solid” that impressionism – the geometric structures he saw within the natural world: what he called its “deeper reality”. He structured the constituent elements of his constituents using the shapes of the circle, square and triangle as bases; which, along with the multiple points of view of his still lifes, led to cubism.

Cézanne painted the National Gallery of Victoria’s Uphill Road in 1881 when he was 42, then living permanently in Provence having retreated from Paris for good. The landscape is typical of many he painted in the latter stages of his career.

The compositional geometric forms of the composition are there: the thin rectangular path spanning the foreground and the green swathe below it; the green triangle of the hill with the rising, dark wall doubling it; the built forms of the village; and even some of the foliage appears to be made up of part-geometric shapes. Forms have been established with colours and their tones, in harmony, applied directly onto the canvas. The immaculately brushed coloured outlines of academic style are not there – the paint has been daubed onto the canvas in impressionist manner. The light, evenly diffused across the composition, is “sunny”, reflecting that of Provence. Its source is neither shown nor implied.

Of the eight major exhibitions the Impressionists mounted, Cézanne exhibited in just two: 1874 and 1876. Success came to him independently of them and those of the Salon.

During an interview in 1868 on the subject of his controversial portrait of the small- statured painter Achille Emperaire Peintre, Cézanne made no concession at all to the art Establishment’s criticism of the work, asserting:

The others (painters) see and feel like me, but they do not dare. They produce salon paintings. Me, I dare…I dare. I have the courage of my convictions – and he who laughs last laughs longest.

And he did laugh last, and “longest”, proving to be the father of modern art, Picasso describing him as his “only master”, and Matisse as his “father”.

References:

Danchev, Alex, Cézanne:, A Life, Profile Books, London, 2012

Becks-Malorny, Ulrike, Paul Cézanne, Taschen, 2001