Paul Cézanne: The father of modern art | National Gallery

good afternoon everyone welcome to the National Gallery and to today's talk my name is Rosalyn Makeba and I'm a Harry my Murray curatorial fellow for post 1800 paintings I'm so glad to see so many of you have joined today to take the opportunity to look and to think about Paul Suzanne's large bathers and I say look and think because with Suzanne you can't do one without the other Suzanne is interested in sensations both the physical sensations of the world and how we perceive it and how they combine with our internal sensations so I want you to think about this as you're looking at the picture as you're thinking about it and thinking whether or not you like it I imagine given that you've come to hear me talk for half an hour about it that you like it I'll take that as my starting point so what do I mean looking and thinking looking and feeling at the same time I'll give you an example I am looking at this painting while at the same time as being stood in front of a large group of people who are looking at me maybe therefore I feel some empathy with these women in the picture that are being looked at but at least I'm getting to talk maybe you as the audience as you're looking at this with cameras behind you that are looking over your heads much like these women who are being viewed from behind for the most part and you're there silent having to listen to me maybe you feel some empathy or not with these figures maybe something that's happened in your day something that's happening in the room is affecting your looking you're not looking without thinking so if we're thinking in terms of do we like this picture it's interesting for me to go back to 1964 when the gallery first bought it as this caused a bit of a scandal people weren't happy that the gallery had paid so much money for this picture and the cause of their consternation was that it was an imperfect representation of the female form and I want you to think about this to is how well Suzanne is giving you an illusion of space an illusion of bodies affecting whether or not you like this picture and Suzanne is rather divisive on this front in 1905 a year before Suzanne died in an art journal in Paris the question was asked what do you make of Suzanne and people gave rather contradictory answers he was either an emptier of cesspits or he was the originator of modern painting and that's an interesting point in relation to the figuration the representation we see here and the beginnings of abstraction we see here and where we are stood now we are in room 41 of the National Gallery which at present contains the most modern pictures that we have in our collection we're actually at the south east edge of the National Gallery looking at paintings from around 1900 if you want to see paintings made after this made later than this in Britain's national collections you have to go about a mile and a half through this wall to take modern and so when we talk about painting before and after Suzanne there is a very physical boundary in this sense it's interesting that I always think of this painting is the end of the story that our collection tells of painting in the European tradition but if you go to the Museum of Modern Art in New York it is with the Susanne's bathers that they traditionally begin their story so this is really an artist at paintings crossroads and in this room if you look around you you'll see other artists from this period we have to the wall over there late money and the wall opposite we have Picasso and Matisse painters of the avant-garde painters who you'd expect to be iconoclastic painters you might not expect to find as it works was in a museum but Suzanne is a little different so then for me is a museum painter par excellence and I'll come back to explain why so a little on Suzanne to get us going so Paul Suzanne is born in Provence in the South of France in 1839 his father who you can see in the large painting over there wanted Suzanne to go to law school Suzanne however wanted to be an artist so he goes to Paris the painting to the left of his father probably shows Suzanne's studio in Paris in 1865 and in Paris he met up with an old childhood friend he just happened to be childhood friends with emile zola the great champion of MANET a great writer and champion of Manny and so Paul Suzanne gets a rather good entree into the modern art world of Paris but he come lately does not fit in he does exhibit in 1874 with the artists who came to be known as the Impressionists and this association was very important for him in that Camille Pissarro one of the Impressionists encouraged him to start painting on plein air outdoors and it also really lightened his color palette so if you look at the to Suzanne's I've mentioned on that wall they're both very dark but the rest of this wall behind me is all Suzanne and you'll see that it's much lighter it's much fresher because of that relationship with the Impressionists however Suzanne said that he had very different goals to the French Impressionists he said that he wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and durable like the art of museums and this is where we see Suzanne going beyond Impressionism this is why we refer to him as a post-impressionist because he has these very different goals although the word post-impressionism was only coined in 1910 four years after his death this is a very late suzanne painting although it was painted over a long period started around 1894 finished 8th 1905 - the year before his death now as you can work out from those dates Suzanne was not a quick painter the Impressionists were famous for painting quickly Suzanne although this is a rather extreme case is known for painting slowly he's very slow and methodical he takes his time he's looking and very carefully transferring his sensation of something he sees so both his the external feeling and the internal feeling in to one of his little brushstrokes and you'll see in most of the pictures along this wall these very particular little diagonal marks that he's making to build up to construct a picture rather than necessarily to draw a picture and because of this approach because it takes him a long time to make a picture we might be surprised to see bathers here you'll notice that other pictures we have the one painting of his father but otherwise we have still lives and landscapes because still lives and landscapes don't move they don't get bored of you painting them they don't fidget they don't get up and walk out of the studio because you're taking too long so it's really a surprise then that we see Suzanne painting human figures and what's surprising is that he does this throughout his career from 1870s through to the end of his life he is painting bathers he makes nearly 200 scenes of bathers both male and female and this is one of three large bathers called large bathers literally because the canvases are bigger and the others are in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the bomb's museum which is also now in Philadelphia so what are you doing if you want to paint people but you want to fin a long time doing it and they might stay still you go to the museum because there you have an incredible store house of bodies of figures of poses that you can borrow steal however you want to phrase it and include in your works and this is what the young suzanne does he goes to the luth and he makes sketches of classical sculpture he makes copies of old master paintings and he takes all of these forms and puts them in to his compositions often he does so in disguise often it's quite hard to figure out where he's taken something from but we think this figure on the right hand side here with her arm forward is taken from a Venus in the Louvre and this woman lying on her front could be taken from the sleeping hermaphrodite of a sculpture also in Duluth but he's not just taking these figures from the museum he's taking more he takes from the museum from the Louvre from what he sees there a challenge a visual challenge how do you represent the physicality the solidity of the human body in the open air eNOS of a landscape and who sets him this challenge are the artists of the Venetian Renaissance so artists like your journey and Titian who are making these scenes now in them so for example with George Ernie you get these scenes that are very still to us today very mysterious they have little clues in them that suggest that some kind of narrative is going on but we maybe haven't figured out yet what's happening but sometimes with Titian you get a very clear negative narrative as to why a whole group of women are in a landscape apart from the obvious which we'll come back to you get figures of Diana and famously we have in our collection but currently not on display as they're in Scotland the Titian painting of Diana and Callisto where we see Diana with his with her all-female entourage who we might associate with this picture here you also in the Louvre if you're looking for figures in a landscape find yourself with the French painter nicolas poussin who's actually working in rome whose interested in more Arcadian scenes these sort of rural utopias of figures in a landscape but we don't have Venus here we don't have Diana we don't have necessarily an Arcadian scene although that's questionable we have a nineteenth-century picture of of a period when modern life was supposedly your subject now I say that because bathers is a theme that was popular with the Impressionists and post-impressionists and neo-impressionist the Foresters act so 25 years before Suzanne started this picture monet painted a scene of bathers which you can find a couple of rooms down in the National Gallery and ten years before Suzanne started this you'll see you can see actually in the next room a painting by surah of bathers but Suzanne's is very different and I don't know if any of you have spotted this yet but there is no water in this scene of bathers towels yes an implication of bathing yes but where on earth is the water for these women to bathe in now in the version of this picture in the Philadelphia Museum of Art the women the women are sort of divided in the center so you have a bit of space here you have a strip of water going across the middle they're not bathers in the version in the Baum's you get a sort of picnic situation in the front I mean we've got some what seemed to be apples here slightly like the still life that we'd expect from Suzanne but we don't seem to have much narrative and this is quite different especially the lack of water when Monet paints pavers you get the feeling that he doesn't really care much for the bourgeois Parisians who have escaped the city of Paris for a day just to bathe to Bob around in the waters of the cen with super you get a sense he cares a little more about the weary workers who sits in the industrial outskirts of Paris ready to bathe in that same River but here you're very confident that the water is not the key to what we're looking at so if we have no signs of modern life we have no water we have some towels and a few oranges what is our story here who on earth are these women and what on earth are they doing here and this is what makes this painting so intriguing and also problematic they're not we don't have a sense of their expressions really the woman here we get a sense that she's looking out at us but not necessarily that she's seeing us and the rest of the women are looking down they're not interacting with each other at all in fact because of how crowded the spaces it almost feels like they're not in the same space it's really like a collage of figures of female flesh that he's taken out of the Louvre and submerged together here he's treating them like objects he's treating them like he treats a still life but it would be naive to think of these pictures in the same way what we think when we talk about Titian or someone else it would be naive to think of these forms as just a stand-in for some oranges these are nude female figures who are being looked upon who are being painted for a period of over ten years by a male artist that cannot be unseen however it was not on these grounds that in 1964 the British press took offense to this picture well as they might it was as I said at the beginning this imperfect representation of female form it feels like the British press would be happier if Suzanne had painted the Rokeby Venus so what's the problem here is that the British press have slightly missed the point because as much as offended as we may be that he's done so Suzanne is really interested in form he wants to turn everything be it a living breathing woman or not into the cylinder the cone and the sphere and that's what he's doing here he's really breaking these down as objects and in doing so he's fusing the landscape and the figures and this is where I come back to this visual challenge that was set to him by the Venetian Renaissance in that he rather than trying to separate landscape and figure he's really fusing them together this is maybe most obvious over here with the woman leaning forward who her figure is so aligned with the tree that she almost becomes it but at the same time we have half a sense that she is in front of the tree it gives a slight inclination of space and I encourage you to look very closely at the spaces in between the figures the spaces where there should be air but there's not these are actually the most worked up bits of the canvas you can really see him laying on the paint working these up in this dark blue they're stifling in that sense and this blue that's the dark blue of the sky that it's not in any sense pushed back as you might expect it to be in a landscape it's really pushing forward into the same plane as these women and then below you have the same blue and their outline which is creating both a sense of flatness but then also he's using the tradition of using blue to shade the edges of the human body to give a sense of three dimensionality and at the same time a sense of flatness now that has an incredible consequence for art history that's why we're at the edge here and we're at the end of this story and this is why many subsequent generations of artists called Suzanne the father of modern art Matisse whose work as I said is opposite us here actually bought a Suzanne favors in 1899 so about half way through this one being painted he bought another smaller version of the bathers and he really took from that this idea of color as I mentioned he took lessons of flatness and surface and in 1907 the year after Suzanne died his work was exhibited at the salon Gorton in a large retrospective and that was visited by Picasso and Braque on whom this was very influential so if you think of the demos Elle's d'Avignon a painting by Picasso from the very same year in 1907 that's a work that shows us standing and squatting women in this very comprehensive space and he's painting it in the time that this gets he sees this work for the first time Brack to takes from Suzanne an interest in form and he takes very literally he ends up going to list up where Suzanne painted and Brack paints the forms their paints the landscape and breaks it down into little cubes and when an art critic sees those little cubes he calls it cubism and that's the beginning of the story of modern painting very much seen as coming from this the last modern artist I'll fight for you is actually a sculptor a great sculptor of the female figure Henry more and more said of this picture when he saw it in the 1920s if I were asked a name the 10 most emotionally intense visual moments of my life this would be one of them I think it's an interesting quote because he calls this he says the ten most emotionally intense visual moments so emotion and visuality together the thing that Suzanne was really working towards it's the thing that completely Henry Moore picks up from it and I want to leave you with that and with this thought of the relationship between what you see and what you feel because Suzanne for the reasons I've outlined became an incredibly important painter for all of these formal visual breakthroughs that he makes but then he becomes in the second half of the 20th century a very problematic artists for us because of the emotional side of things which the formalists would have us completely ignore and we just look at how incredibly vish he's made these pictures but we if we're looking at Suzanne on his own terms then you have to remember to both look at how important this work is formally at the same time as how you feel about it emotionally so I don't know if you feel the same way about it that you did at the beginning I don't if you're thinking the same things or if you're seeing the same things but I do hope that this talk at least was enjoyable thank you very much [Applause]

Channel: The National Gallery

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Keywords: Paul Cézanne, Cézanne, modern art, bathers, large bathers, Rosalind McKever, Art history, Art history lesson, Picasso, Manet, Emile Zola, Impressionist, Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Titian, Giorgione, Les Grandes Baigneuses

Id: MFdliclkdlE

Length: 25min 2sec (1502 seconds)

Published: Mon May 21 2018