Seeing Cezanne at the Barnes, part one

There are three great Cezanne Bathers, and one of them is at the Barnes Foundation. Spending time at the Barnes on Sunday got me thinking about not just Cezanne's Bathers, but about Barnes' oft-eccentric hangings. But before we get to Barnes' installations, some Bathers background...

Cezanne's paintings of solitary male bathers have that quality the separates great art from legendary art: They are richly mysterious. We can discuss them for decades and never agree on what they 'mean' or why Cezanne painted them. [This is Bather with Outstretched Arms, which is in a private collection.]

The Philadelphia Museum of Art's indispensable 1996 Cezanne catalogue naturally includes a summary of Bathers scholarship. It cites Theodore Reff writing that the figure above might be "a projection of Cezanne himself, an image of his own solitary condition." Reff wrote that maybe it was "possible to link [this painting] with a specific theme in [Cezanne's] own fantasy life." Joseph J. Rishel, the PMA's catalogue essayist, posits that Reff could be referring to Cezanne's

"...sexual anxiety, fueled by unresolved conflicts with his authoritarian father, from whom he kept his liaison with Hortense Fiquet a secret as long as possible. The theme is essentially a projection of the artist onto his youth as a means of sexually liberating himself from the oppression of his father and his own marital conflicts... a consensus has emerged that the picture's dominant theme is the longing for individual release, a breaking away, an act of liberation that would literally come to rest with the lowering of the arms and the squaring of the figure's shoulders, as in [MoMA's version of the bather]."

I'm the first to agree that biography can be useful when considering an artist's work, but if that isn't pop pseudo-Freudianism worthy of an eye-roll, I don't know what is. Instead of playing psycho-babble guessing games I like to look at the art and see where it leads me. The Barnes' installation of its Bathers painting provides such an opportunity.

But first, let's get all the Bathers JPEGs in pixels: The second great Cezanne of a solitary male bather is the famous Bather (c. 1885) at the Museum of Modern Art, shown at right. It dates to 7-8 years after Bather with Outstretched Arms... which means that Cezanne's first great painting featuring a male bather was the Barnes' Bathers at Rest. I'll bring it into the discussion tomorrow...