Cezanne: A “Spontaneous Classic”

When the Impressionist painters rebelled against the Academic art establishment in France they effectively threw out the old rule books and guide books dominating the old world. Thus, the artists and critics who succeeded them were left to try to develop new systems for classifying, judging, and practicing art. However, it seems as if the harder they tried to define art and the artists, the more contradictions, paradoxes, and gray areas they found. In many ways, Cezanne embodies these conflicts, which made him especially hard to classify and ultimately Richard Shiff does not definitively place Cezanne in either the Impressionists or Post-impressionists but calls him a link or continuation between them.

Overall, the most problematic issue seems to revolve around the competing forces of the “unconscious” and the “conscious.” For example, references are made to Cezanne’s unconscious and spontaneous expressiveness, and his gaucherie and distortions are linked to his position as a “primitive” who sees the world in a very simple and sincere way. And yet we see that Cezanne is also called a classic (in the syle of 17th C. painter Poussin) and Shiff also shows how Cezanne studied past art, developed a loose theory about sensation, and actively manipulated techniques and color to achieve his originality. Despite the contemporary critic’s statements about the unconscious, Shiff argues that the conscious side of the artist actually plays a huge role in the creation of original art as artists cannot “escape being self-conscious” and that “Cezanne’s technique (as well as that of so many of his contemporaries) developed in accord with specific intentions, indeed, as a response to ‘statements’ made by the techniques of other painters.”

I agree with Shiff on this point because it seems as if the critics of the time went a bit overboard in their rejection of Academic artificiality when they started labeling Cezanne as a man of “genius” and “unaccountable originality” whose work seems to have been done “almost unconsciously”. Also I find their obsession with the “primitive” kind of strange, though I’m sure it’s linked to turn of the century ideas about race and evolution.