"The world of proximate things. . .exists for Cézanne as something to be contemplated rather than used." Meyer Schapiro

How about just a little more time spent thinking about Cézanne this morning before dismantling the still life of apples and oranges in my kitchen to make lunches? It's astonishing to me that once you have a new way of looking at things you can see so much more. Above is Still Life (1883-87).

Art historian Meyer Schapiro talks about the contemplative, detached stance that Cezanne takes and how that can be seen his approach to still life:

Cézanne's still life is distinctive through its distance from every appetite but the asthetic-contemplative. The fruit on the table, the dishes and bottles, are never chosen or set for a meal; they have nothing of the formality of a human purpose. . . .Rarely, if ever, do we find in his paintings, as in Chardin's, the fruit peeled or cut; rarely are there choice objets d'art or instruments of a profession or hobby. The fruit in his canvases are no longer parts of nature, but though often beautiful in themselves are not yet humanized as elements of a meal or decoration of the home. (Only in his early works, under Manet's influence, does he set up still lifes with eggs, bread, a knife, and a jug of wine.) (p. 14 - 15, Cézanne, Meyer Schapiro)

Here's Still Life with Apples (1895-8). He's right, don't you think? These are objects to arrange, explore, depict in color to create volume, and so on, not to eat for lunch.

Not at all what Chardin was up to - here's Still Life with Plums (1730).




What's fascinating to me is that Cézanne's contemplative, aesthetic approach to the world of objects extends to his portraits as well. Here's Card Players (1890-2). Off to the kitchen to cut up that real fruit. Please tell me what you think. . . .

More Chardin

I'd rather ignore the dishes in my kitchen in order to look at a few more of Chardin's. Above is A Glass of Water and a Coffee Pot. (c. 1760)

I didn't know that Proust loved Chardin, too, but now I see why that should not be surprising.

"You have already experienced it subconciously," (Proust) wrote, "this pleasure one gets from the sight of everyday scenes and inanimate objects, otherwise it would not have risen in your heard when Chardin summoned it in his ringing commanding accents." (p. 215)

As Michael Kimmelman puts it in The Accidental Masterpiece, Chardin's style was "extravagant understatement."

Over and over Chardin returned to pots, pans, onions, and eggs, finding something lovely and harmonious in the simple, homey objects. "The art historian Michael Baxandall has pointed out how, by causing viewers to linger over his various little objects, Chardin was subtly devising works that have multiple points of focus, and thereby expressing contemporaneous theories about how we do not take in complex space all at once but instead piece together the accumulated perception of different colors and shapes." (p. 218) Here's Still Life with Jar of Olives.



What do you think? Does this make sense?

Michael Kimmelman's book, The Accidental Masterpiece, On the Art of Life and Vice Versa, is one I pick up from time to time, and always find something to think about. Above is Soap Bubbles.

Every great painter is great by his or her own terms, Antoine Watteau's terms differeing from Gustave Courbet's, Jacques-Louis David's from Wassily Kandinsky's. Chardin was as great as any artist by the terms he set for himself, which were incredibly narrow: for almost his whole career, spanning half a century, nearly every minute of it spent in Paris, Chardin focused on what was not much farther than three or four feet in front of his nose. . . .Chardin's people are maids and schoolteachers and wives, absorbed and inward turning, oblivious to us. Their absorption becomes the emotional essence of the work. (p.215)

He feels they are not the same as Vermeers, bathed in light, kind of other-wordly figures. Rather these people are real and solid, not so ethereal. What I didn't notice at first is that the compositions are relatively spare; every detail is not included. This seems to contribute to the serenity of the works.



As far as Kimmelman is concerned, Chardin had absorbed the philosophies of the times, understanding Locke and Newton. Kimmelman says critics have pointed to the paintng, Lady Taking Tea, as proto-modern "because the figures in them seem so completely absorbed in what they are doing, modernism exulting in the inward-looking autonomy that defines pure abstract painting". So perhaps the painting "is not just a picture of a woman drinking tea but a a mediation on our perception of a woman dringing tea. . . it's a picture about seeing, in other words." (p. 217)

What do you think?

More on him in the next post, I think. I'm interested in learning more about how Chardin influenced Cezanne and delighted Proust.

My daughter is always pestering me about my subjects, saying, how about doing a teapot? So far, no teapots.