"The Large Bathers" by Paul Cezanne
is a painting
that dawns on you.
At first you see the whole:
a group of women bathing by a river,
a subject that's anything but original.
The canvas is composed in a balanced geometry of
triangles: one for the group on the left,
one for those on the right,
and one comprising them all,
bounded by the leaning trees.
But after a minute, you start to notice things
like the figures behind the river,
or the swimmer in the water
or, almost disturbingly, that none of the bathers
have any definable faces, or
that their bodies seem to fold into one another,
as if they've been painted over -
but not completely.
The more you stare at it,
the more the canvas seems
a chaos of elements
deliriously rendered
with a spontaneity that feels almost
negligent.
Of course, we know that Cezanne
labored on this painting for seven years,
all the way up to his death.
Spontaneity is certainly part of the message.
But the painter was intensely purposeful in
what he wanted to say, and
how he wanted to convey it.
From our perspective,
across the gulf of cubism and
all imaginable forms of abstraction,
it's hard for Cezanne's distortions of
color and form to shock us -
yet, that's exactly what they did in 1906,
at the painting's first exhibition.
It's not wrong to say that Cezanne initiated
what became the 20th century's
endless experimentation.
As Picasso himself said,
"Cezanne is the father of us all."
In this way, he can sort of be seen as
the bridge between what came before
and all that was to come.
"The Large Bathers" reaches in the past,
recalling similar scenes of nudes or bathers
like those by Titian,
or Nicolas Poussin,
or Thomas Eakins, among others.
Certain of the figures evoke
postures from older works:
the woman on the left, striding upwards
with the tree, for example,
bears a resemblance to an 18th-century sculpture
of the goddess Diana.
Or, take the woman on the right, here,
who's raised knee and shoulders
remember the classical Venus de Milo
by Alexandros of Antioch.
And, perhaps it should be noted that
none of the 14 women we see here
were drawn from real models.
Cezanne took his examples
from other works and picture books,
adding to that disquieting sense of remove
that these figures have from any
identifiable personalities.
That remove - that alienation - is
echoed everywhere in the painting.
Of the 14 women, six are simply
turned away from the viewer,
a few are even in the process
of dissolving or emerging
from the foliage all around them.
Most unsettling of all, the figures
are pocked with areas of white,
which, on closer examination,
proves not to be any paint at all,
but the bare canvas itself -
interrupting the scene as if
some force from a world beyond.
What is Cezanne trying to do here?
What do these disturbances amount to?
What are the effects of his short, flat brushstrokes,
of distilling everything into its
geometrical basis, or
freezing in paint that which
doesn't appear to be a scene at all,
but something on the verge
of becoming a scene -
or else, of dissolving out of one.
Cezanne is emerging out of Impressionism,
a movement that was obsessed
with how colors and light
really appeared to the eye.
How did the atmosphere -
the rain or the sunset -
affect the visual impression of the observer?
The Impressionists explored this by
going out into nature and
painting rapidly, applying
just what they saw
to the canvas in front of them.
Cezanne took the palette of the Impressionists,
retaining the brilliant, often surprising colors
used to evoke nature's effect on us;
but he took color a step further
and applied it to express form as well.
Ever since the Renaissance,
depth was rendered via perspective.
Cezanne seems to realize that
Renaissance perspective is only a kind of
code, by which we understand
the third dimension in a canvas.
Seeing itself,
the perception as distinct from the understanding,
may not work on those principles;
it may be far more unruly than that.
This is why he didn't shy away from
distortion of objects, of using
colors to bring elements in the
background forward, or
melt things in the foreground
into the architecture of colors
that hold them there.
There's a difference between
the way we know what we see
and how we actually see it.
Our minds are so incredibly good
at taking the anarchic varieties
of sensible experience
and within milliseconds, composing them
into intelligible wholes.
It happens so fast that we can't even
access that actual moment of perception,
and for the most part, we should be
happy about that, because
raw experience, like a kind of trauma,
is just too much for us to withstand.
In "The Large Bathers," Cezanne uses
his various techniques to visit
that moment of perception.
Confronted with it aesthetically,
all that's unsettling about experience
is frozen for our contemplation.
In life, it's a bridge we just can't cross -
take a look at that man
on the other side of the river.
Many think that this figure is
Cezanne himself, situated between
the classical, constructed diorama of bathers
and the pastoral, impressionistic church scene
in the distance.
I'd bet, if we could turn the painting around
and see it from that perspective,
it would look just as sensual, erotic and beautiful
as something by Titian or
any other painter who depicted
a similar scene in the past.
But from our vantage,
the one Cezanne gave to us,
we're allowed a fugitive access
to something far more disturbing:
the real.
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