(tasteful piano music)
- (Steven) I am on the second floor
of the Metropolitan Museum of Art with Jim Coddington,
the longtime Chief Conservator at the Museum of Modern Art.
We're standing in front of
Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory,
this extraordinary painting of his wife.
- [Jim] When I, as a conservator, look at a painting,
I'm looking both at what we can see and cannot see,
trying to understand the artist's studio practice.
Cézanne would have started with a
selection of his stretcher size.
A stretcher is a wooden construction
around which the canvas is stretched.
These stretchers were commercially available.
They had actually developed a system of sizes
that could be ordered by an artist.
The next step would be to apply a sizing.
- [Steven] So the textile itself is too smooth.
- [Jim] It's too absorbent,
so whatever layer you put on next,
which is called the ground layer,
might get absorbed into the canvas.
- [Steven] And in Cézanne's case,
often that ground is visible.
- [Jim] We do see the ground layer,
not only where it's not been painted,
but where he has integrated it into the composition.
- [Steven] Now there are choices
with the color of the ground.
Here Cézanne has chosen quite a luminous color.
- [Jim] The first really important aesthetic decision
the artist makes is what color is the ground,
what color am I going to be painting on?
If you choose a darker, middle tone ground,
you paint away from the middle tone
and the darks you paint against that middle tone ground.
Whereas if you're starting with a white ground,
then if you paint very thinly,
the luminosity of the ground will shine through.
- [Steven] And we see that especially
in the very thinly painted area in the lower-right corner,
where we can see Madame Cézanne's dress
barely covers that ground.
- [Jim] The next step for him would be to outline
the forms of the composition with a graphite pencil.
We can see the application of the graphite
directly on the ground layer.
- [Steven] The lines are so loose.
It's clear that he was not trying
to define the edges of the fingers.
He's really trying to block out the composition.
- [Jim] It's very loosely done, as is the next layer,
which are very thin washes of a blue paint.
He's not trying to outline and paint within the forms.
He's refining the composition
as he goes along, layer by layer.
He then goes to other colors
and begins to further block in the composition
in the right side of the picture,
where one sees some very thin applications of green,
and then he also begins to mix some of the paints together.
Some of the blues have a little bit
of white mixed into them.
He is just circling the problem
that he has of the composition, and as he continues on,
the paint becomes thicker and more opaque.
- [Steven] He's taking colors that seem to belong
to one area, and he draws them in to other areas.
For example, the glove that's closest to us
has that beautiful ochre in it,
that you see it in the area that surrounds her.
It's as if he's finding applications
as he has that paint on his brush.
- [Jim] He is constructing form
through fairly conventional devices.
That ochre-ish form, which is slightly forward,
is a warm tonality.
The other glove is cool.
Warm tends to come forward, cool tends to go back.
He is suggesting that one arm
is catching a little bit of light
and the other arm is in shadow.
- [Steven] And the sense of opacity of the paint
is clearest as we rise to the shoulders
and the areas around the face.
- [Jim] The amount of labor that goes into the various parts
of the painting is quite diverse here.
The thing that holds the viewer's eye the most,
which is her face, he has developed
the composition most fully there.
He continues to rework the face
to get a sense of modeling and form,
again using these techniques of warm and cool,
but also light and dark.
- [Steven] My eye moves fairly quickly
over the more summary areas of the painting,
and like a magnet, is drawn to that face.
- [Jim] He is constantly adjusting,
even the tilt of the head,
you can see some working around the edges of her head.
- [Steven] Although it is the most resolved
part of the painting, there is still a certain degree
of play because of some choices that he's made,
especially around the eyes.
They're so dense with that blue.
But also because he's left a little bit
of the ground visible, and Cézanne,
through that open ground, through the visible graphite,
gives us access to his process.
- [Jim] And certainly points him
towards subsequent painters who, in the 20th century,
were very actively making their process evident.
- [Steven] Those eyes are looking directly at us,
and yet, they're not entirely available.
- [Jim] I have to confess that I was really moved
by the fact that this is somebody who he knows
better than anybody in the world,
and he is still trying to see
and understand who this person is through the vocabulary
that he uniquely has, the way he paints.
Just around her shoulders, you can see that he's playing
a little bit of the warmer colored paint
that separates her in space
and gives that head a little more dynamism.
- [Steven] But that's a pure abstraction.
This is nothing that exists in nature before him.
It's a reminder that the dynamic
is not simply between what he sees and what is seen,
but also between the artist and the canvas.
- [Jim] For all of the presence of process
and the evidence of how this painting was painted,
we're still captured by the unknowable
and yet still fascinating stare of Madame Cézanne here.
It seems like it's not finished,
but indeed it is very finished.
It's as if he is beginning with nature
but must finish with painting.
(tasteful piano music)