Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair FWN 443 1877 72.5cm x 56
What is the best symbol of the Industrial Revolution? Nuts and bolts? The steam engine? The motor car? I want to suggest it is: the ‘mechanical device to aid the art of sewing’ – which we, now rather miserably, call the ‘sewing machine’! In the period from 1850 to 1900, the sewing machine had the same kind of effect as the mobile phone for us. You just got the latest model – fixed arm and tension system, and foot pedal- and then the following year, they invented a new model with the rotary hook instead of the shuttle; then six months later, another model that could do button-holes; and then, three months later, one that could do the chain stitch…..
By the end of the century, every home had to have one! You could knock up a dress or a shirt in an hour – a tenth of the time it had taken. Singer (after some dispute!) finally won the patent in 1885 for the Singer Vibrating Shuttle Sewing Machine, and millions were produced and sold. It’s a good symbol for the Industrial Revolution because, just as the mobile phone can symbolize the start of a New Age of Information Technology, so the sewing machine can symbolize the start of a revolution in women’s working week, and thus the start of a redefinition of the roles and status of women in society.
‘In virtually all known societies to date, power between the sexes has been asymmetrical: all known societies can be arranged along a continuum running from ‘equalitarian’, where males and females share power in the public sphere roughly on an equal basis, to male-dominant, where males alone govern in the public sphere. But never the other way round – where there is female dominance of the public sphere alone.’ (Ken Wilber, Brave New World chapter). There seem to be two defining factors, which place a particular society along this continuum: sexism and the means of production. This was about to change, for the first time in human history: because the means of production would no longer be based on biological factors; and so the justification for male dominance is lost.
Here, Hortense sits not just in a red armchair, but in her own power; she’s a modern woman ready for Paris. She looks at us, not with any deference nor any challenge, but with the confident dignity of an assured twenty seven year old woman. It’s a powerful and a remarkable painting; it’s powerful because it’s both monumental and graceful; the red armchair, reshaped by generations of women, is still solid and mighty; Hortense holds the circle of life within the orbit of her arms and shoulders. It’s remarkable for its contrasting colours, its lack of modelling, and its formal construction. All the colours are contained within clearly delineated areas, a constructive method that Gaugin would later exploit. The lack of modelling gives the painting an immediacy: not an urgency, for there is no sense of rush; not a confrontation, for there is no sense of aggression; simply a “I am who I am”.
Rainer Maria Rilke was so taken with this painting that on the last day of the exhibition of 1907 (to celebrate the death of Cezanne) he said he tried to focus intently so that he would imprint a memory on his brain, colour by colour, digit by digit: “even though I stood in front of it, day after day, transfixed and unflinching” he had as much chance of remembering the “splendid colour cohesion” as remembering a gigantic “string of numbers”. Rilke’s description makes me think of murmurations of colours:
“It seems that each part knows all of the other parts. It is a red armchair because it binds up with itself an aggregate of experienced colours…everything has become a matter of the colours amongst themselves; one colour draws itself back in the presence of the other, then intrudes itself, and falls into self-contemplation. The essence of the painting hovers in this back and forth of reciprocal and varied influences, rises and falls back into itself without coming to rest.”
Rainer Maria Rilke.
Madame Cezanne was a seamstress, and this style of dress came into fashion in 1876. Most women would have made their own clothing to fit the measurements of their own families. High fashion usually dictated the style of clothing made; and it was usual for women to alter their clothing to make them more modern, as Mde Cezanne has done here: adding the bow.
The value of a thing, and its means of production were a keen debating point among the thinkers of the time; Marx maintained that traditionally, the value of an object was simply the number of hours taken to produce it. Work in factories lessened the value of objects and alienated the worker producing the goods by removing them from the ownership of their own labour. As we know, the factory system enabled by the Industrial Revolution ushered in unfettered exploitation and dreadful working conditions; but it also lay the ground for the liberation of women. I suspect Marx was thinking more about the relationship of proletariat and bourgeoisie, than that of men and women; but his sense that something big was beginning to happen was spot on.
“All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away
with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions;
all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.
All that is solid melts into air,
all that is holy is profaned,
and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses
his real conditions of life, and his relations to his kind”.
Karl Marx
(my underlining)
“Providing women and young girls with equal access
to education, health care, decent work and representation
in political and economic decision-making processes
will fuel sustainable economies and benefit humanity at large.”
United Nations Goal 5.
The UN Goal 5
“…is one of the most powerful levers of avoiding harmful emissions.”
Project Drawdown.