Portrait of Louis Guillaume FWN 448 1880 56 cm x 47
“The whole Renaissance tradition is antiseptic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.” Georges Braque
Scientific perspective gives you a ‘formula’ for painting: when you look at a motif as an arrangement of objects, scientific perspective provides the artist with a formula for relating all the objects together within the space of the frame. It provides the artist with a way of faithfully representing the objects in view. But we do not experience only what we see: we experience a motif with our other senses besides the sense of seeing, we experience a motif from within our personal history, we experience a motif within the context of our culture, and so on. Indeed we can look at how we react to things from each of the many developmental lines that have been identified: cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, intrapersonal, moral, spiritual, intentionality and somatic. Scientific perspective is not untrue, but it is not the whole truth. There is another space; or rather, there are more dimensions to the space we experience.
This is a painting of Cezanne’s son’s best friend, painted at the same time as Cezanne painted the portrait of his son for his tenth birthday. The Guillaume family ran a cobbler’s shop in the same apartment block in Paris that Cezanne rented; the two boys were the same age, and probably at some time went to the same school. It would appear that the Guillaume family knew the family of the Fiquet’s too, Hortense family, back in Saligney, in the Jura. In Paris, the two families were very friendly, socializing and dining together often; the Cezanne’s would often leave their door keys with the Guillaumes. Listed in the provenance, the first owners of this painting were the Guillaume’s: it wouldn’t surprise me if Cezanne had not painted it for Louis’ tenth birthday too.
The painting reminds me of the so-called ‘card-player’ series that Cezanne was to do in the 1890’s: I think the tenth birthdays of his son and best friend were the occasion of a rediscovery of his interest in portrait painting. He began to realize that the ‘volumes’ required in portrait painting, posed him with the same problem or opportunity that he faced in painting landscapes: space, perspective, and relationships within space. At this time he was still experimenting with the hatched brushstrokes in landscapes. In a sense, I think Cezanne’s use of hatched brushstrokes in landscapes, and his developing use of volumes in portrait painting had their origin in one and the same thing – the rejection of scientific perspective.
Braque again: “What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space……. I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in any thing. I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.”
If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper, (this canvass), cannot exist.
Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too.
Thich Nhat Hanh
Portrait after Cezanne Juan Gris 1887 – 1927 Cubist painter