The good old Courtauld thinks of everything. Mentioned at numerous points in this small, scholarly show is the fact that Paul Cézanne treated his subject matter – the hard-working poor at leisure – quite differently from the way his predecessors did and, sure enough, just in case those synaptic foot soldiers fail to supply a necessary mental image, a nearby display illustrates the point.
Acting as prelude or coda, depending on your route through the Courtauld, ‘Drawing Peasants’ is full of small works on paper from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries that detail the bawdy downtime of society’s hapless lower echelons. Almost all are satire – created to provoke scorn or pity, as well as horrified delight, among an audience of sophisticated urbanites. Back to Cézanne, and the contrast couldn’t be more marked. A card game among farm workers is the subject of the three key paintings on display – in addition to its own ‘The Card Players’ (1892-96), the Courtauld is showing versions loaned from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and that goldmine of post-impressionism, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris – yet, far from plunging us into a murky netherworld of drinking and gambling, these paintings dignify states of mental absorption. These are pictures of and about looking and thinking, the scrutinising gaze of the artist recognising an equivalent in the rapt attentiveness of the players.
What draws you into Cézanne is his method (a forerunner of cubism) of stitching the world together. It’s impossible not to think of the planes of modulated colour he uses elsewhere to describe the edifice of Mont Sainte-Victoire as bestowing a similar sense of timeless monumentality on the human form. Which isn’t to say that Cézanne saw rock and flesh as one but that he was attuned to the sculptural quality of all things. The beauty of having versions of the same subject – in addition to card players, the show gives us a trio of portraits of a man leaning on a table, smoking a pipe – as well as smaller paintings and preparatory watercolours and drawings to study, is that the workings of a questioning mind are revealed. We see how Cézanne tilted perspective, moved elements around the picture plane, shifted limbs – even moving a head so that it appears to be smoking a pipe through its cheek.
In the end, though, Cézanne always presents us with a kind of puzzle, a mystery in plain sight. What should we read into these apparently democratising scenes? It’s possible that there is a socio-political subtext. However, Cézanne, by all accounts, was a shy man, and finding models was sometimes a problem. These farm hands from the family estate were available and, when playing cards, they didn’t move much. A more modest explanation doesn’t diminish Cézanne’s genius. ‘The Card Players’ represent a preoccupation that transcends time.