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  • Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine
  • Charles Harrison
Cézanne and the Eternal Feminine. Wayne Andersen. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 249. $80.00 (cloth).

As he is concerned constantly to remind his readers, Wayne Andersen has made a number of studies of what might be called the sexual psychopathology of early modernist art, from Manet's work of the 1860s (The Picnic and the Prostitute) to the Demoiselles d'Avignon (Picasso's Brothel). In his address to one of Cézanne's more diverting pictures, now in the collection of the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, the author's guiding principle is that "imagery as complex as The Eternal Feminine . . . needs considerable background" (xiii). The tendencies of scholars are nowhere more clearly revealed than in their management of the figure-ground relations by means of which their subjects are qualified. A foretaste of Andersen's understanding of background may be gained by a sample of his chapter headings: "Leda and the Swan" (chapter 5), "The Clothed and the Naked" (6), "The Whore of Babylon" (8), "Venus, Venal, Venality" (9), "The Sacrifice of the Rose" (i.e. of virginity) (10), "Hero and Leander" (11), "The Vicissitudes of Love" (13), "Wives in Crisis" (14), and "Why not Put the Eyes at the Crotch?" (15).

Having promised an approach to the painting that will be "tentative, roundabout and responsive to every clue" (xiv), the author is as good as his word, at least in so far as the clues that count are iconographical. On the mythological themes evoked by Cézanne's numerous flirtations with baroque and romantic subjects, Andersen's expositions are exhaustive and generally well informed. The problem is that the further we are led through the various sources and variants and representations of the myths in question, the harder it becomes to hold Cézanne's work in view in all its intractable facticity. This is neither an unusual nor an uncommon problem in modern art-historical work. Unless we demand what the now unfashionable Clement Greenberg called "relevance to the quality of the effect," it is hard to know just where limits are to be set to the causal inquiries that sustain interpretation. In the words of the author himself, "Try as one might to speak of Cézanne's art as art, one's mind is overtaken by psychology" (213). In this case, however, the psychology by which one's mind is overtaken is as often the author's as the [End Page 927] artist's. His text is peppered with personalized anecdote, with dolled-up Freudian cliché, and with avuncular generalizations on matters of sexual politics. We are advised at one point that "a fantasy of sexually assaulting a woman or being assaulted by a lusty gaggle of them can be a toss-up in most men's minds, but is best sustained as a fantasy" (160). That there is a tendency alternately to categorize women as virgins and as whores is a point reiterated ad nauseam.

The problem of proliferating "background" is aggravated in Andersen's text by a tendency to take similarity for a causal relation. To cite one example among many, an apparent resemblance between a figure to the right of The Eternal Feminine and—suitably canted—the body of the drowned Leander in Vorsterman's copy after Rubens's Hero and Leander sets off a lengthy excursus into the story of Hero and Leander, and into its possible psychoanalytical reinterpretation. This is in turn conscripted into the aggregated "meaning" of Cézanne's picture. Paintings are of course polysemic and complex things and their interpretation is always a matter for open inquiry. In this case, though, as the layers of sexual obsession and repression accumulate, it becomes harder and harder to hold on to the saving sense that The Eternal Feminine is, among other things, a haplessly and perhaps intentionally comic painting.

In fact the reader is dissuaded from such irreverence at an early stage in Andersen's book. The central feature of Cézanne's painting is the enthroned nude woman that gives it its title. In the state in which the picture was left...

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