Schneemann's Doubt

Translator: Aaron Cutler

In 1974, Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) published her first artist's book, in an artisanal printing of 200 copies on colored paper. The book was called Cézanne, She was a Great Painter (1974, reprinted in 1975 and 1976). The work brought together childhood drawings, never-sent letters, short declarations, and fragments of performance texts woven together in ways that were both precarious and unpretentious. It also united a large set of ideas, impressions, and sensations that, when considered in hindsight, seem to have motivated and molded Schneemann's practice as a painter, performer, and filmmaker during the previous decades. Although it would never have been defined by Schneemann in such terms, the publication suggested a flavorful and spirited postulation of poetic election.

The cover image of a drawing made when Schneemann was four years old pronounced the artist's future interest in eroticism and, more specifically, in erotic equity between the members of an amorous heterosexual relationship: a set of simple lines depicting two bodies laid out on a bed as they regard and caress each other tenderly. In the volume's introduction—the lone text written specifically for the occasion—Schneemann wrote: "Around twelve years old I knew a few names of 'great artists'. … I decided a painter named 'Cézanne' would be my mascot; I would assume Cézanne was unquestionably a woman." The name not only had a female suffix ("Anne"), but it seemed to her to be perfectly plausible that the unfinished and awkward, disproportionately long bodies of the swimmers that she saw in a painting's reproduction would be the work of a woman. If a woman could paint that way, then she could also become a painter, and she would do it by transforming Cézanne into her first muse.

Although unusual, this queering of Cézanne is not so absurd. Sexual ambivalence and androgyny are not exactly strangers to the work of the Impressionist painter, who disregarded conventions of similarity and expressiveness as much as he did those of gender representation. This is especially evident in two sets of paintings that, for quite different reasons, became important to Schneemann: The Bathers—her first encounter with Cézanne's work, her coup de coeur—and the portraits of Madame Cézanne, to which I will return later in this text. Much has been said (and much of it critical in nature) about the masculine traces and heavy expression to be found in the painter's depictions of Madame Cézanne. Yet it is with Cézanne's bathers, however, that sexual ambivalence appears most disconcertingly. In this series of paintings, and most supremely in its latter entries, the markings of gender are reduced to a few schematic indications: Hairs or nipple-less breasts applied to bodies whose curves and silhouettes allow for different interpretations. The naked body is not only entirely de-eroticized—it is also frequently rendered androgynous. Instead of graceful, it is solid and heavy, without any sign of femininity, coquetry, or seductiveness.

Let us now imagine a very young Schneemann browsing through an art history book and discovering these "trans" bathers without warning. If we allow ourselves this imaginative exercise, then it would not be at all absurd to imagine that that young teenager could extend her doubt regarding the bathers' sexualities to the sexual identity of the artist.

Cézanne would remain an obsession for Schneemann who, over time, would come to see what once struck her as being a product of "feminine awkwardness" as in fact being an irreparable and even desirable approach to structuring pictorial space. But what interests me most in this anecdote is not the reception of an Impressionist painter by an artist who began her own production within the context of abstract expression before proceeding to launch herself into the spheres of happenings and filmmaking. Rather, it is what I see as being the fabulation of a point of origin for a vocation that spreads throughout all of Schneemann's artistic practice, mainly, that of a search for meeting lost and forgotten women. I refer not to women...