Cézanne's other
Subtitle: the portraits of Hortense
By: Susan Sidlauskas.
Publisher: University of California Press
Published: 2009
Place of publication: Berkeley, Calif
Language: eng
Number of pages: 302
ISBN-13: 9780520257450
Subjects: Cézanne, Paul, -- 1839-1906 -- Criticism and interpretation; Fiquet, Hortense, -- 1850-1922 -- Portraits
Genres: Portraits
Description: "In the voluminous scholarship that's been written on Paul Cezanne, little has been said about the twenty-four portraits in oil that Cezanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cezanne, over an extended twenty-year period. In Cezanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Susan Sidlauskas breaks new ground, focusing on these paintings as a group and looking particularly at the differences that render many of them unrecognizable as the same person. She argues that Cezanne sidestepped the conventional goals of portraiture-he avoids representing a consistent, identifiable physiognomy or conventional feminine postures and does not portray the subject's inner life-making lack of fixedness itself his subject, which leads him ultimately to a radical reformulation of modern portraiture. Sidlauskas also upends the notion of Mme Cezanne as the irrelevant and absent spouse. Instead she reveals Hortense Fiquet Cezanne as a presence so crucial to the artist that she became the essential "other" to his ever-evolving "self." Coupling historical texts from philosophy, psychology, and physiology with more recent writings from women's and gender studies, cognitive psychology, and visual culture, Sidlauskas demonstrates that Mme Cezanne offered intimacy at arm's length for the painter who has been dubbed "the lone wolf of Aix.""--BOOK JACKET.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction: Seeing Cézanne; title: The counter-muse : a brief history; title: The color of emotion; title: The materiality of vision; title: Toward an ideal : dissolving difference; title: Conclusion: The woman in question; title: Appendix: Paintings of Hortense Fiquet Cézanne.