78 artistDecember 2019 http://www.painters-online.co.ukCHARLES
WILLIAMS’
MUSINGS
I
love Manet, always have. I love A Bar
at the Folies-Bergère, the Déjeuner sur
l’herbe, The Luncheon. I am prepared
to follow the wilder excesses of his
stylistic experimentations too, because
I trust him. There’s a lovely portrait of
his friend Carolus-Duran in the Barber
Institute at Birmingham University,
which seems unfi nished, but somehow I
want to look again and again at it. I know
he knows what he’s up to. I love his
deep, insatiable interest in the texture,
light and colours of the world he lived
in, the clarity of his vision; I read Zola
quite a bit as a young man, and I think
Manet gives you more than Zola, you
get more of an idea of that world.
You can’t just look and move on
though, it’s not a case of riffl ing
through the work. Nor can you just
accept what other people say about
him, although much has been written,
and it’s interesting. You need to look
carefully and long and look for yourself.
There is a lot written about A Bar at the
Folies Bergère, for example, about the
perspective – who is the viewer, why isManet and
Cézanne
the refl ection off to one side, etc – and
to be honest it’s not going to help.
It is a mistake, for example, to
treat perspective and truth as if they
were the same thing, forgetting that
perspective was invented to make
convincing visualisations of prospective
architectural projects, not to make
visual observations more accurate.
Perspective bears little relationship
to how we actually look at things,
and in fact the more you look at this
painting the more you realise that linear
perspective is more or less forgotten;
each object or group of objects seems
to have its own perspective.
It’s not ‘the truth’ it’s just a painting.
A superlative and endlessly interesting
painting, and it acknowledges its
artifi ciality at the same time as being
almost unbearably visually convincing.
I love Manet, as I said earlier, and when
I visit the Courtauld I go straight to A Bar
at the Folies Bergère. I very rarely look at
the Cézanne Card Players, which is also
there. I am not that keen on Cézanne.
At least I wasn’t till I went to the
Cézanne Portraits exhibition at the
National Portrait Gallery last year
where, despite the ghastly scrum of
other art-lovers and my own antipathy
to the old git, as I have come to regard
him, I achieved a sort of epiphany.
There’s a lot to dislike about him; he
has always occupied a sacred position
in the history of art, as a sort of signifi er
of high seriousness, and this has come
with a raft of undefi nable, hyperbolic
assumptions about the intensity of
his vision and the sensitivity of his
surfaces, a bit like the rubbish
people talk about Lucian
Freud’s laser-eyes (I met Freud
once and found him extremely
unimpressive, I would describe
his eyes as shifty rather than
laser-like). There’s a particular
Cézanne quotation that scared
me off: ‘My method, if I have
one, is based in hatred of the
imaginative’ (from a letter to
Gasquet, 1921). What it seems
to be saying is that there is
no room for imagination in
painting.
There are lots of people
who will tell you that the
job of painting is to record
what you see, and that is a
simple process. There are
many unspoken assumptions
beneath this: I once had
an interview with a gallery
dealer who asked me if I had
ever just painted what was in
front of me, and gave me the
example of an artist whose workconsists of images of the most exquisite
tastefulness. I don’t think he had any
idea of how artifi cial, how mediated,
how much it was not ‘just painting what
was in front of him’. He went on to
speculate, almost idly, about another
artist whose nudes sold better than the
ones where the lady kept her clothes
on.
It is not a simple process. Cézanne
certainly didn’t think so. Manet didn’t
think so either. The perspective in the
Bar at the Folies Bergères, for example,
which Manet makes a convincing whole,
‘works’ despite his not worrying too
much about perspective. In real life, we
do not see whole, resolved images like
paintings or photographs, but rather
we have impressions of larger spaces
that we synthesise with sharply focused
details. We see things in different
scales; try photographing a point of
interest in a landscape, for example. It’s
extraordinary how small it will seem in
comparison to the surroundings.
In an effort to make paintings that
appeared to show things clearly,
Cézanne refused the tricks and sleights
of hand of tradition, the ‘bravura’ that
Manet displays, and invented his own.
In the National Portrait Gallery the fi rst
thing that I was knocked out by was the
unfi nished painting Paul Alexis Reading
to Emile Zola. There was something
hair-raising about this unfi nished
quality, the way Zola’s body was left
as raw canvas, a hole in the surface of
the paint; unfi nished-ness became, for
me, the theme of the whole exhibition.
The next one to impress me was a later
painting, Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress.
While the surface of the Zola painting
was more or less entirely covered with
urgent and forcefully applied paint, this
was made up of small passages of paint,
built up in a mesh that allowed visibility
to the canvas beneath, and I had the
most extraordinary sensation of the
fi gure somehow coming forward from
the canvas. It seemed to make itself in
front of me; ridiculous I know, and yet it
did. There’s a lot of peculiar stuff written
about him, a major strand of which is
the liberties he takes with perspective,
and much of it is prompted, I reckon,
by the often contradictory or gnomic
comments he made about his work,
but just looking at the paintings with
as clear an eye as you can manage will
reward any viewer. Next time I get to
the Courtauld I will go straight to The
Card Players and save A Bar at the Folies
Bergère for later.Charles Williams NEAC, RWS, Cert.RAS is a
painter, writer and lecturerCharles Williams Renee and Kim, oil on linen, 16 14in
(40.5 35.5cm)TA