14 ★ FTWeekend 21 March/22 March 2020Arts
H
ow to engage with art now
that museums and galler-
ies are shuttered? Last to
hold out among the sea-
son’s new exhibitions in
Paris was the Musée Marmottan’s
thoughtful, scholarlyCézanne and the
Master Painters: a Dream of Italy. Even
though it finally closed its doors on Sun-
day, its story shines bright, for its chief
point was that art, once encountered,
livesintheimagination.
Cézanne dreamt of Italy all his life,
was deeply influenced by art created
there, but never visited the country. He
had no need: he saw Italian paintings in
museums in his youth, then spent most
ofhiscareerinruralProvence,andwhat
sustained him there were memories of
these pictures, reproductions, discus-
sionswithhisfriends,andbooks.
“Mi amice, Carus Cezasinus”, Zola
began a letter to Cézanne in 1858. The
schoolfriends had just left the Collège
Bourbon in Aix, where Cézanne had
won prizes for Latin and Greek.
Now, Zola having left for Paris, the pair
correspondedinconversationsbasedon
Virgil’s “Eclogues”, while Cézanne
buried himself in Stendhal’s “Histoire
de la peinture en Italie”. Twenty years
later, he noted that he was re-reading
thisvitalsource.
Joining Zola in the capital in 1861,
Cézanne went straight to the Louvre
and studied Poussin. “I want the friend-Dreams
of Italy
Cézanne|Jackie Wullschläger aces the greattr
French painter’s ideas and influences from the
past, as well as his own influence on the future
From top: Cézanne’s ‘Château Noir’
(1905); ‘Seated Man’ (1905-06),
‘Five Bathers’ (1900-04)— Musée National
Picasso-Paris/Mathieu Rabeau; Museo Nacional Thyssen-
Bornemisza; Musée d’Orsay/Adrien Didierjeanso Picasso remembered Cézanne. He
studied this proto-Cubist “Château
Noir” closely, and the order, clarity,
structural concerns that Cézanne took
from Poussin were building blocks for
Cubism’s reorganisation of pictorial
space. The Marmottan showed the
supreme example of the Musée
d’Orsay’s tightly constructed “Mont
Sainte-Victoire”, steeped in Provençal
light,serenelybalancingthenaturaland
man-made, mountain and trees, the
balustrade and Roman aqueduct refer-
encingPoussin’scarefularchitecture.
Amusée imaginairewas always run-
ning through Cézanne’s mind. By con-
trast,amonghisavant-gardecontempo-
raries, Monet had to be dragged to the
Louvre — and then painted only the
viewfromthewindow—whileanarchist
Pissarro thought such “necropolises of
art” should be burnt
down. But “what I
wanted was to make
of Impressionism
something solid and
durable, like the art
of museums,”
Cézannesaid.Evolv-
ing his youthful,
harsh manner — to
be “couillarde”,
ballsy, was his aim —
he turned to key
high Venetian art-
ists, especially Tin-
toretto, as well as
Neapolitan artists.One of the Marmottan’s revelations was
“The Autopsy” (1869), a stark, bluish
naked figure pummelled by a doctor,
juxtaposed with its precise model,
Jusepe de Ribera’s hyperrealist “Deposi-
tion of Christ” from the Louvre.
Cézanne replaces faith with scientific
inquiry,refutinghopeofredemption.
Cézanne’s early savagery — slapped,
smeared, scraped paint, sexually vio-
lent subjects, as in the two figures beat-
ing a woman to death in “The Murder”,
ortheblondedyingupsidedownin“The
StrangledWoman”—owessomethingto
the influence of Zola’s melodrama and
naturalism. These pictures still disturb
and were almost universally derided
throughthe1860sand1870s.“TheDon-
key Thieves” (1870), centred on a white
ass in a Mediterranean setting, fringed
by swirling figures, the focus on the ani-mal’s buttocks, was Cézanne’s defiant
response to mockery: a self-portrait as a
lonely, misunderstood east. But theb
classical learning is notable: the inspira-
tion is Apuleius’sMetamorphoses, whose
heroistransformedintoadonkey.
Another self-portrait, from the same
year, is “Pastorale”, featuring three
ungainly nudes plus a self-depiction,
fully clothed, stretched out on a river-
bank.Thiswasarough,sarcastic,laugh-
able riposte to Manet’s “Déjeuner sur
l’herbe”, but also a clumsy attempt at
Arcadia: the Marmottan placed it next
to Poussin’s bathers “Landscape with
BacchusandCeres”.
When Cézanne retreated home,
smarting from failure in Paris, he
reclaimed his Mediterranean identity —
views around Aix, the bather motif. In
“Four Bathers” (1877-78) he already
seeks to root bodies in communion with
limpid landscapes, or seeming to ema-
nate from nature itself. He said he
wanted to “redo Poussin from nature”,
and in the 1900s, as in the procession of
figures resembling a frieze “Five Bath-
ers”, he finally achieved the rhythm and
stability of the classical master: patchesof colour representing trees, grass,
water, articulate space and light effects;
man,art,natureblendinharmony.
The continuity and amplitude that
Wordsworth loved in Poussin’s pictures
— “the unity of design that pervades
them, the superintending mind... the
characterofwholeness”—isapparentin
late Cézanne, for example in the fused
geometric dabs of vegetation, red roofs
of houses, airy skies, in “Bend of the
Road at the Top of the Chemin des
Lauves”, depicting the road uphill from
Cézanne’sfinalstudio.
Inthisisolatedstudio,Cézannehunga
print of Poussin’s “Arcadian Shepherds”
and posed his own peasant friend, the
gardener Vallier. In “Seated Man”, exe-
cuted in long, dilute oil strokes, the
cross-legged, frail gardener leaning on
his stick is integrated into a blurred veg-
etal background, as if returning to the
Earth, yet stoic, dignified. Lionello Ven-
turi called the Vallier portraits “a dia-
logue with death”; they inevitably recall
Poussin’sthemeofdeathinArcadia.
Thus, giving order and a sense of per-
manence to Impressionism’s fleeting
effects, Cézanne brought history to the
generation emerging in the 1900s. Like
all good exhibitions, the Marmottan
show has life beyond its walls: it leaves a
vision of how Cézanne became, as Mau-
rice Denis said, “the last descendant of
the classical tradition and a product of
the great crisis of light and liberty that
has rejuvenated modern art. He is the
PoussinofImpressionism.”The tremulous touches
call to mind Poussin’s
own sheer strangenessand late febrile manner
S
omewhere, someday,
somehow: the American
musical has always turned
on words like these. So it is
fitting that the first of the
great 1970s shows in which Stephen
Sondheim revolutionised the form
should conclude with a “someone”, the
notional lover who Bobby, the single,
relationship-curious protagonist of
Company, imagines will hold him too
close, sit in his chair and ruin his sleep.
“Being Alive” is an unusual kind of
love song. Neither lament nor
celebration, it belongs instead to a sub-
categorySondheim has made his own:
the inquiry into commitment itself.
As always, the music flowed from
the story he had to tell, about a
New York bachelor on his 35th
birthday who observes the lives of
his “good and crazy” married
friends and wonders whether eh
should follow their example.
Drawing on theexperiences of
friend Mary Rodgers, Sondheim
made good progress on the score.
The problem was the ending: how to
resolve a narrative whose dominant
mood was ambivalence? Two attempts
at a final statement for Bobby had
been set aside by the time of the
Boston try-outs, which were
confronted with “Happily Ever
After” and its bleakly Sartrean vision
of “Someone to bleed you of all / The
things you don’t want to tell / That’s
happily ever after, / Ever, ever, ever
after / In Hell.”
“It was the bitterest, most
unhappy song ever written, and we
didn’t know how devastating it
would be until we saw it in front of
an audience,” recalledproducer-
director Hal Prince. Sondheim,
concedingthat the dramatic irony
wasn’t quite cutting through,
agreed to write a last-minute
replacement.
The solution he found was to begin
with the same lyric but send it in athe defining version came decades
later, in the 2006 Broadway revival.
Raúl Esparza was a charismatic lead
with a voice capable ofpower and
delicacy, and helped by a bold,
stripped-down production that found
ingenious ways to prepare audiences
for his character’s transformation —
something Sondheim and Prince feared
they had not done enough.
By this point many artists had taken
“Being Alive” out of its theatrical
setting, fromregular Sondheim
collaborators Patti LuPone, Bernadette
Peters and Mandy Patinkin to more
mainstream stars such as Barbra
Streisand. The song changes in the
process, often to the chagrin of purists.
But that is unavoidable, andjazz singer
Cyrille Aimée made a case for taking a
few liberties in her brassy, up-tempo,
salsa-infused interpretation last year.
Sondheim has a birthday of his own,
his 90th, to celebrate on March 22 — an
age at which even the most precise
and prescriptive of composers will
observe new meanings accruing to
their work. With “Being Alive”,
this is well illustrated by Noah
Baumbach’sfilmMarriage Story,
in which Adam Driver delivers a
piano bar rendition that starts as
wry homage and ends in pained
regret, echoing his character’s
progress from flawed husband to
more engaged, self-aware divorcee.
Or take Rosalie Craig’s wonderful
performance as “Bobbie” in the
2018-19 West End production of
Company, a revivaldue to
transfer to Broadway with
Katrina Lenk in the lead role.
Comment at the time focused on
the gender switch, though
perhaps the bigger change was
elsewhere: some of the anxiety
had gone, in the audience as well
as in the show. Craig’s Bobbie
observes her dysfunctional
married friends with affection
rather than concern; you sense
that, wherever she ends up, she will
be equally forgiving of herself. The
epiphany still comes and alone is
still alone, not alive. But suddenly,
50 years on, the problem looks
much more like a state of mind.
Lorien Kite
More at ft.com/life-of-a-songdifferent direction, pivoting on a
moment halfway throughthe song
when Bobby shifts from second to first
person and “Someone to” becomes
“Somebody”. Thus with the minimum
of movement — and here Sondheim the
lyricist fuses with Sondheim the
composer, whose melodies often stay
relatively still while everything changes
around them — the observations
became requests,and the song a
journey “from complaint to prayer”.
Dean Jones, the actor who originated
the role of Bobby, performed “Being
Alive” with operatic intensity on the
first cast recording; Larry Kert, who
replaced Jones early in the run, took a
more conversational approach, with
less vibrato and closer attention to the
quieter moments. But it could be thatTHE LIFE
OF A SONGBEING ALIVEship of a painter who gives me back
myself,” he wrote. “Every time I come
away from looking at Poussin, I know
betterwhatIam.”
French-born, Rome-based Poussin
(1594-1665) and Cézanne (1839-1906)
usually hang far apart in museums. The
Marmottanputthemtogether,sharpen-
ing our understanding of Cézanne’s
influences, and also stirring our appre-
ciation of the currently unfashionable
Poussin. He is often considered an icy
classicist, but Cézanne saw his warmth
andhumanity.
Take Poussin’s “Landscape with
Hagar and the Angel”, an inhospitable
rocky scene with a tiny bewildered fig-
urerunningfrommysteriouslushforest
to eternal, massive cliff — ephemeral
human life nearly annihilated by
nature’s power. As a young man,
CézanneempathisedwithPoussin’scon-
cerns of time, geological strata, blind
natural forces, as in his roughly handled
Provençal landscape of trees andout-
crops“Rocks”(1867).
Forty years later his luminous “Châ-
teau Noir” (1905), a neo-gothic castle
rising, rock-like, amid transparent
cubes of foliage and quivering sky, ech-
oestheweirdlopsidedformsof“Rocks”,
butthistimethetremuloustouchesalso
call to mind Poussin’s own sheer
strangenessandlatefebrilemanner.
The art-historical stretch goes fur-
ther: as Cézanne remembered Poussin,Stephen Sondheim in the
1970s —Michael Ochs Archives/Getty ImagesMARCH 21 2020 Section:Weekend Time: 3/202019/ - 17:30 User:paul.gould Page Name:WKD14, Part,Page,Edition:WKD, 14, 1