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PARTISAN REVIEW
geoning strokes powerfully summarize and contain the violent sub–
ject.
There are numerous studies of nudes and bathers in the show,
both male and female, and it's interesting to see the changes between
female nudes, which were done in pencil in the early to midseven–
ties, and which are silhouetted, shaded with light patches of strokes,
and serpentine, and two male bathers seen from the back, both done
in the late seventies (one in pencil, the other in pen with traces of oil
color). In the latter, the silhouetting is broken, or indicated by marks
that overlap each other but do not form single, smooth contours, and
the shading is done in larger, more explicit strokes (and fewer of
them). More crucial still, the blank paper is allowed to indicate mass
and volume, to function sculpturally, as it were, and with supreme
economy. Detail is sacrificed for compactness and compression, the
solidity that comes from a summarizing impulse. By the late nine–
ties, when Cezanne does
Bathers
(in pencil, with touches of violet
watercolor), he is virtually modelling the figure (especially the figure
on the left) in areas of blank paper and darker and lighter strokes, in
effect translating a sculptural feeling into a wholly two-dimensional
vocabulary. In this respect it's instructive to compare his drawings
with Seurat's, which are also economical and summarizing, also
destructive of contour, and also committed to engaging the pa–
per- but the velvety pile of it, as it were, as an accessory to the fine
infinitesimal web of marking. And whereas Seurat materializes
volume through big areas of massed tone, Cezanne uses the pencil
mark and the white paper to suggest just those points where planes
are created by the fracturing of light, the instability of the glance,
and the resistant bumps and ridges of the body or landscape itself.
If
the exhibition is unified by something more than Cezanne's
sensibility, it is in fact the presence of a task, a lifelong task, to find
the means to translate or convert the visual sensations of three–
dimensionality into the language of drawing. It doesn't truly happen
until Cezanne begins to work from nature; it's not there yet in
Family
in a Garden,
an idyllic but overpacked grouping of figures done in
pencil sometime between 1870 and 1873, but it is in the beautiful
Camille Pissarro, Seen from the Back,
also in pencil, and done between
1874 and 1877. Here the blank paper works positively between
broken lines to indicate not just volume, but the weight and density
of objects. The relationships between Pissarro's hat, jacket collar and
shoulders and the force of his back against the chair he sits in are
shown through pencil strokes that, in their variations of thickness
