140
PARTISAN REVIEW
when it moved (propelled by an exquisite motor that Horn has used
in other pieces), the pointer barely missed a series of vertical con–
structions set at the edges of a circle described on the floor. These
demonstrated Horn's familiar vocabulary: a precariously balanced
egg, dry and wet pigments, mechanical parts, brushes turned into
metaphors for bird crests and so on. As presented, they were as
evocative of the studio, the factory and the alchemist's laboratory as
of the circus. The pointer revolved, like a mechanical child playing a
counting game, extending a long, menacing finger at Horn's allusive
constructions . Nothing else in the exhibition approximated the
power of the center "figure," nor did the various parts coalesce into a
whole. I haven't given up on Horn, but I expect more of her.
My enthusiasm for contemporary painting and sculpture not–
withstanding, the most challenging show I saw this
fall
was
Cezanne:
The Early Years
1859-1872.
Selected by Lawrence Gowing, the ex–
hibition originated in London, at the Royal Academy .
It
has been at
the Musee d'Orsay in Paris and will come to the National Gallery in
Washington, D .C . early this year. It's a difficult, uncomfortable
show, a document of struggle, confusion and intense feeling . That
Cezanne ever became "Cezanne" as we know and revere him seems
miraculous once you know the full range of his first efforts.
Cezanne was twenty-one when he began the rigid, amateurish
Four Seasons ,
the panels in the collection of the Petit Palais, with their
elongated female figures that recall Puvis de Chavannes and Goya's
tapestry cartoons. Twelve years later, he was capable of constructing
a dispassionate self-portrait with carefully placed planes of warm
and cool color. In between there are straightforward landscapes,
lurid bacchanals , studies saved from academicism by their ferocity ,
and a series of brutal portraits of his family and friends. They in–
clude the well-known painting of his father reading a newspaper in a
flowered armchair and the various images of his lawyer uncle, Domi–
nique, with their slabs ofthick, dragged paint. It's an erratic, confus–
ing group, signposts along the young Cezanne's uneasy , indirect
path towards his own art.
Gowing's sensitively chosen selection raises more questions
than it answers, and that constitutes a great deal of the show's
fascination . I'd always assumed , for instance , that the clunkiness of
the portraits of Uncle Dominique, like the maladroitness of the bac–
chanals , came from a lack of conventional facility. But several works
in Gowing's exhibit make it plain that Cezanne could paint quite
skillfully, if pressed . Clearly the left-handedness of the early works
that we know best must have been deliberate , part of Cezanne's
