They Suffered for Their Cézanne Portraits

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There’s an engrossing confab of a show in session at the National Gallery of Art here. It’s called “Cézanne Portraits.” With some 60 likenesses by a notoriously testy, people-averse artist, it’s the largest gathering of its kind in a century. (The last one was in Paris in 1910.) And it has just a few more weeks to run, so if you’re going to catch the conversation, which I seriously recommend, the time is now.

You’ll know most of the players by type, if not by name. Cézanne himself, in self-portraits, is very present, looking alternately feral and professorial. So is his mate of nearly 40 years, Hortense Fiquet, who sits with her hands knotted in her lap and a lifetime of patience inscribed on her face. The Cézanne clan, as a whole, is a tense bunch. The artist’s Provençal father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne, has his head in a newspaper, as if trying to tune everyone out. By contrast, his uncle, Dominique Aubert, can’t stay still. In a series of 10 portraits done in a two-year span he mugs as if he were in a bus station photo booth.

A few art celebrities are on hand. Émile Zola, Cézanne’s childhood friend in Aix-en-Provence and (at least early on) aesthetic brother in arms, reclines on a cushion, a Buddha in beige gabardine. The art critic Gustave Geffroy, who Cézanne loved (when Geffroy wrote something nice about him), then loathed (for reasons we don’t know), hunkers spiderlike over a scattering of open books.

And the dealer Ambroise Vollard, who put Cézanne’s career on the map (he organized his first portrait show), is rewarded, if that’s the word, with the likeness seen here. Vollard claimed to have submitted to 115 sittings for the painting, each lasting from 8 a.m. to 11:30 p.m., during which time he was verbally slapped — “You wretch! You’ve spoiled the pose! Do I have to tell you again you must sit like an apple?” — if he so much as twitched.

The torment he suffered doesn’t come through in the image itself, in which Vollard projects the calm of a seasoned statesman. Yet Cézanne, after all the hassle, decided the picture was a failure and refused to finish it. One day he put down his brushes and never came back.

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