Imre Györgyi szerk.: A modell, Női akt a 19. századi magyar művészetben (A Magyar Nemzeti Galéria kiadványai 2004/2)

Tanulmányok / Studies - Werner Hofmann: Venus ég és föld között / Venus between Heaven and Earth

front of Claude, as Emma undressed in front of Léon, and plays off her body, which is completely unadorned, against that of the idol. Claude takes her once more in his arms, but realizes that he has only won renewed security through betrayal of his art. This realisation drives him to suicide. Cézanne recognised his own artistic calvary in the story of Claude Lantier, which caused him to break off his friendship with Zola, a friendship that had bound them together since their youth. Was his dismay due to the failure prophesied for him as a man and a painter, or was it due to the indiscreet glimpse of his sexuality afforded by the novel? The early work of the seventies reveals something of his aggressive instincts, being mostly "pictures concerned with sexual desire, violence and death" (M. L. Krumrine).

37 Two pictures of this period have a particular significance: the Ewig-Weibliche (Eternally Feminine, ///. 13) and the Apotheose of Delacroix (Venturi, 1873/77, III. 14) The works are complementary, a picture and an anti-picture, and both offer several alternative readings. Specifically, they address Cezanne's dilemma, the rival claims to power of art and Eros. Meyer Schapiro suggested a dialectic coupling: he thought of the choice that Hercules had to make at the parting of the ways.™ However Cezanne's piety may have directed him to the passage in Matthew 7,13, where mankind is confronted with two gates and two ways. The broad way leads to damnation, the narrow way to life ("and few there be that find it"). In confronting this choice, Cézanne subjected himself to a ruthless analysis. At one moment he chooses to depict painterly virtue, of which the epitome was Delacroix, whom he admired as "altissime peintre"; at another, he can be seen allying himself (standing to the side of his easel, but not detached from the scene) with the collective male psyche, which abandons itself headlessly to the "devilish seductive power" (P.-J. Proudhon) of woman. The two pictures are concerned respectively with the creative ascent into spirituality, and the descent into the satisfaction of animal instincts. Cézanne is drawn to the ideal in the form of Delacroix, yet cannot resist the idol of the "Great Whore of Babylon", which is why he paints a polemical "anti-apotheosis", an apotropaic picture that brutally depicts the temptations of the flesh in order to exorcize them. These temptations will later come to haunt Cézanne, and for that reason he will objectivize them throughout his life in the artistic creations of his bathers. We know that these artistic images do not rely on the display of living nakedness, for Cézanne avoided working from female models. He explained this reluctance with his Catholic principles

—but also with the danger of Jesuit persecution and with the narrow-mindedness of the provincial milieu.

34 For Schapiro, the sketches for the "Apotheosis of Delacroix" reminded him of "a Baroque saint ascending to heaven." However the figure resting in the clouds recalls rather the Christ of an entombment or a Pietà. By contrast, all heavenly aspects are excluded from the "eternal feminine": the profane idol is totally at home in its fleshly availability. In his homage to Delacroix, Cezanne's brush works deftly and animatedly, while in his handling of the "eternal feminine" the vehement and aggressive strokes reveal an obsession that is at once spellbinding and brutal. The result is a cynical "anti-apotheosis", a worship that consists of mockery. In the generously proportioned nude, the eyes of which (since restoration work carried out at Malibu) have a blood-red glitter, he dethrones the classical ideal of beauty, as represented by Venus, and makes a death-goddess out of her, recalling the Venus libitina of the Romans. At the same time, however, he reveals the hollow pathos of the wellworn adoration gesture through the idol's male accomplices. This desolate fairground spectacle anticipates the hysteriafilled scenes of the masses painted by Ensor. The two last scenes of Faust, in which Goethe extols the "eternal feminine" anticipate the prayer of Doctor Marianus, who invokes the mercy of the "Virgin, Mother, Queen and Goddess". As in Runge's Venus / Aurora / Mary, the feminine in all its diversity is invoked and honoured. Cezanne's "antiapotheosis" substitutes for these transfigurations the deathblow of disillusion. In this way he endows his art with a purity that rests on a more radical evasion of instinct. This brought both gains and losses for Cezanne's art and the art of his many followers. The almost monkish abstinence of the painter, who refused to look at naked models, led to a liberation from the exigencies of physical beauty and its antique norms of measurement. If Cezanne's moral protest against the whore of Babylon chimes with the verdict of the prudish moral censors of his time, he also explodes the aestheticcanon and demands thereby a new and vital diversity of expression, which glimpses "nature in her absolute nakedness" in the form of ugly and vulgar bodies, the sort of thing to which his contemporary Pinard took exception. Untroubled by sexual anxieties, Toulouse-Lautrec drew a "modern Judgement of Paris", a commentary on this sujet which exemplifies this implied paradigm shift. A condescending top-hatted gentleman appraises three Venus priestesses, variations on the new ideal of beauty. With blasphemous commentaries like this, begin the coarsenings and distortions that were to become the shock tactics of Expressionists, the Fauvists and the young Picasso in the twentieth century. Indeed the Demoiselles d'Avignon and its preliminary stages presage this strategy of provocation. In the meantime, the twentieth century did not stop at the cult of ugliness. It was precisely the disparate group of the Surrealists who, having declared war on the bourgeois conception of art and its conservative norms, drove the confrontation so far that they were not afraid to borrow from the 19th century art of the Salon. The elegant couplings of Bellmer and the no less attractive female forms of Dali bear witness to such borrowing. All this was designed to liberate the instincts. The most striking disavowal of traditional boundaries was achieved by Max Ernst with the Garten Frankreichs (Garden of France, 1962, ///. IS).

40 A horizontal Eve / Venus here offers us a seductive and eye-catching view of the fleshly roll of the hips, executed in the same masterly fashion as the Salon painters, but also Ingres in his odalisques. Exactly what Ernst may have used as a model for this lying figure is still not decided. Probably it was something that once hung on