Date: 21-08-1990
Owning Institution: National Gallery of Scotland
Publication: The Independent 1987 - 1999          
Subject:   16th Century  17th Century  19th Century    

Painters are often reluctant to discuss their own work and they have every reason to be cautious. Anything said may be taken down and used in evidence; one chance remark, expanded upon by a critic or art historian with sufficient eloquence and determination, may colour interpretation of an artist's oeuvre for generations.

Paul Cezanne's statement, that he sought ''to re-do Poussin over again after nature'', is one of the more famous examples of the phenomenon. Taken up by commentators such as Maurice Denis (''Cezanne is the Poussin of Impressionism'') and Roger Fry (''How much nearer Cezanne was to Poussin than to the Salon d'Automne''), Cezanne's comment has contributed to his own reputation as the great classicising painter of his age, the advocate of a return to the values of the seventeenth-century heroic landscape tradition. His few words have also fostered the notion of Poussin as a modern avant la lettre, a painter whose precise, geometrical compositions anticipate not only those of Cezanne but presage, too, the innovations of twentieth-century abstraction.

Cezanne's comment has, also, provided the pretext for ''Cezanne and Poussin: The Classical Vision of Landscape'' at the National Gallery of Scotland, the most ambitious Edinburgh Festival exhibition for years. Juxtaposing a number of major landscapes by Poussin and Cezanne, in a way that is rarely permitted by the predominantly chronological disposition of the world's great permanent collections, it offers a chance to gauge the validity of one of the more influential received opinions in modern aesthetic thought.

Curator Richard Verdi argues that his display demonstrates ''two artists' search for the most eternal qualities in nature''. But the notion of Poussin and Cezanne as a pair of kindred souls communing across the centuries comes to look suspiciously like one of those attractive simplifications whose credibility depends on the suppression of the visible evidence. Verdi's show is fascinating, but also an oddity - an exhibition whose main premise is consistently sabotaged by the paintings it adduces in its support.

Turn, for example, from Poussin's painting of 1648, the Earl of Shropshire's Landscape with the Body of Phocion Carried out of Athens, to Cezanne's La Montagne Sainte-Victoire, executed in the 1880s, from the Phillips Collection in Washington. Both artists clearly have a highly developed sense of composition as structure, taking what might be described as a virtually architectural approach to the business of constructing a picture - but any apparent similarities are, in the end, submerged in the gulf that separates them.

Poussin takes tremendous care to establish the illusion of depth, which is literally measured for you at each stage of the painting's spatial recession. The logic of his single vanishing-point system of perspective is reinforced by the effective disposition of the picture into a receding sequence of horizontal bands. Each band, aligned precisely with the bottom edge of the canvas, is inhabited by a group of figures or animals, seen almost invariably in profile, which diminish gradually in scale - from the two men bearing Phocion's body on a stretcher in the foreground, to the shepherd with his flock in the middle distance, and finally to the ant-like procession of worshippers in front of a temple in the distance.

The sense of exact measurement, of the painter's absolute confidence in the triumph of his illusion, is further enhanced by the architectural elements in the picture and by the fact that, without exception, these overgrown blocks of stone, this monumental tomb, that classical temple present themselves to you front on - as flat planes, markers, like Poussin's profiled people and animals, of specific points in the picture's spatial scheme. The whole thing, of course, is highly artificial; reality may rarely, if ever, be translated with such impeccable and unquestionable logic to the two dimensions of a picture's surface.

Cezanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire suggests, too, the subordination of nature to pictorial artifice. Offering a panoramic view across the valley of the Arc, culminating in the blue eminence of the mountain, the image demonstrates something like Poussin's fondness for the right-angle and, too, his tendency to calibrate spatial recession through the establishment of a sequence of parallel planes - in Cezanne, established by the chequer-board pattern of fields reaching across the valley to the mountain. If anything, Cezanne might be said to heighten the sense of artifice implicit in Poussin, to subordinate the facts of visual experience still further to the dictates of compositional harmony. But . . .

It is a characteristic strategy of those who seek to argue for the supposed modernity of Old Master painting to ignore its subject and focus on its formal aspects. Yet in Poussin the two cannot easily be separated. The Landscape with the Body of Phocion is a painting that tells a story, a picture with an explicit narrative and moral thrust inevitably absent from Cezanne's depiction of a mountain near Aix-en-Provence. Poussin has been careful to place the shrouded body of Phocion, a noble general who drank hemlock after being rejected by the people of Athens, directly beneath the magnificently carved tomb of a wealthy Athenian in the middle distance. Everything in Poussin's picture contrives to provoke meditation on the difference between Phocion's tragic, ignominious end and its setting. The elaborate, measured scheme of the picture serves a rhetorical formula: how are the mighty fallen.

Poussin's art issues in confident, certain creations because he uses landscape as, essentially, a fiction, the mise-en- scene for a dramatic situation whose moral is never in doubt. Doubt, however, is integral to Cezanne, who is quite unable to play God with nature with the same confidence. His genius lies in the subtlety with which he admits this.

Poussin's work contains few of the tensions that you find, characteristically, in Cezanne. Cezanne evinces his mania for placement, for what he called interrelations, in the massed bands and patches that are his equivalents for this or that area of a landscape; yet those same areas entirely lack the distinctness of their counterparts in Poussin, the sense of one's complete separation from another. They blur and overlap, climbing up the picture at times in what becomes a solid wall of paint, confounding near and far. Cezanne's perspective is not the single vanishing-point scheme of Poussin but a much knottier and more problematic method, subject to confusion. His theme becomes, in effect, the difficulty of fixing what you see, not only in a two dimensional surface but also, it is implied, within experience itself.

Objects or areas, in Cezanne, often have doubled outlines, as if the painter had painted the scene before him first with one eye closed and then the other. Cezanne's art, for all its artifice, is peculiarly honest about its dishonesty; its broken outlines and fractured forms let you in on the provisional nature of his enterprise, his sense that any painted equivalent to experience is necessarily a distortion. ''Everything we see falls apart, vanishes, doesn't it?'' he once said. His verticals and horizontals, you notice, are never quite true, threatening to unbalance the image: there is a turbulence behind the apparent order of his pictures, a sense of whirling, wheeling instability - particularly evident in the later works in Edinburgh - only barely held in check.

There is one Poussin in this show that might be said to treat the theme of untamed nature - the Landscape with Diogenes, whose theme, Diogenes' abandonment of worldly possessions, is reflected in the unusually wild, unruly vegetation. But this is unruliness placed in a moral scheme, wildness sanctioned by didacticism.

Since, for Cezanne, there is no narrative, no overt moral, there can be no corresponding closure of the image. This is reflected in the number of times that he painted the Montagne Sainte-Victoire; each time he returns to it, he tacitly admits the uncertainty that lies at the heart of his work. Cezanne may well have wanted to think of himself as a classical painter, an artist capable of grand, declarative statements. But he is a modern, and his art's most notable and moving characteristic accords with that: it is the gap between aspiration and achievement; it is, precisely, his failure to re-do Poussin.