Acknowledgments

Armstrong, Carol

Save Cite Share

Free

Acknowledgments

Carol Armstrong

Cézanne’s Gravity

~This book has been a long time in the making, and its shape has shifted more than once. Its genesis goes back to two origin points. The first of those dates to the 1990s, when I was teaching at the City University of New York Graduate Center and began work on a project concerned with the vexed history of the discourse on color; one of the instances...

Author

Carol Armstrong

PublisherYale University Press

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-22228

Acknowledgments

This book has been a long time in the making, and its shape has shifted more than once. Its genesis goes back to two origin points. The first of those dates to the 1990s, when I was teaching at the City University of New York Graduate Center and began work on a project concerned with the vexed history of the discourse on color; one of the instances of that discourse with which I became obsessed was the series of letters written by Rainer Maria Rilke to his wife Clara Westhoff in 1907 on the subject of Cézanne’s posthumous Salon d’Automne retrospective of that year. That initial project was supported, first by research grants awarded to me by C.U.N.Y., and then by a Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers fellowship at the New York Public Library in 2003–04. Though I never realized that project as such, I am grateful for both sources of time and money, and particularly for my time spent at the Cullman Center exploring issues that have continued to inform my work and my teaching up to the present. Ultimately that project metamorphosed into the fourth chapter of Cézanne’s Gravity.

The second of the two origin points for this book was the work I undertook on the exhibition Cézanne in the Studio: Still Life in Watercolors, held at the J. Paul Getty Museum in fall 2004. I was invited by the curator of drawings, Lee Hendrix, to write a monograph about the spectacular watercolor still life by Cézanne in the Getty’s drawings collection, the Still Life with Blue Pot of 1895–1906, and together we decided to mount an exhibition that focused on the twin questions of the genre of still life and the medium of watercolor in Cézanne’s oeuvre, to be accompanied by a richly illustrated catalogue for which I wrote the essay. I cannot adequately express how important that collaboration was on all fronts, or how deep my gratitude was and is for the chance to co-curate that exhibition and to write about that splendid work of art, as well as for the funding that I received, both from the Department of Art and Archaeology at Princeton University, where I was teaching at the time, and from the Getty itself. Many of the works that featured in that exhibition, and many of the paths first pursued in the course of writing about them, are taken up again in Cézanne’s Gravity.

During the same years, I taught seminars at Princeton whose discussions yielded new thoughts and questions as well as seminar papers by students that influenced my way of thinking about both Cézanne’s career in particular and the history of nineteenth-century French art more generally. The seminar on color that I first taught there yielded another one much more recently, at Yale, where I came on board in 2007. Co-taught with Nicola Suthor, a much-valued colleague, that more recent iteration of the original seminar on color helped to sharpen and solidify my thinking about artists as diverse (and yet as bound up with one another) as Cézanne and Helen Frankenthaler, and will continue to inform my work into the future. Another seminar first taught at Princeton, on the history of still life, was also crucial to the unfolding of my long-term engagement with that traditionally lowest, and to me most fascinating, of the genres. I taught that seminar once at Johns Hopkins as well, as a Mellon Visiting Professor in the fall of 2006, and then twice more at Yale, and I have continued to be preoccupied with the history of still life in painting and photography, and in my own making of photographs. That preoccupation lies at the very heart of Cézanne’s Gravity.

Last but not least, of course, are the seminars on Cézanne (or on Manet and Cézanne) that I taught first at Princeton, and then more recently at Yale. In that seminar at Yale I was happy to see artists from the School of Art testifying to an ongoing enthusiasm for this most difficult of painters, and I was the beneficiary of excellent insights and provocative conversations, as well as some superb papers, by students including Johanna Burton, Naina Saligram, and Nick Robbins. It is one of the pleasures and profits of teaching that students teach the teacher by provoking her to think harder, anew, and differently about the subject at hand, and anything that comes into its orbit. That was never more true than in the case of Cézanne, so often considered the progenitor of the twentieth-century lineage of abstract painting.

Which brings me to the question of the long haul of this book, and the many metamorphoses it underwent. At first reluctant to embark on yet another monograph, as peculiar a monograph as it might be, on yet another major artist of that most canonical of canons, nineteenth-century French art, I eventually found myself doing just that. Spurred on by dismay at the declining interest in that period of art, I had originally thought to write a collection of essays on different artists and different problems surrounding the French nineteenth century. But then the dismay I had been feeling led to a refusal to accept that falling off of interest as final or definitive, and thence to the hosting of two symposia. The first was an interdisciplinary interrogation of “The Long Nineteenth Century” in November 2010, for which I gave the keynote address, “Crossing Time Lines: From Paul Cézanne Forwards, From Virginia Woolf Backwards,” and which constituted the beginnings of the first chapter of Cézanne’s Gravity. The second, entitled “Olympiad,” took place in September 2013, on the 150th anniversary of Edouard Manet’s painting of Olympia and the Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and was accompanied by two exhibitions sponsored by the School of Art under the leadership and with the collaboration of Rob Storr. For the latter of the two symposia I gave the opening address, “Ceci n’est pas une prostituée,” which, among other things, took up Cézanne’s engagement with Manet’s two most scandalous paintings, and resulted in some of the content of the prologue to Cézanne’s Gravity. I am most grateful for Yale’s support, and to Emily Bakemeier in particular, in making both of these symposia possible.

Among the reasons for the waning attention to nineteenth-century French art—canon-critique from feminist and other quarters, the rise of interest in art produced elsewhere than in Europe and the United States, the gathering of force of what may loosely be called a postmodernist sensibility, and the exodus of scholars from the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, not to mention the shift of focus of the lion’s share of students forward to the post-1960s phenomenon known as “contemporary art”—the notion that the modernist timeline that the art of Manet and Cézanne had inaugurated had come to its end, that art was therefore obsolete and that thus we should be “over” it, seemed to me the most open to dispute. The art in question is still powerful art, it still compels, and it is still worthy of being thought and written about; throwing the baby out with the bathwater did not seem to me to be the best way to proceed. What did seem worth getting free of was not the art but the timeline into which it had been inserted, along with the nineteenth-century conception of historical and art-historical time that underpinned that timeline. And that was ultimately the motivation for turning back to the mode of a monograph that pushed against the single-figure, developmental model of the monograph, and that made Cézanne a kind of test case for rethinking timelines altogether, whether the timeline was that of the individual artist and his artistic offspring, or that of the unidirectional arrow and forward movement of vanguard art as a larger whole.

This rethinking was undertaken in a variety of public lectures that stimulated me to wrestle with the problem of how to present Cézanne afresh. Beginning with the President’s Lecture on Manet and Cézanne that I was invited to give at Princeton in December 2002 (and which I gave again at University College London in fall 2004), and continuing with the Belle Ribicoff lecture and seminar on the same subject that I gave at Vassar, also in fall 2004, I proceeded to deliver a series of works-in-progress lectures at Yale that culminated with a lecture on Cézanne, Greenberg, and Frankenthaler for the student-run nineteenth-century colloquium in the History of Art department in fall 2016. During the same period I was asked to give lectures on Cézanne at the University of Hong Kong (the Shih Hsio-yen Distinguished Lecture in Art History, March 2012), the Center for Cultural Analysis at Rutgers University (November 2012), Johns Hopkins (the Israel Rosen Memorial Lecture, April 2014), the Thyssen Bornemisza Museum in Madrid (for the “Cézanne Sight/Non-Sight” symposium, May 2014), the University of Georgia Lamar Dodd School of Art (spring 2015), the NYU Institute of Fine Arts (March 2015), Princeton University (for the “Cézanne and the Modern” colloquium, November 2015), the “Screens” symposium at Yale (April 2015), and the University of Kansas (Murphy Lecture, March 2016). For these opportunities, which contributed much to the unfolding of my thoughts about Cézanne, I am very grateful to Shirley Tilghman, Nick Adams, Tamar Garb, Greg Thomas, Susan Sidlauskas, Michael Fried, Alisa Luxenberg and Nell Andrew, John Elderfield, Francesco Cassetti, and Marni Kessler, among others. Without these opportunities, and the discussions that they yielded, I do not think I would have been able to realize the second, third, and fifth chapters in Cézanne’s Gravity in particular—those that concern Einstein, Merleau-Ponty, and R. D. Laing—or the material in the epilogue. I have benefited as well from the invaluable feedback that I received from Alex Potts, Peter Pesic, Nicola Suthor, Marika Knowles, and Izabel Gass, who all read and commented on different chapter drafts of Cézanne’s Gravity.

Finally, of course, I am thankful for all the support that I received from the History of Art department and from the Frederick W. Hilles Publication Fund at Yale. I am particularly appreciative of the support and advice given me by the current chair of the History of Art department, Tim Barringer. Heartfelt thanks go to Amy Canonico, my editor at Yale University Press, and to Nick Robbins, for his thorough and efficient work as my research assistant. Without them this book would not exist, in this form or any other.

Previous chapter

Base text size -

Chapter images ()