Cezanne and Provence: The Painter in His Culture

While art historians have long treated Provence as merely""another 'motif' in Cezanne's visual repertory,"" Athanassoglou-Kallmyer (Eugene Delacroix: Prints, Politics, and Satire) smartly insists that the painter's regional alliance wholly affected both his stylistic innovation and his critical acclaim. In 1886, at age 47, the painter abandoned Paris for his native Aix-en-Provence. Contextualizing Cezanne's move within late 19th-century French nationalist efforts to preserve and exalt the regional cultures that modernization threatened to destroy, the author produces startlingly original, often convincing readings of his work. She invokes the commercialized revivals of once-Rabelaisian local festivals to illuminate Cezanne's wry burlesques of""disjointed and weightless"" harlequins moving""within a flat, boxlike space."" She considers the 1895 parliamentary ban on the manufacture of cards, which jeopardized a major regional industry and pastime, as a provocation for Cezanne's impassive Cardplayers. She brings contemporary advances in geology and archeology to bear upon the painter's densely striated, crudely forged icons of Mont Sainte-Victoire; by consciously aligning his work with the primitive artifacts discovered at the mountain's base, she contends, Cezanne aimed to tunnel down into the landscape's""essence"" and back to a cultural purity. Finally, she shows how the painter's deliberate mythification of Provence anticipated his own critical reception. When his work was at last exhibited in 1895, Parisian critics, now keen to idealize the provinces as the destined site of national renewal, lauded Cezanne as the authentic""hard-toiling village artisan"" whose coarse style rebuked the polished products of the elitist Salon. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer may overstate her case by marshaling every facet of Cezanne's oeuvre--pastoral scenes, subversive humor, pottery, pigeons, fabric and skulls--into a sphere of specifically Provencal concern. Still, her tirelessly researched and generously illustrated study (including 120 color plates, 102 halftones) freshly de-centers the academy's standard conflation of modernism and urbanism, and impressively grounds the elusive""father"" of modern painting in a vivid place and propitious time.