On Painting

ON THE WALL of the classroom in my old school there hung a reproduction of the Mona Lisa, the famous painting of the Italian Renaissance. Our teacher told us, "Notice the strange smile on her face." And it was truly a disquieting smile, lovely yet ambiguous. It looked as if it might disappear at any moment, and even though the smile remained in place as I carefully examined the painting, I was left all the same with an unaccountable sensation of loss. Our teacher told us that when the master was working on this painting, he had exerted himself to the utmost searching for rare and exotic objects from across the globe to place in front of this woman, all in order to get her to smile that particular smile. I didn't like this explanation. Green tortoises, mummy's feet, or mechanical toys: none of these would necessarily elicit a smile like that. To make someone smile that particular smile would surely be more difficult. Or perhaps easier than one might think. When a woman remembers a gesture or a little habitual motion that her lover tends to make, there is a childishness to her expression, lovable and at the same time pitiful, for she is suddenly suffused by a tender lenience that radiates outward, casting her past and her future in its shade. And at that moment, there might well be a smile as evanescent as this one in her eyes.
It has been determined that the model for the Mona Lisa was a young married woman. Perhaps it was something clever her youngest child had said that morning-such a knowing little boy, and only four this August.
 that made her want to grin, but she restrained herself in the presence of the painter, because noble women are never supposed to show their teeth when they smile.
In any case, a nineteenth-century British man of letters—was it Walter de la Mare? I can't remember anymore—wrote an essay about the Mona Lisa that spoke of her ghostly wisdom, like the mysteries of aquatic life in the depths of the sea. I have nothing against wanting to write poetry when confronted by a painting—great art should call forth the creativity of each person who witnesses it, providing more than merely passive enjoyment—but I despise his view of the Mona Lisa because of the way it limits interpretation. If one had read the essay first and only then viewed the painting, one would not be able to help looking for the shadows of schools of fish in her eyes. Such a gorgeous (if somewhat strained) analogy might seem to add to our experience of the work but serves in the end to impoverish the meaning of the painting itself.
In our Chinese textbooks, we read a piece called "A Record of Painting" that rather obtusely calculates how many horses in a certain painting were standing and how many reclining. The colophons on Chinese paintings should be viewed as calligraphic characters that, when executed well, some-times really do complement the structure of the painting and, intentionally or not, serve as a counterbalance to the painting itself. This counterbalancing effect is the hallmark of Chinese painting. The words themselves, how-ever, never have very much to contribute to the image, no matter how exquisite or aptly chosen from previous sources they are, because once they have been transplanted to the painting, they lose their place.
And thus, as I prepare to write this essay on some paintings I have seen, I am all too aware of the fact that I must infringe the very rules I have been at pains to establish, for it is very difficult indeed to talk about paintings without actually describing them. Any attempt to describe a good painting will inevitably have its limits, but I wonder if it is really necessary to concern myself with these questions before I have even begun to write. Isn't it quite natural, after all, for one friend to say to another when they meet: "The moon's been so beautiful the past couple nights. Have you seen it?"
I recently obtained an illustrated volume of the paintings of Cézanne and have had the opportunity to examine his work quite carefully. I had always been aware of Cézanne's role as a progenitor of modern painting, but I was more interested in the work of later disciples such as Gauguin, Van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso, each of whom grasped hold of different aspects of his work and developed them to their logical conclusion. As a result, their work seemed more tendentious, more immediately distinctive, and thus more
 accessible. And the only impression I had of the abundant possibilities and broad significance of Cézanne's work was a still life poorly reproduced in a magazine, which portrayed a few grayish apples laid on a tablecloth, behind which stood an array of wine bottles. From the arrangement of the apples, I should have been able to see the way he had gone beyond line to a new discovery of blocks, but I had yet to understand his technique fully.
The book I have now before me is called Cézanne and His Times. It is written in Japanese, so I can't even get the names of all of the paintings straight. Of his early portraiture, a few paintings are worth noting for their contrasts with one another. One painting from 1860 portrays a man with full eyebrows and large eyes who looks like a poet surrounded by mist and fog. Only his face and the whiteness of his collar emerge from the somber gold surface of the painting. I am not fond of the romantic tradition: its atmospheric suggestions of mysteries left complacently unexplained strike me as tantamount to flicking on a light switch so as to shine artificial moon-light on whatever comes in view, fabricating a scene of hazy blue beauty, intermingled with dark shadows, through which one might hear the excited calls of insects and the startled croaking of frogs.
If we turn to another painting from 1863, we see a similar estrangement, a discomfort with the real, which manages this time to avoid the cut-rate poetic posturing of the first painting. Here, we see a little person with a large head, already well into middle age, with his long light-colored curls parted in the middle in the style of the day. He sits on a high-backed chair, his wandering eyes expressing a world-weariness born of age and experience, with a slightly mocking, supercilious composure in the hint of a smile underneath his prominent triangle-shaped beard. What is discomfiting about the painting, however, is that the proportions of the figure are so wrong. His legs are too short, his arms are too short, but the large hands dangling at his sides are very long, and the bony white joints of his fingers set against the floral-print fabric of the chair produce a subtle, civilized sense of terror.
The monk in a portrait painted in 1864 is hirsute, with black bushy eye-brows, a white robe, a white cassock, and a cross hanging from his neck. He crosses his arms across his chest. He has large hands. The surfaces of his face and his hands are extremely rough; one can discern where the skin has cracked and puckered from the cold. The whole painting is done in pure tones of gray and grayish-white, but there is nothing wretched about the extreme cold; there is only the fundamental quality of struggle between man and the elements around him.
In Cézanne's hands, the clichéd themes of European religious painting ever since the Renaissance are transformed. His Madonna Clasping the
 Dead Jesus to Her Bosom is truly astounding. His Madonna is a common woman, poor but clean, who has made her living as a seamstress, doing piecework, soul gone gray, hair gone gray, the petty frustrations of forty or fifty years of suffering contained in her hooked nose and tightly com-pressed lips. Nor does she actually clasp the baby Jesus in her arms. Her back is turned to him as she attends to some other matter. We can smell her poverty seeping from between the folds of her dark robes. Someone else is holding Jesus, a big, stout man who looks like a butcher, his arms as thick as stone columns, the blinding whiteness of his bald head melding with the dark face below. At first glance, he is a frightening figure, but on closer examination it is clear that his cruelty has its roots in other sorrows, and that he, too, is deserving of sympathy. What is particularly strange is the figure of Jesus himself. His face is obscured, his muscles are beautifully defined, his expression serene, and he stretches his legs such that his body extends across the entire width of the painting. He has become an aesthetic object, a beautiful form, seemingly lacking any other significance.
In The Walkers, one man is a little taller, wearing a gentlemanly stovepipe hat, the other somewhat shorter and more like a military man, wearing a felt cap with a folded bill and tall leather boots, walking stick in hand. In the heat of the afternoon, grass and trees and pale-colored houses have all been steamed into a misty white haze. Inside their shirts, the smell of old and new sweat intermingles, but the neckties of these walkers are neat and tidy, and they good-naturedly stroll arm in arm directly toward us, pitifully immaculate in their distress.
The backs of the two stylish young men in Country Landscape convey a similar feeling of sad triviality. The subject of this painting, however, is two women in the latest fashions. This sort of composition is usually a cliché of portraiture in the academic style: aristocratic women, elaborately made up, festooned with strings of pearls and precious jewels, stand proudly like little white mountains against a backdrop decorated by a forest and a castle, which may very well be their own family's fief. The women in this painting, though, are resolutely realistic. The brunette sits with her palm resting on her cheek. She has a low forehead; she is strong, with a worldliness of the smartest sort. The blonde is somewhat more contrived in her nobility. Her slender body is held at an angle so as to exhibit the long featherlike flourish of the train of her dress. Her face is partly hidden behind her leather muff, and the expression in her washed-out eyes is ambiguously lyrical. To place these two women in such a barren landscape, with a huge flag waving in the wind in the distance behind them, is an idiosyncratic gesture, to say the least, so much so that one is reminded of the more recent surrealists: a
 painting of a tree in which a sofa sits in the uppermost branches, and the country sun shines across the patchy floral upholstery, as desolate as a dream. Cézanne did not develop such images to their fullest potential, and this is why one grows so fond of the forthrightness of his painting.
Shepherd's Song portrays a group of men and women by the water, kneeling, reclining, sitting, their white flesh and white clothes flowing like music across the painting, describing the arclike shape of the letter U. By one corner of the arc, a nude woman cradles the back of her neck in her own out-stretched arms. The flesh of her body seems to undulate, and the surface of the painting is bathed in the languor of a strangely irregular light.
A painting called Olympia is surely based on Greek mythology. I do not know the original story, but I am taken by the woman in the center. She sleeps curled up into a ball, and although her legs are swollen and distended, one is still able to see that her flesh is young and firm.
I don't like The Temptation of St. Anthony, perhaps because Cézanne was too partial to the subject matter, which he painted twice. The earlier version is dark and cluttered—St. Anthony has women's breasts, and the woman who appears to him in a dreamlike state resembles a horse-while the later version is diluted and confusing.
A Summer's Day captures the eternal yet fleeting feeling of sun shining on one's body. A little boy stands by the water with arms akimbo and legs spread apart, looking radiantly happy, the shape of his body from behind resembling that of a frog or a toad. The woman with a little parasol under the burning sun is obviously a bit ludicrous. There are more holidaymakers on the other side of the water, where a grove of trees floats above the landscape in a cloud of green and the pale blue sky shelters clouds that hover above the lily pads, despite the withering extremity of the heat. The canvas sail of a little boat flashes in the white-hot glare, and its sailors and deck-hands are burnt black by the sun.
If one places portraits of two different children next to one another, the contrast between their personalities can sometimes be quite shocking. One child cups his face in his hand, and his prominent forehead radiates intelligence, skepticism, mischief, and cunning. This is humanity putting its best foot forward into the arena of struggle. But children are children. A patch of the white shirt he is wearing peeks out from underneath his over-sized overcoat. It is such a small, white thing, this shirt, so vulnerable and easily destroyed. When he reaches a certain age, that which is insubordinate in him will be made to toe the line. But there are also those who toe the line from the start, such as the boy in the second portrait, who is bright and correct and civilized, and as gentle as a bowl of porridge. He looks directly at
 the viewer with his great big eyes. It is not that there's no hint of mischief or evil in those eyes. It is merely that those hints can be completely ignored, because they are of no use. There is no ambition here, no resolve, only deceit and a crooked face.
In terms of technique, the first picture has already been simplified to the extent possible, but in order to capture the complex layering of the boy's spirit, a welter of brushstrokes have been added atop the blocks of color. The picture of the second boy from seven years later is composed entirely of flat blocks of color, but the flatness here has a rich substance of its own.
There was a man named Chocquet (according to the Japanese transliteration) who must have been Cézanne's friend and whose portrait appears twice in this volume. The first time that we see him, he already looks old and senile. His lips seem to tremble, and he sits with his legs crossed, one hand resting on the chair back, fingers splayed. From his head to his shoes and socks, a look of querulous distrust conveys his cowardice, his reproachfulness, his pettiness. It is clear that this is a man who has been through everything and learned nothing thereby. He's at loose ends but at the same time believes himself rich with the fruit of his experience, of which bounty he is only too happy to share in the form of lectures delivered beneath a triumphal arch consecrated to the virtues of old age. The satire here is not entirely lacking in sympathy for its subject. But in a painting from nine years later, this sympathy has expanded into an exquisite tenderness. This time, he sits outdoors against a backdrop of dense foliage, and although his hair is still gray and his figure similarly gaunt, he looks much younger. The terror of his own incomprehension has given way to a sense of perplexity that, because it encompasses everything around him, is much more serene. In his lowered eyes, we can see sentimentality, grief, retirement. His sunken mouth carries a little smile; perhaps he's spending a pleasant summer morning in the garden. There is love in every single brushstroke, for this man, and for his stubborn affection for life.
Those who are interested in the exaggerated and distorted line of modern art would do well to look closely at his oversized, obliquely angled hands.
Over the course of several portraits of the artist's wife, we can also detect some significant psychological developments. The first example uses the traditional image of a pair of lovers as its theme, but when we look ahead to the later paintings, it is clear that the woman portrayed here is strikingly similar to the artist's wife. This is clearly a depiction of the painter's own love story. The background is romantic. Tall reeds of some sort grow by the side of a lake. The limpid sunlight shines across the woman's white bonnet, with something of the freshness of a line from an old Chinese poem: "tender reeds in the distance green / white dew lends a frosty sheen." The woman lays her hand on the man's bare arm, just below his shoulder. She is a shallow woman at bottom, who finds virtue in obeying the rules, yet in the moment that she is illuminated by the sunlight of love, she becomes more generous of spirit, smaller, more confident in her knowledge of the world, and all of this moves her so much that tears shine in her eyes. The painter desires her to be transformed in this manner, and thus he paints her just so, while he represents himself as an entirely passive, subordinate, and characterless young man, sitting with his head bowed at her feet, accepting her kindness, his body seemingly shrunken in comparison with hers.
In this, her very first appearance in Cézanne's work, she is depicted with a squarish face and slightly protruding eyes. She seems a mild young woman who has undergone the rigors of a strict bourgeois upbringing. This is why she remains exceedingly reserved throughout. Yet entranced by his own romantic ideals, Cézanne has sanctified their relationship through his art.
Her second appearance in his work comes as a real shock. It must be quite a few years later. She sits on a sprawling old velvet sofa the color of dark clouds, her head bent to her sewing, with prominent circles under her eyes, a sharper nose, and a squarer chin. She is strong-willed: her hair is pulled back into an unshakable iron bun, and her upper body is sheathed in what looks likes galvanized sheet metal. The door to the room is visible just behind her, a hard rectangle, locked. There is flowered paper pasted on the wall, and each flower resembles a little iron cross. Can it be easy for a poor artist's wife patiently and smilingly to maintain such iron-clad wifely virtue? What a frightening thing life can be!
When Cézanne goes on to paint his wife five years later, he captures her in a tender moment. Her hair is loose, and she is wearing what appears to be a nightgown, made of satin, its soft and luminous flow of wide vertical stripes seemingly unable to prop up her body She holds her head to one side, lost in her own thoughts, and reminiscence makes her young—although a young woman's eyes could not contain the depths of sadness in these eyes. She is someone who has suffered for her ideals, only to discover much later that very little remains of them. Even their remnants are distant and indistinct, and yet, because she has suffered, they seem all the more appealing, like a simple melody floating through the air from afar, mingling with the breath of the earth and the seasons.
'The line is fr0m Shijing (The classic of poetry), a sixth-century B.C. collection traditionally said to be edited by Confucius.
 This aspect of her, however, is only fleeting. In another portrait, her hair appears to have been clipped short like a boy's, and even her face resembles that of a boy who has been weathered by a storm, aged before his time. Her chin extends forward from the picture frame, and her sharp semiprofile resembles a rust-blackened blade that's just cut through an apple and is sticky with its sour juice. Yet she smiles, and in her eyes is a bleak courage—a courage that would seem solemn, if she had been able to man-age something heroic rather than merely bleak.
The next picture is even more unhappy. The painter's wife sits in her husband's atelier, a brilliantly colored floral-print window shade slanting above her head. Sunlight and shadow play across the wall, but the light here does not belong to her. She is merely the woman from the kitchen. She wears greasy, somberly colored clothes. The object she is clasping in her hand might be a handkerchief, except the way she holds it suggests that it is more likely a dishcloth. She was probably busy using it when he called her in to serve as a model, and much as one would placate a child, she has decided to stay for a moment to humor him. She has been smiling all these years, and now the time has come for the painter to acknowledge the truth: it is an exhausted, insipid, and sloppy smile. On that long-suffering face, there is very little left of the feminine. One eyebrow is raised, perhaps parodying her disappointment, and the parody itself is actually a gesture of tenderness, of the sort that's only possible through a long and familiar intimacy. You need to look carefully before you can see it.
Cézanne's final portrait of his wife is lively and distinct. She sits in a flower garden illuminated by the sun, with luxuriant foliage and the white, swirling dust of late spring and early summer on the road behind her. She is wearing her best Sunday gown, tightly encircled by a whalebone corset. She has recovered the slim figure of her youth, and when she stretches out her arms, her wrists look firm and lovely. And yet the spring scene in the background has nothing to do with her. The painter's circumstances have improved, the hard times are behind them, but having been formed by precisely those hardships, she is no longer able to live her life in peace. The happiness on her face is a happiness devoid of content. If one were to remove that brilliant backdrop, the happiness on her face would seem strangely hollow, even idiotic.
Having seen Mrs. Cézanne's wifely virtues, it's something of relief to see a selfish woman. His subject in Woman in Bonnet and Leather Shawl has a long pallid face and a long nose, and her eyes possess a chilly allure. She retains the rancorous air of a city slicker who has ended up in the country-side. She could be a gentry woman, or she might be a con artist with pre-tensions to gentility.
 In a very few brushstrokes, the painting entitled Statue manages to express that solidity and hardness that is the special quality of stone. This is the most statuelike object I have ever seen reproduced in a book of paintings. I don't know whether the painting was intended as some sort of parody. It looks to me as if it may well have been: this all-too-typical image of a child, with prominent and plump cheeks, round belly, and contoured limbs, is supposed to convey divine health and vitality but ends up smacking of greed, impudence, and an excessive fondness for wine and women, instead. In the end, this Cupid resembles neither a god nor a child.
In addition to these, there is a large group of paintings that take groups of bathers emerging from the water as their theme. Each of these paintings is set on a shore beside a wood. There are a few men who look mostly alike, but the focus is on a number of women and the difficult task of capturing their gestures and the figural beauty of their bodies. This is especially true of the last such picture, Women Bathers, in which the depiction of the human form has gradually grown more and more abstract, prefiguring the cubism of the century to come.
There are two paintings sketching Mardi Gras that seem to be about the naked pursuit of love between men and women during the wild jubilance of the carnival. The atmosphere is frenzied, and the brushwork is frenzied as well, and what I took away from these paintings was merely that the women's stomachs were invariably bigger than those of the men.
The Last Day of Mardi Gras, however, is a masterpiece. Two vagabonds, dressed up as harlequins, are on their way back from the celebration. One holds a walking stick, and the other is unsteady on his feet, his waist bent and one hand propped on his knee, holding himself in a slyly jocose posture. They seem to be walking downhill. All the lines in the painting are slanted, and the atmosphere is suggestive of the repose that comes in the wake of desire fulfilled. Mardi Gras is an ancient custom, which has long since fallen into disfavor, but the faces of these two men are as common as could be. They are giddy with a simple sort of self-confidence, drunk with their own inconsequential cleverness, betrayed by their own lack of feeling, and lack of interest.
Boy with Skull presents a student on the cusp of maturity seated next to a table, his knees pressed against the legs of the table, as if they can no longer fit underneath, as if everything has somehow gone out of proportion. His face is truly that of a student: mischievous, inquisitive, full of fantasy, impatient of others. One can almost feel the pressure exerted on his legs by the wave-shaped edges of the cheap wooden table at which he sits. On the table, there are books, a ruler, and a skull sitting atop some papers. The
 skeletons used for the study of anatomy possess a real intimacy, because they are merely ordinary; one's student's days are especially ordinary, like the smell of feet perspiring inside a pair of basketball shoes.
A portrait of old age is found in Woman in a Straw Hat. Her head is bowed as she counts the beads on her rosary, and under the brim of her hat is revealed a foxlike face whose humanity has been diminished by half, leaving only cupidity. She lacks the energy for stealing, larceny, or the hoarding of goods, and this lethargy leaves her uneasy. She bends over her rosary, praying not for serenity or for heavenly ideals but only to be allowed to continue to murmur over the hard little beads, to count and catalog more of the objects that lie within her purview. She will not be with her beads for much longer, and she can do nothing more than pass them back and forth across her mouth until they are slick with the smell of her spittle.
Cézanne's own old age was not like that at all. In his very last self-portrait, he wears a hunting cap at a rakish tilt, like a man about town. He has grown a white beard, and his slender, raised eyebrows give him the crafty look of a man who's seen through it all. The smile in his eyes is exceedingly endearing, as if to say: I know-even after I'm gone, spring will come again. Old age is not lovable in and of itself, but there are many lovable old people.
Of the landscape paintings, I am fondest of his Broken House. This is a white house sitting beneath the afternoon sun, with a blackened window that looks like a solitary eye peering out from a face. There is a great big crack running from the roof all the way down to the ground, so that the house looks as if it's laughing itself to pieces. The little path that leads to the house is already barely visible through the undergrowth, and the house is surrounded on all sides by weeds, which look extremely soft and pale under the sun, forming a blurry expanse. The suffocating color of the sun reminds one of the lines of a poem: "On the ancient road to Chang'an, no sound and no dust, no sound and no dust / through fading sunset in the west wind appear the towers of the Han imperial tombs." Here, however, there is no magnificent past to mourn, only bourgeois desolation, emptiness within emptiness.