 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our lecture this morning. Thank you all for coming. My name's Martha Lucy. I'm Deputy Director for Research, Interpretation, and Education here at the Barnes. And it is my great pleasure to introduce Susan Sidlawskis. Susan Sidlawskis is Professor of the History and Theory of Modern Art at Rutgers University. And it is not an exaggeration to say that she really is truly one of the most distinguished scholars in the field of 19th century art. She has an approach to art history that combines social historical context with theory and with a careful, painstaking analysis of form. I mean, really, she has this way of taking you through a painting that makes you see things that you didn't realize were there, that you never would have seen. And she does it so elegantly. Susan has contributed greatly to our understanding of Cézanne, especially his portraits of his wife, which are some of his most enigmatic works. And we will be hearing about those today. In addition to essays on Manet, Degas, and Cézanne, among others, Susan is the author of several books including Body, Place, and Self in 19th Century Art, Cézanne's Other, The Portraits of Orteans, Winner of the Deadless Book Prize in 2010, and Striking Resemblance, most recently. This was called, well, it was called Striking Resemblance, The Changing Art of Portraiture. And it was an exhibition catalog accompanying a show at the Zimmerly Art Museum. Her current book projects include something on the medical portrait in photography and film, which sounds fascinating, and a study of the late portraits of John Singer Sargent. So we're looking forward to those. So please join me in welcoming Susan Szilowskas. Thank you. Thank you, Martha, for the very generous introduction. It's great to see you here to all these years, back and forth. Let me just take a sip of water first, and I apologize in advance if my really crummy cold gets in the way. Microphone OK? Everyone can hear? So this is a little bit of a story also about my relationship to the Barnes, which is, of course, beloved. On a bitter winter morning, decades ago, Professor John McCubrie, my graduate advisor at Penn, brought me to the double brownstone in Rittenhouse Square, home of the great collector, Henry Mackelheny, to which we had been invited. Mr. Mackelheny greeted us warmly, elegant in his smoking jacket and monogrammed velvet slippers. He was hosting a charity event that night and ushered us into the adjoining ballroom with flowers, place cards, and menus, awaiting the guests who would be dancing later on its spring-loaded marble floor. I didn't know that such a thing existed, but there it was. And he was an extraordinarily generous man, too, as the city of Philadelphia knows well. After showing us the Matisse in his dining room, Mr. Mackelheny led us into his parlor, where I caught sight of the painting that I'd come to see, to Gah's interior, a painting that obsessed me for many years, still does, now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, of course, which appeared to be hanging over a working fireplace. That was never very, I never verified that. I'm just saying. And it has since been cleaned. Ahead, on the opposite side of the room, was David's double portrait of Pope Pius VII and Cardinal Caprara, who together presided over an exceptionally well-fitted-out bar. If I'd had a phone in those days, there would be a picture, but this was the 80s. Looking around a room packed with the paintings and furniture that now graced the galleries of the PMA, I caught a glimpse of a quieter work tucked into a far corner. It was this painting by Paul Cézanne. I assumed it must have been the much-maligned or tense, although I had never seen even a photograph of this affecting picture. Years later, as an assistant professor at Penn, I hope some of you in the audience knew John McClubry. I'm sorry, he's no longer with us. Years later, as an assistant professor at Penn, I trailed along with John McClubry to the preparatory meeting for the great 1996 retrospective of Cézanne's works that Joseph Richel and François Cachin were organizing for Philadelphia and Paris. There were even buses emblazoned with Cézanne paintings back and forth through the city. Preparations were taking place in what looked to be a kind of war room. The walls plastered with drawings, miniature reproductions and architectural plans. Although my interest in the paintings of Ortons had never ebbed, it had never occurred to me to write about them. The prospect was far too daunting. But out of the blue, Joseph Richel, here is Joe, decided that I should give a public lecture on the portraits of Madame Cézanne. I protested that I was completely unprepared for such a task, but Joe insisted, anyone who knows Joe knows that when Joe insists, must do what he says. I owe the book I wrote over a decade later to John McCubrie, to Joseph Richel, to Henry McElhenney, into the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and to the Barnes Foundation, which made it possible for me to study repeatedly in a great length the five portraits they share of Ortons they share between them. Six, if you count the still visible ghost of Ortons that lies on its side beneath the Bay of the Stock at the PMA, and here it is. I have revisited, and you can see it, if you stand in front of the painting, just sort of tilt your head, you can see her head floating beneath the water. I have revisited these paintings many times, of course, but it is a special privilege to be able to talk about them inside the elegant walls of the Philadelphia Barnes, because of course it was the Marian Barnes I was going to all the time then. In the years since I wrote that book, I have come to see the paintings of Cezanne here more expansively, precisely because of their conversations with their works around them. The monumental card players betrays a wistfulness for a man's world of quiet camaraderie, which I doubt Cezanne had experienced often since his boyhood swims in the Provencal Rivers with his friend, Emil Zola. The artist, Lita in the Swan, proclaims the fact that Cezanne was entirely capable of producing a sensual female body when he was so inclined. The origin of the late Bathers series, the most challenging of which is, of course, here at the Barnes, is a temptation of St. Anthony, which you see on the right, for which Ortonnes is widely thought to have been the model for the central figure, and I used to brush that off. No, this seems perfectly plausible to me now, however, although I resist the continuing emphasis placed on the fact that her value to her future husband was defined from the outset by her lower class status. As Stephen Levine has reminded us, Cezanne's father did not begin his career as a banker. He was originally a hat maker. With more sustained looking, the differences among genres within Cezanne's work begin to seem more fluid, as they have to me. The card players is technically a genre painting, but it possesses the majesty of an altarpiece and encompasses a constellation of remarkable still life objects. Landscapes seep into portraits, this is one of the ones we'll be talking about, even those ostensibly set within domestic interior. Consider the shawl that Ortonnes wears in one of her two Barnes portraits. The plateau of her shoulders, the dark spill of blues, greens and violets, cleaved apart by needle-thin peaks of ochre, which suggests a skirt or dress beneath, although the area has the roughness of an undergarment. Another glimpse of deep ochre appears just below Ortonnes' crossed wrists. Here, looking nothing like a fabric, but more like a tree trunk of modeled gold and brown. In the other Barnes portrait, Adam Cezanne with her hat, the near-sculpted cluster of leaves seems likely to lift off from the crown of her hat, which renders her headgear one of the most expressive features of the painting, along with the unexpectedly pliant armchair, to which I shall return. Historically, then, there have been two major barriers to appreciating the portraits of Ortonnes as they deserve to be appreciated. Well, in my view, anyway, I'm not objective, though. First, no modern painter is less identified with domesticity than Cezanne. The art historian Linda Nocklin once pointed out that the prevailing impression of the artist as the lone wolf master of X has persisted for over a century. Indeed, his solitary practice is one of the founding myths of modernism, the antisocial painter heroically forging the inevitable path towards abstraction. A family would never, would only be a burden to a man dedicated to such a Herculean task, prejudices that are reinforced by the fact that we have no photographs of Cezanne at home, only images of him working outdoors in the presence of his motif, dressed in his shabby formal suit, which I guess he wore even when he was sitting in the leaves, or in the studio, where he is gravely but proudly planted before one of his last Bather paintings, and that's, of course, in different iteration of the Barnes-Bethers. Inconveniently, for the lone wolf myth, Cezanne had a wife and a son, and despite long periods of separation, his sketchbooks indicate that the family members spent a significant amount of time together. Ortaus's presence may have been the intermittent in her husband's life, but she supplied a constancy that I believe was essential to him, for she set into motion an intense and fruitful period of experimentation. And these are most, sorry about that, this is obviously me and not the full act flicker. The spirit of experimentation, I think, was very much enhanced by her, maybe even inspired. She embodied both intimacy and distance. She was not of Cezanne's flesh, like his son, nor whom he adored, or his father, whom he feared. She was his intimate, a fact that has been almost erased by the artist's accounts, frequently alluded to, aversion to being physically touched. In painting his wife's portrait, however, Cezanne could hold her quite literally at arm's length, fixing her at a reassuring distance, yet keeping her close enough to observe her exhaustively. In fact, Cezanne found this form of looking so rigorous that he experienced profound physical strain. I can't tear my eyes away, he confessed. On numerous occasions, the painter ruefully quoted Ortaunce's own description of the physical, quoted Ortaunce's, his description of, yes, Ortaunce's description of him, of the physical consequences. And my eyes, you know, my wife tells me, they jump out of my head, they get all bloodshot. Cezanne characterized himself as the écorché, the skinless one, a man so acutely attuned to his sensations that he was convinced that the world left near physical impressions on his body. It should not be surprising then that intensive visual immersion in his motif was experienced as a near physical experience, contact. Ortaunce sat for hours facing her husband's bloodshot eyes at least 24 times, probably more, probably more like 28 or 29, but we don't have them all. A shifting force against, he could measure his own mutating self. The second major impediment to embracing the portraits of Ortaunce has been, which is perhaps very obvious, their failure to confirm to the conventional expectations of what amused to the artist of genius should look like. There is a much remarked upon absence of what passes for feminine charm. Picasso's portraits of his wife Jacqueline, for example, offer a more familiar type. In spite of the Cubist geometry and rearrangement of her body parts, Jacqueline's erotic appeal remains intact. And we can safely assume that she is deferential, nurturing, and relatively passive with Picasso always in control. Of course, we know there is a succession of photographs of him with every woman he was involved with after, let's say 1920. Ortaunce, on the other hand, has been much maligned for her regrettable lack of conventional beauty, her sour disposition and her failure to smile, which is like the worst, a refusal to ingratiate that many writers have cited as her most damning offense. The woman worthy of having her portrait painted more than once or twice was expected to be either an authority of some kind, a queen, a mythical or allegorical figure, or a seer, or failing that to be beautiful. Sarah Sidden's, as envisioned here by both Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough, fits the bill through her stature as an actress famed for her transformational performances of classical roles, symbols, queens, et cetera, as well as her striking personal attractiveness. Also conforming to expectations of the desirable muse is Peter Paul Rubin's portrait of his second much younger wife, Elaine Formont. Life-size, Elaine is all but nude here except for the fur-lined coat that she clasps around her torso. And thighs as if to hide them with a calculated lack of success. Now, at first glance, it may seem that Rubin's tribute to his wife could not be more different from Cezanne's portraits of his spouse. But we know for a fact that the artist was deeply preoccupied with Rubin's portraits of his wife, many of which were in the Louvre or available through reproduction, which reigned from her presentation as a new bile young maid to an indulgent, perhaps slightly weary mother who lavishes attention on her son while she appears to ignore her daughter, Clara, who is not painted tremendously attractively either. Later, Elaine is an elegant woman of fashion whose son, Franz, seems to play the role of attendant to his sumptuously dressed mother. As scores of drawings attest, Cezanne spent hours before Rubin's monumental Marie de Medici cycle at the Louvre, which some of you have probably seen, repeatedly making graphite drawings of the series' most sensual characters, and this is true over and over, the niads and the allegorical figure of war, the rather androgynous Balona. Oh, I mean, I cannot, there are scores and scores of sketches after these figures. Initially, nothing appears more opposed to Cezanne's measured, bounded brushstrokes than Rubin's barvura streams of color. Indeed, Rubin's silken paint exemplifies the kind of eroticized touch that for centuries had encouraged the presumably male viewer to indulge in the fantasy of possessing the desirable woman on view before him with Boucher's Madame de Pompadour an exemplary addition to that canon. Although Cezanne was clearly not interested in sustaining that particular tradition, it's important to note that color was everything to him, and he had a particular veneration for Rubin's mastery that these are both from Lotta and his daughters. And you can see from the detail, especially on the right, the kind of silkiness of Rubin's paint. It is important to note to Cezanne that color was everything to him, loved Rubin's. Cezanne believed that colors were numinal entities that he himself put it, virtually living. He insisted that if he looked intensely enough at the colors he loved in the paintings of his favorite artists, Rubin's de Lacroix Veranese, they would penetrate into his very being, almost like veils coming through his skin. Color was Cezanne's principal vehicle for expressing emotion, although that may not seem evident from the disconnected patches of color that are scattered across the customary oval of Orton's face. This is a painting that was in Berlin and has recently been sold for auction, and I don't know where it is. How do we assess the strokes of color and shapes that only occasionally concur with what we expect an eye, a mouth, or a cheek to look like? Cezanne was painting a time when there was a perception that the deepest, most important emotions were not necessarily visible upon someone's face. In fact, quite the opposite. True emotions were buried somewhere beneath the surface where only the most discerning could even guess at their presence, let alone their exact meaning. For Cezanne, color delivered emotion to the surface by suggesting its changeability, if not the exact feeling associated with it. In other words, the presence of an individual subjectivity could be acknowledged and represented without giving away the details of its constitution, because who are we to know what its constitution is? The barn's portrait you see here represents a particularly rich example of how exactly Cezanne achieved this, and this is just the detail for the first painting we're going to talk about. Although we cannot know with any certainty what Ortolence was feeling, let alone what her husband was feeling when he painted her, his portraits of her insist on the presence of emotion and all its liveliness, conviction, and changeability. To accommodate the unpredictability of those glimpses, Cezanne incorporated flux, even instability, into the visual structures of his portrait. While Rubens' ochres and russets slide seamlessly into his greens and violets, creating a lustrous service that one can easily imagine touching, Cezanne juxtaposes rather than blends his colors, and this is a great example of it, with an abruptness that is not unlike the staccato rhythm of the eye and the act of perception, with a physicality that underscores the primacy of the artist's touch of the brush upon the canvas, and that's very important, a kind of mediating skin between the self and the other. And think about how we actually look at someone's face. Our eyes tend to move in fits and starts. We scan parts of the image or the face, seek out other passages, and then return again to what we think we've already seen, which appears completely different from what we thought we remembered. The process of looking is irregular, unpredictable, and incremental. We could view Cezanne's color patches as a random distribution of warm and cool tones, but the evidence of the painting itself suggests that the artist thought long and hard about where to locate the tiniest flecks of color. In fact, he expressed annoyance with critics who did not understand this procedure. He complained, they could never even suspect how in blending a nuanced green with a red, you can make a mouth sad or a cheek smile. Here, Ortolce's face seems to pulse with color. Her eyes are large and black. Her dark irises swell beyond their tapered lipses. In her left eye on our right, black substitutes for the white we expect to see around the iris. Each eye seems directed at a different point to the side of her husband's form. In fact, each half of her face seems to be arrested in a completely different state of mind, as if Cezanne is painting both Ortolce's resignation to sitting still and the inevitable distractibility that is a consequence of her doing so. Anyone who's posed, of course, now we never pose, we take selfies and increments of seconds, but to pose for a portrait is very, it's hard not to fidget, even for a photographic portrait. In addition to the asymmetry of the eyes themselves, one brow arches conspicuously with interest, skepticism, curiosity, weariness, there is no way to tell. Ortolce's left brow on our right seems more placid, adding to the sense that she is simultaneously in a world of her own, even as she sits just inches away from the painter. Unlike her limpid but evasive eyes, the nose is vigorously painted, as if Cezanne uncharacteristically wanted the illusion, I'll go to an even bigger close up, wanted the illusion of projection into space. It's a bit graceless, that nose. Did he need to paint that crooked blue line upon his wife's nose, as if she had broken it at some point in time. It's far more likely that the artist was motivated, not by the desire to diminish his wife's attractiveness. Rather, he was enthralled by how the curving shadow on the right echoed nicely with the clamp around the inner eye and the outside curve of her brow. He also took pains to apply ink-like strokes, and I hope you can see these. I think this is my, that is my, my here, here, and here. Hold on, I'm so sorry. I should always leave my finger. With the, and I think he did these strokes, not with pen, I say ink, but with the tip of his brush, which is something he did quite often. Thin stabs of red, blue, and ochre, as if he had become immersed in the visually interlinked, but not quite adjacent, planes of the eye socket, lid, and brow. Ortonsis painted with only one ear, a not uncommon omission for Cezanne, one that confers a certain mobility on her face. If she returned away slightly, only one ear would be visible. But it's also possible that the single, delicately shaped ear is placed to echo the ochres, roses, and blues that compose that near adjacent, arching brow, whose collar structure is arranged with a slightly different emphasis. Other than the blue-black of Ortonsis irises, which are not strictly natural in tone, there's little concession to what we might call local color. In a Degas pastel, for example, facial features might be composed of unexpected, even unnatural combinations of colors, but there is still a recognizable, if still somewhat ambiguous facial expression there to be extracted. Cezanne makes one possible exception. The irregular but roughly matched golden rose patches placed approximately where Ortonsis' cheeks would be. During the late 19th century, blushing was widely considered by philosophers, scientists, physicians, alienists, later psychiatrists, and even by the public to be the only physical trace of emotion that was always truthful because it was out of the control of the subject. The art historian, Thierry Dauve, has argued that this conviction about the emotional transparency of blushing is one of the keys to fully understanding the subtleties of Edward Monet's great painting, The Bard, The Folie Begère, where we have the barmaid, Suzan, as she stands behind her post in this large mirrored room. As we move closer to this professionally poised but diffident woman, her face becomes a flame with rosier color as if it is our very proximity that challenges her modesty. Ortonsis' hair is far less carefully styled in Suzan's. In most of her husband's portraits, her hair either resembles a cleaved apart helmet. You might refresh your memory with an array of 15 of the portraits because it's usually the case. Or registers as a reasonably elegant top knot. In the barn's painting, the top knot seems to have collapsed into a small mound of straw. But despite the seeming lack of style, there is at least one purely fanciful curl falling onto Ortonsis' forehead. In addition, Suzan seems to have taken a particular, an uncharacteristic pleasure in the ruffle. I hope you can see that. You'll see it more in the next slide that rims his wife's high-collar blouse for he continues it along her shoulder line and you'll be able to see that in this combination. In contrast to the lightness of those lyrical strokes, oh, let me go back for a minute. The heaviness of the chin and jaw are unexpected. A rim of dark blue, almost black shadow, encloses another thicker curve of sky blue on top of which floats a round disk of a pink ochre chin. It's like right here. And I have to say that before I was asked to give this talk, I had not studied this painting as carefully as I had others. So this gave me an opportunity to really look at it fresh, which has been great. A compressed mouth partly eclipsed by a green shadow pushes out a rosier lower lip. The curve of the chin appears to have been cut out of sheet metal, encouraging us to imagine that we could tuck our fingers beneath Ortonsis' chin. I know that's kind of a repellent thought. And lifted up like a trap door, an aggressive act of exposure that would seem completely at odds with the artfully disheveled hair, the bright tones of the cheeks and the ribbon-like streams of paint that compose that ruffle around her neck. It's as if the face shifts from feminine to masculine, transparent to opaque, and a rough change that is all the more unsettling because it occurs over a matter of inches, and of course in the very same face. Excuse me a second. Ortonsis' shawl is another area composed of discontinuities that don't quite cohere. The garment appears not simply to cover her body, but rather to supplant it, an act that violates the time tested sensuous appeal of the drapery, or fur, think of Ruben's wife, worn or shrugged off by the more conventional artist's muse. The shawl falls in uneven drifts beyond the edge of the painting, shifting into a veritable landscape of blues, browns, and greens, where falls become the turning away edges of a mountain. This effect, together with the green, yellow, and blue strokes of paint fill the upper left quadrant of the painting, suspend this place somewhere between an interior and an exterior, and that's not uncommon, but it seems especially true in this painting. Ortonsis described as seated here, although there is no sign of the slope of her lap. Her hands are not simply in repose, they are hovering in space, as if they are being presented to us. For Cézanne, who expressed terror that anyone should get their gratin, their hooks into him, it makes sense that the hand might be a fraught object, and indeed he painted Ortonsis' hands more often than anyone else's, including his own, which are almost always tucked away out of sight. Here we see like a thumb, and that's, there's like maybe one other self-portrait in which you see something in the hand. And of course, this is not uncommon for an artist who is simultaneously studying himself in a mirror, sometimes from a photograph, probably your mirror, and trying to paint what he sees. The hands in Ortonsis' portrait, here seem to have originated from different bodies. The fingers of her right hand are either dissolved at their tips or sharp as knives. Any threat implied by those chisel tips is undermined by the hand's overall form, which somehow resembles that of a tentacled sea creature. I may have hallucinated that, but let's just think about it. Cézanne treats Ortonsis' left hand completely differently. There is a substantial fletchiness here, built up with pale ochre and rose strokes. The artist has taken the tip of his paintbrush and delicately sliced through the curve of her thumb and the little finger, leaning the other digits with joints as distinct as those we might see on a wooden marionette. In the barn's Madame Cézanne with a green hat, the subject's hands appear to be clasped together, and we will see the whole painting, although her right hand seems to have more fingers than it should. Although their overall shape suggests that Cézanne wanted the hands to appear cradle together, the left thumb presses deliberately against the fleshy underside of the other hand, tilting the balance. But there are many features within the second portrait of Ortons, very likely made several years later than the hatless painting we have been considering, that reward close study. These are not only of a striking visual interest. I would suggest that collectively, they attest to Cézanne's hopes for his place in the history of art. And I suspect that they also reveal something unexpected about his attitude towards his immediate domestic surroundings. And that's part of a new project I wanna do some day on Cézanne's domestic objects. Now it's just a talk, or a piece of a talk. Once again, Ruben's portraits may shed light on what Cézanne had in mind for this rather elaborate envisioning of Ortons. My guess is that the woman with the green hat is at least in part an affectionate parody, parody of and rejoinder too, another of Ruben's best known female portraits, the straw hat, in which the lavishly appointed headgear elaborates and extends the subject's radiant skin and lush costume. And before I try to persuade you of the usefulness of what seemed to be yet another unlikely comparison, we need to address the issue of parody in the work of Cézanne. Is this even a strategy the artist was likely to employ? Nina Athanasalu-Kallmeyer believes that it was. And she has argued persuasively that Cézanne was alluding to Aang's Napoleon on the imperial throne when he portrayed his Provencal friend, Achille Emperer, sitting in the same chair in which the painter had earlier positioned his father somewhat less theatrically, the painting that's in Washington, D.C. Callmeyer refers to Emperer as a tragic figure of failed ambition, a dwarf artist for whom Cézanne had sympathy and even admiration, but towards whom the painter was at times quite cruel. Certainly Cézanne had nothing but contempt for Aang, whom he regarded as the most unrepentant practitioner of what was now an empty academic style. Aang was also a southerner, so he particularly irked Cézanne, of course also a southerner, Southern France, whose politics dictated that he felt as much contempt for the current ruler, Napoleon's nephew Louis Napoleon, as he did for Aang. As Callmeyer points out, it had become common practice to compare the great original emperor, Napoleon, to the small Napoleon. The portrait of Emperer is a moving work, not devoid of affection and especially in the head of what she made many sketches. But Cézanne is using an especially vulnerable figure in a painting that parodies both an artist and an inadequate emperor. Did Cézanne intend to parody his mistress and later his wife, as some critics have always assumed? I do not believe so. Cézanne's failure to paint or tongs in what art history regards as a flattering manner has much more to do with his own experiments and colored sensations, and her willingness to submit to his exhaustive inspection. I suspect that or tongs was sturdy enough to act as a kind of partner, whether consciously or not in her husband's subtle parodies, parodies of the icons of femininity that had been painted in the past some by his most beloved forebears. As Mary Sheriff has pointed out, during the 18th century, Ruben Strahat came to represent the summa of feminine beauty. Although the artist's subject was actually his sister-in-law, Cézanne Ludin, most viewers well into the 20th century assumed that she was the painter's wife. People still assume she was the painter's wife. So unequivocal was his testament to her charms. Ludin's glance is coyly self-effacing, and her hands both support and call attention to the voluptuous breasts that spill out of her soft black bodice, their prominence further enhanced by the decorative lace insert. Cézanne's beauty was emulated by ladies of the French court, many of whom chose to impersonate her at masquerade parties. And while the painting of her was in England, the painting was widely known by reproduction and copied. The artist, Elisabeth Wigelbrunn, appropriated both the subject of the Strahat and its maker into her own self-portrait in the Louvre. Adjusting Ruben's model and her own appearance to display herself as both sensually compelling and unmistakably active, not aggressive, but active. Wigelbrunn recast the coy, deferential gaze of Cézanne Ludin as a direct address to the viewer. Suddenly, but significantly, she converted the earlier subject's slightly averted posture into a more forthright engagement, the woman artist as the agent of her own destiny. Whereas the Flemish painter had invited his presumably male viewer to imagine touching, even possessing the female subject before him, Wigelbrunn appears at least to be mildly challenging the viewer rather than simply being seductive. Although she is no less attractive than Susanne Ludin, and of course many of her friends seem to look exactly like her during the portraits she painted of them during this time. Although she is no less attractive, a status appropriate for the woman who was, after all, Marie-Antoinette's favorite portraitist. Like Wigelbrunn, Cézanne may have borrowed Rubin's model for the purpose of transforming it. While Rubin's deliberately encouraged the fantasy of visual possession of an accommodating woman, Orton's somber expression, an energetically twisted body suggests a subject who is far more formidable and not necessarily receptive to the gazes of her admirers should she gather some around her. She may be seated, although it's the chair rather than her invisible lap that suggests her position, but she is clearly not a passive recipient of either admiration or scorn. Orton's has had as a conspicuous and curious inclusion displayed with no hint of the joie de vivre that such a confection would seem to demand. Her face is shadowed with a cool tint that those predisposed to dislike her might associate with the wicked witch of the West. I know it is irresistible, right, but that is how people describe her. In fact, they occasionally call her face green, which it really is not. Which is, after all, how most of Cezanne's friends and his earlier critics perceived her. I mean, the press she got was very bad. Indeed, the high-crowned hat only reinforces the association if one is predisposed to make it. The hat's brim seems distended, too broad for its circumference. Its semi-transparent fabric is relatively unusual. Perhaps an invention of Cezanne's rather than the hat-makers. A doubled layer that allows for a teasing glimpse of the subject's high forehead. Cezanne may have intended this scrim as a joking subversion of the historical transparency of the desirable woman's skin and portraiture. The longer we look at it, gaze upon his hat, the more overscale it seems. We are looking down through the hat's brim, even as we are looking directly at the silhouette of its crown and at Ortega's face and upper body. And you can see like her forehead is right there. The hat appears to float somewhere just above her head rather than to mold or frame it. Aside from the brim, the hat's only decoration is the cluster of lush green foliage that closely resembles a group of fig leaves. I didn't neglect to include my botanical specimen, but you're gonna have to trust me on this. Really looks like a fig leaf. Symbolically, the fig leaf bears a strong association with the concealment of sexual parts. Symbol, in addition to chastely covering many restored classical sculptures, a string of leaves once concealed Masachio's Adam and Eve's genitals as they were expelled from the Garden of Eden before conservators removed them. So if you went now, they're no longer there. Of course, sometimes a hat is just a hat, but a hat adorned with a fig leaf might just be something else. In representation, the hat inevitably plays an equivocal role. It brackets and amplifies the head, but never quite fuses completely with it. The hat's curious status lies somewhere between discrete object and bodily extension. Orton's hat, which retains its objecthood, resembles Susanne-Eludin's chapeau in the straw hat less than it does, the headpiece, and it's called Heuch, I'm sorry, but the Dutch pronunciation. I cannot speak Dutch very well. Worn by Susanne's sister, Elen, who displays the latest, I know it's just irresistible, isn't it, infashionable millinery for the young matron of 1630s and true. Elen's headpiece, or Heuch, and Orton's hat both appear insistently sexual. The hat, worn by Ruben's wife, has an assertive phallic shape that towers over rather than simply adorns her head. Orton's accessory offers associations with the fig leaf, which not only covers the sexual organs in representation, but by extension serves as an emblem of sexual shame. Evidence of the prohibition against touching breached for all eternity, sexual, that was the expulsion of the garden, right? Cezanne's leafy embellishment not only celebrates touch through its material sensuality, it also serves as a traditional symbol of its denial. Thus, in a single move, this is very Cezannean, the artist combines provocation and prohibition, expressing a contrariness that likely suited him, if not necessarily his wife. For Cezanne, the sensation of touch is not activated by the illusory suppleness of painted flesh, rather it is provoked by the materiality of the paint itself, applied incrementally to the surface of the canvas. In the green hat, he paints a seemingly transparent material through which we see the crown beneath. We feel, we are looking at two distinct layers simultaneously and remain a bit unsure about which layer, if any, is being offered to the touch. At first glance, the apparent disconnect between this leafy cluster and the rather grave woman who wears it might seem a reproach to Ortonnes, to the very idea of fashionability. Those who do not admire Cezanne's wife, and of course, these are many, have emphasized her interest in fashion, the story of her being at the dressmaker and therefore unavailable while her husband was dying, compared, continues to be a favorite, and that still appears in most biographies of Cezanne. But this determination to nullify, or at least diminish, Ortonnes's presence in her husband's life and work, simply does not square with the careful, even elaborate drawings and occasionally watercolors that Cezanne made of Ortonnes with and without her fashionable attire. Here she is in a rather elaborate bonnet. It's such a beautiful drawing in Rotterdam, a very large drawing like that. Her husband took a note of her sewing, reading, sleeping, and occasionally gazing back at him in a beautiful watercolor that Joe Richel, who was one of the first people to say anything positive about Ortonnes, once pronounced a Valentine. There may be some comedy or satire to be extracted here, but I do not believe that it is that Ortonnes's expense. And the woman with the green hat, her upper body is encased in a veritable breastplate of pleated fabric. It's near our memorial presence, however, fails to deflect our gaze completely from hints of Ortonnes's sensuality because the undulations in the pleats allude to curves, or at least to associations, even if they do not indicate the actual contours of her body. The subject's sensual force is thereby both acknowledged and protected. The firm's slightly tilted alignment of Ortonnes's shoulders reinforces a conviction that she is in command of the space she occupies. Her left arm is admittedly a bit more substantial than her right, which leans upon a chair that possesses as much liveliness as Ortonnes's own mobile body. The chair's uneven and liven chestnut arms roll forward like thick locks of hair. The arm of the chair on our right appears as expressive as the curve of a hand. In one passage, Ortonnes's left arm, on our right, the slightly swollen upholstery of the chair's back and the rounded frame, if you look sort of up above her elbow, are virtually indistinguishable from the man-made and the natural, indistinguishable. Ortonnes leans sideways as if she has adjusted her body to the demands of a chair that appears to be accompanying her with a counter rhythm of its own, complimenting and reiterating her own muscular grace. While you may find my description of this chair a bit too fanciful, I wanna stress that in fact, Cézanne had a very fraught relationship with the objects that populated the domestic spaces through which he circulated, for he did not live in his studio, which one might infer from all the emphasis placed on its importance. Cézanne challenged the neutrality of ostensibly innocuous domestic objects just as he projected his sensations on the motifs outside and within his studio. Ordinary teapots, clocks, chairs in particular became defamiliarized with a force as visceral as any pine tree, mountain, or rock the painter cast his eyes upon. Certain objects were repeatedly transformed into subjects and loomed with a force that unsettles our assumption that we can control them. At times, objects seem not so much waiting to be touched as straining to touch us. I mean, this is a cushion on an armchair. The philosopher Maurice Maloponte believed that Cézanne was acutely, uncomfortably aware of the fact that the body is a thing among things caught in the fabric of the world. To borrow the words of art historian, Carolyn Van Eck, Cézanne's objects refuse to behave themselves. Most often, the expectations are that one's intimate surroundings are filled with things that soothe and anchor us, making the world outside seem less forbidding, less other. For Cézanne, however, the misbehaving objects around him, which are most numerous and prominent in his drawings, allow the artist to experiment with where he ended in the world began. The reassurance that others extracted from the familiarity of domestic life was neither possible nor desirable for Cézanne. His art was forged through his talent or curse for being surprised by everything around him, including the figure of his wife, no matter how often he encountered them. Furniture and clothing often appear to be engaged in an unresolvable contest for dominance. The curving frames of two household chairs are entwined like giant chains or wrestlers locked in a stranglehold. And jacket on a chair, amazing but large wash drawing. A cumbersome garment writhes with life. Within its fabric, mountains, and grottos, it appears entirely capable of crushing the unnervingly springy legs on which it sits. Other objects become worlds unto themselves. An elegant armchair possesses a restless asymmetry. It is seen frontally from the left, but obliquely from the right. The stranded leg, the evidence of another attempt abandoned, but then not given up. Its strong arms enclose a soft mountain of pillows that rises up against a textile sky filled with clouds. The chair is an idealized dwelling in miniature with land and atmosphere in perfect equipoise. The lightly compressed slope of the pillows and the multiple legs also suggests that the chair has become a kind of body, arrogating space and beckoning the viewer with its concave softness. When studies of Ortonnes and Paul appear in the sketchbooks, there are often unexpected, almost humorous juxtapositions of household objects and heads or limbs. We know that Cézanne handles his carnet with no regard for up or down, left or right, which means that some of these alliances are coincidental. But some seem to be exercises in the rhyming that does occur between the animate and the inanimate. What seems at first to be a collection of unrelated floating heads. This one I showed you earlier. Oh, there it is. Again, unrelated floating heads. Hold on. Coheres loosely into a reverie about the intimate life of a young family, because this is very early. Perhaps this dreamscape is the closest Cézanne came to constructing one. Later, Ortonnes appears to gaze down upon two entangled chairs, kind of like soldered together in ways they shouldn't be, as if they'd come together herself. Her head competes for preeminence with an apple that seems to be rolling up towards her as she sits, or an obstreperous milk can, sort of, about to threaten her. As she sits sewing, or in fact is poised to sew, because notice there is nothing between her hands, which is very odd. The space between her hands is empty. She's barricaded on all sides by the disorderly architecture of domestic life. The leaning tower of books, balanced precariously on a nightstand, the bed post-knob-like head seems to be keeping her company rather than an inert piece of furniture. Cézanne's watercolor, The Balcony, which is in the collection of the PMA, painted around 1900, is a fragile-appearing but deceptively elastic screen of color, a perforated wall situated where the formlessness of nature confronts the dwelling with greatest force, or perhaps in Cézanne's case, it was the reverse. The formless dwelling resisted the architecture of nature. Rather than visualizing an enclosure defined by walls, the painter imagined a kind of membrane between the inside and the outside, suggesting that the boundary between self and world was both permeable and reversible. The green and blue stokes of color, we assume they must be the crowns or leaves of trees just beyond the wrought iron balcony, refused to stay outside where they belong. They moved towards us like a weather front. Cézanne seemed to have little faith in the security of the borders between the interior and the exterior, between private life and the world outside, between self and other. Cézanne, to conclude, was to some degree an isolate. No one can entirely dismiss the idea of his lone wolf status. But at times he seems to enter into a kind of partnership with his wife. Cézanne kept coming back to her in his work. In Seated Woman of 1904, which I think is Ortons, most people do, I believe that he came back one last time. She sits at the table that provided the stage for so many of the artist's still life arrangements and was at the center of his studio, at the center of his practice. By being there, Ortons Fiquet Cézanne sat with her husband and became his art. Thank you.