Art - passion or poison?
In his novel, The Masterpiece’, (in French, ‘L’Oeuvre’), Emile Zola- still seeming, as we look at him today, to brim over with courage and passion- gives us an extended analysis of the relationship- often complicated, even manipulative- between artist and model.
It was the Reading Group for November, and the essential unpleasantness of winter was starting to descend upon the Cromwell Road and the tangled streets of South Kensington that surround it. A party that looked cultured enough was happening on the ground floor, in the Mediatheque and in the Salons, with lights and crowds and all the paraphernalia of apparent sophistication, and so the Reading Group was switched to the basement, where about twenty people huddled, to hear the moderator, Dominique, begin the debate. She told us that she was labouring at a play and a novel herself- I would add that writing is inevitably a task as blistering and painful as elevating, bit by bit, the pyramids from the Egyptian sands.
We were informed that Zola- who, the same as Dickens, seemed highly prolific, in the melodramatic 19th century manner- was very disciplined as an author. I had to go through ‘The Masterpiece’ in what (for me) was a sometimes clunky English translation, since the Mediatheque’s shelves did not have the work in the original French. The central character- the artist, Claude Lantier- is based, in part, probably wholly, on Paul Cezanne (though there is something of Manet too- Lantier stands for Impressionism, the new art movement that emerged with a sort of extreme nervousness rather than avant-garde boldness after the catastrophic Franco- Prussian war; Impressionism was the hallmark of the nascent third Republic). By some maybe unsettling coincidence, Zola and Cezanne had been friends as kids in Aix- en- Provence, in the South, far away from the bustle and excitement of Paris. After ‘The Masterpiece’, Cezanne refused to meet Zola ever again. Indeed, all the Impressionists, Cezanne in fact being a Post- Impressionist, were disappointed with Zola’s portrayal of the idealistic, but far too driven, and eventually suicidal, Lantier.
Is art really a synonym for the torture of one’s soul?
Zola, of whom a full- length portrait was done by Manet, must have felt that Art is about Destruction (indeed self- destruction) as well as Creation. Lantier is both intimidating and inspiring, at the same time. He is tragic, while having the air of a buffoon; he is tensely, so tensely, obsessed with his art to the point that he becomes worse than an embarrassment- he develops into someone with the capacity for danger. Lantier is recognized as a talent, albeit an odd one, but he has the ability in the end to hurt people, above all, his wife, Christine.
Christine is Claude’s muse and his model. The two meet by accident. With that impulse of kindness which artists can sometimes be said to possess, he allows her, a stranger, to stay overnight in his studio during a terrible downpour in Paris. Then, as she dozes, he resolves to draw her, despite her qualms once she awakes. Zola from the start depicts the urge to art as a devouring demon. Image replaces reality for Claude Lantier, emotional truth seems less important to him than the pretty lies on a canvas.
We are made by Zola to contemplate: Does the artist seek to possess, then punish, his model?
At the Reading Group, as it grappled with this charged and disturbing novel, I questioned Zola’s interpretation of the artist as a fanatic sacrificing himself, and anyone who dares to get too close to him, simply for the sake of the graphite pencil and the sable brush, of the coloured surface, scarcely a few millimeters thick, laid with such toil and difficulty upon a canvas. Artists, I contested, seem gentle and sensitive, and, while necessarily dedicated to the importance of image, are also aware that reality, that people, that relationships, must appear significant too.
Claude is in many ways a caricature of the artist, of the creative outsider- misunderstood, even loathed, by the bourgeoisie, a hero (or clown?) facing laughter and rejection. One could argue that the vicious attitude of society to the artist, dismissed all too often as a bohemian parasite, must have contributed to the warping of Claude. To feel that Claude himself is misanthropic would be not to comprehend him- it is just that, according to Zola, Claude- in essence, any artist- is vulnerable to being blinkered by his work, to his commitment to his work.
A member of the Reading Group commented that Claude is a mixture of Cezanne and Manet- the introduction by Roger Pearson to the Oxford World’s Classic translation includes Monet also. But surely Cezanne is the prime personality template for Claude Lantier. Cezanne and Zola, as we have said, had known each other since childhood, and the strangeness of Cezanne is what Zola conveys in his uncomfortable and essentially bleak novel- the emotional but dream- doomed and bizarre figure of Claude Lantier surely did outrage the prickly Cezanne.
I am looking, with my uncomfortable elderly eyes, at a copy of ‘Modern Painters’ from winter, 1995. Matthew Collings, in discussing the new artists of the 1990’s, refers to Cezanne as the progenitor of modernism. Collings dwells on the stinging idiosyncrasies of Cezanne, who comes across as eccentric, and somewhat cold, even. This eccentricity, this coldness, this strangeness, springs at us from Cezanne’s paintings. Perhaps the art will always reflect the soul of the artist. Possibly, there was something verging on the mean and disagreeable about Cezanne, and Zola gives us a reflection of this. Cezanne very much did not like the mirror in words that Zola held up to him.
The Reading Group asserted that ‘The Masterpiece’ was a ‘roman a cle’- with Claude Lantier standing for Paul Cezanne, and Sandoz, the writer, representing Zola himself. The introduction cites others from the Parisian community of artists and their associates who feature in the novel under different names. And Paris itself is a character in the novel, the undisguised city and pompous capital, loud, overcrowded, as exciting as it is threatening- with its dark streets and its brittle salons, its smarmy con- men and its veteran whores. Claude feels he must return to Paris, after residing with his new wife in the uncongenial freshness of the countryside.
The novel is not kind to art and the art world. Claude is made out to be an art fanatic- ultimately, a suicidal one- who hurts, mangles, his own family- his disastrously loyal wife, Christine, and his sick son, Jacques. Claude almost ignores, to the point of neglect, Jacques, whose pathetic life as a disabled kid ends with sorrowful whimpers- and then? A quasi- deranged Claude subsequently paints his poor son on the miserable death- bed. The novel, with the demise of little Jacques, moves from being sardonic, ironic, to being definitely macabre, as Claude resolves to send in his portrayal of the doomed Jacques into the stuck up environs of the Salon for that year.
Here Zola decides to be cynical, in displaying the framework of corruption that surrounds the ‘official’ salon. Artists, far from being dedicated to the spirit of ‘beauty and truth’ a la Keats, are mocked as manipulative rivals, as irregular oddballs (one category into which Claude Lantier could alas be fitted), and as, in the fashion of Fagerolles, unprincipled daubers producing the type of unchallenging stuff that seems to sell on the art market. Art dealers, for example, the ethically scruffy Malgras, are felt by Zola to be greedy and exploitative. The workings of the Salon, in picking pictures- the grubby way votes are gathered for this or that picture or statue- indicate just how distant from the purity which is essential to art the remorseless art establishment must be. The East room of the Paris Salon is condemned by Zola as ‘the death-chamber of art on a grand scale’ (!) Amidst the traditional themes of the naked nymph or a Biblical tableau, the little painting of Jacques, Claude’s gift to his dead son, looks so original and sincere, even though it is positioned high up, out of the way.
Is the extinguishing of tiny Jacques an indication of the sterility that might lie, Zola implies, in Art as an end in itself? A sign that the artist verges on being a vampire in relation to his model- the model here being the wife of Claude, the mother of Jacques- the gentle, and, in the end, ruined, Christine?
Perhaps it is this lesson that is hammered into us by Zola- that the world, that specifically the art world, is unsavoury and broken, and Claude, for all his obsessive characteristics, is the lone innocent Christ- like hero with a different brand of talent, an idiosyncratic ability perceived by the aged painter, Bongrand, if by few others. Claude is being persecuted because he appears to love art too much. Maybe Zola is indicating that the real reason for Claude’s decline and collapse is the isolation he suffers at the hands of the stiff and staid art market and art establishment, rather than his at times creepy adoration of brush and canvas.
Madame Line- Playfair remarked Aix was a humdrum town that appears to have been rendered interesting by Cezanne alone- in the past, the director of the Museum there, however, asserted that no painting by Cezanne would ever enter his galleries. Cezanne, as a post- Impressionist, was indeed, similarly to Lantier, an unconventional, almost unsafe, figure. About a quarter into the novel, Claude has a painting exhibited in the ‘Salon des Refuses’- an effort that combines a naked Christine with a clothed Sandoz, his lover and his friend acting respectively as models for him. Bongrand praises him for his portrayal of the nude female- but the crowd laughs and jeers at Claude’s unappreciated originality. As the introduction to the translation points out, Claude’s picture parallels Manet’s ‘Dejeuner sur l’herbe’ of 1863. This also put female nudity next to the fully dressed male. (Nothing is new, in art or anything else, and the juxtaposition of clothed men and undressed women can be found in ‘Fete Champetre’ by the 16th century Italian artist, Giorgione). Both Manet and Renoir were mocked, but they are now seen as the torch- bearers for art’s spirit. The initial instinct of society in confronting anything radical and brilliant is to destroy it.
Christine, Claude’s wife, seems as attached to him as he is to art. With the novel’s end, she tries, in vain, to convince him that her love, her passion, her kisses and the nearness of her body, matter more than his grotesquely unbalanced need for art- which, she must suspect, contributed to the death of diminutive neglected Jacques. They join in bed for a final night- then he slips away, to hang himself at dawn in his studio, ‘in front of his unfinished, unfinishable masterpiece’, his face turned to the naked woman he had been trying with such difficulty to paint, the female image that had usurped his actual wife.