Constructions of Cezanne and His Art in Paris, 1886-1901

This dissertation studies the construction of the authority and identity of Paul Cezanne during his absence from Paris between 1886 and 1895. In order to reassess the meanings and effects of his practice during the years of his withdrawal, it attends to issues of gender and sexuality in the art and criticism of the artist. The first chapters link the issues raised in the criticism to contemporary theories of subjectivity and sexuality. Chapter 1 traces how the artist was fictionalized and purified in such representations as Emile Zola's L'Oeuvre (1886) and Maurice Denis' Homage to Cezanne (exhibited 1901) and situates these processes within the shifting gender politics of the Paris art world. Chapter 2 shows that by acknowledging and then disavowing Cezanne's economic independence, artists and critics were able to claim the disinterestedness of Cezanne's and their own practices. Chapter 3 shows that evaluations of Cezanne's artistic identity and authority were often tied to assessments of his manhood, and that over the course of his absence there was a general increase in claims for his "potency." But it also demonstrates the breakdown of stable meaning within and between the texts. The final chapters reassess art historical accounts of Cezanne's paintings and show that these accounts have oscillated in their notions of the fluidity or fixity of desire. Chapter 4 situates Cezanne's paintings of men and boys within the structures of a homosocial art world, and argues that gaps and incoherences in these portraits were sites for the inscription of homoerotic desire. Chapter 5 examines Cezanne's painting L'Orgie and interpretations of it that rely on theories of touch and vision, to consider how desire and power are figured and function within them. These final chapters ask to what extent recent revisionist accounts of the artist rupture, and to what extent they perpetuate the dynamics and values of Modernism.