Imaging the Artist: Cezanne and the Rhetoric of the Self-Portraits

Through a study of the artist's self-portraits, the dissertation provides a fundamental reinterpretation of the painter, Paul Cezanne. "Cezanne, Self-Portraits, And The Construction Of A Radical Persona"--the initial chapter--reinterprets and attempts to clarify the opening decade of the youthful Cezanne's tumultuous early career. Indeed, the images reveal an ambitious young man who came to Paris to assert his right to be an artist but also to leave a mark on the French art world. Through his art and conduct, Cezanne astutely fashioned an artistic persona that positioned him in opposition to both the Salon and the avant-garde community. The second chapter, "Reconstruction of the Self: Cezanne And The Recall To Order," scrutinizes the painter's self-portraits of the 1870's. Through an analysis of these images, the section provides a new explanation for Cezanne's move to Pontoise, for his brief flirtation with the Impressionist technique, and finally, for his adoption of a more personal-idiosyncratic style characterized by the "constructive stroke." Chapter three, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci: Cezanne's Narrative Self-Portraits And The Femme Fatale," takes a new and radically different view of a series of paintings in which the artist injects himself into the pictorial narrative of the canvas. In each of the narrative self-portraits, Cezanne exhibits an anxiety that translates into a negative--one might even say misogynistic--representation of women in which the primary female actor acquires the characteristics of the standard nineteenth-century femme fatale. It is Cezanne's fascinating relationship with this perversely negative icon of the feminine which is explored here for the first time. While the self-portraits discussed in the final chapter, "The Topography Of The Self: Cezanne And The Final Decades," exhibit certain characteristics of their predecessors, the emphasis of these self-images has changed. Rather than employing his self-representations as a pictorial assertion of his evolving personality, Cezanne utilizes these images primarily, though not exclusively, to look inward, as if he were taking stock of his life, providing invaluable insight into one of the great masters of European art.