Madame Cézanne

Amory, Dita with contributions by Philippe Cézanne, Ann Dumas, Charlotte Hale, Kathryn Kremnitzer, Marjorie Shelley, and Hilary Spurling (2014)

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Read an interview with Dita Amory on Now at the Met.

Publication Details

Description

Paul Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense Fiquet rank among his most powerful and iconic works. Yet posterity has not been kind to Madame Cézanne. She was called a distraction, blamed for her husband’s “lackluster” landscapes, and disdained for her impenetrable expression in his paintings—if she was acknowledged at all. The reality is much more complex, for while Fiquet and Cézanne shared a difficult relationship, she was a willing collaborator as the artist’s model, wife, mother of his only son, and unwavering partner.

Madame Cézanne examines for the first time this unconventional relationship in the context of Cézanne as a painter, draftsman, and portraitist while shedding light on the most personal dialogue of all, that of artist and muse. Biographical essays are supplemented by groundbreaking interpretations of Cézanne’s portraits and captivating discussions of the artist’s working methods. Featuring all twenty-nine of Cézanne’s oil portraits of Fiquet and most of the known drawings and watercolors, Madame Cézanne both reconsiders, with insight and compassion, the long-held misconceptions about the Cézannes’ marriage, and shows how Cézanne’s portraits of his wife provide a lens through which to understand his masterly technique at the advent of modernism.

Table of contents

Director’s Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

Newly Seeing the Familiar
Paul Cézanne, Hortense Fiquet, and the Portraits
Dita Amory

My Great-Grandmother Marie-Hortense Fiquet
Philippe Cézanne

A Template for Experimentation Cézanne’s Process and the Paintings of Hortense Fiquet
Charlotte Hale

The Portraits of Madame Cézanne Changing Perspectives
Ann Dumas

Cézanne as Draftsman Sketchbooks and Graphite Drawings
Marjorie Shelley

Cézanne and Matisse Paint Their Wives
Hilary Spurling

Re-Imaging Cézanne
Dita Amory and Kathryn Kremnitzer

Notes

Selected Bibliography

the Portraits of Hortense Fiquet, Madame Cézanne
Kathryn Kremnitzer

Index

Photograph Credits

About the authors

Dita Amory is Acting Associate Curator in Charge and Administrator of the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Philippe Cézanne is Honorary President of the Society of Paul Cézanne, Aix-en-Provence, France.

Charlotte Hale is Conservator in the Department of Paintings Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Ann Dumas is Curator at the Royal Academy of Arts, London.

Kathryn Kremnitzer is Research Assistant in the Robert Lehman Collection at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Marjorie Shelley is Sherman Fairchild Conservator in Charge of the Sherman Fairchild Center for Works on Paper and Photograph Conservation at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

Hilary Spurling is the author of The Unknown Matisse and Matisse the Master.

Press reviews

Broadway World

"tightly coordinated, consistently illuminating publication."

Hyperallergic

"very good"

London Evening Standard

"intriguing, amusing, wry"

New York Observer

"excellent"

Times Literary Supplement

"The essays draw attention to the tenderness Cezanne shows for Hortense."

Wall Street Journal

"comprehensive"

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European Art in the 19th Century

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Titles by author (46)

Dita Amory

Philippe Cézanne

Ann Dumas

Charlotte Hale

Kathryn Kremnitzer

Marjorie Shelley

Hilary Spurling

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Exhibition

Madame Cézanne

November 19, 2014–March 15, 2015

This exhibition of paintings, drawings, and watercolors by Paul Cézanne (French, 1839–1906) traces his lifelong attachment to Hortense Fiquet (French, 1850–1922), his wife, the mother of his only son, and his most painted model. Featuring twenty-four of the artist's twenty-nine known portraits of Hortense, including Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (1891) and Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (1888–90), both from the Metropolitan Museum's collection, the exhibition explores the profound impact she had on Cézanne's portrait practice.

The works on view were painted over a period of more than twenty years, but despite this long liaison, Hortense Fiquet's prevailing presence is often disregarded and frequently diminished in the narrative of Cézanne's life and work. Her expression in the painted portraits has been variously described as remote, inscrutable, dismissive, and even surly. And yet the portraits are at once alluring and confounding, recording a complex working dialogue that this unprecedented exhibition and accompanying publication explore on many levels.

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