LETTERS

Sirs:

Diane Lesko’s article in the December issue, “Cézanne’s ‘Bather’ and a Found Self-Portrait,” purports to have “discovered” a number of images “hidden” within certain Cézanne compositions. While not wanting to address myself to the question of value regarding this type of analysis, I feel that one particular point should be cleared up. With reference to the painting Peasant in a Blue Shirt, Ms. Lesko states that the background consists of a “separate composition” composed of three “overlapping images.” These are, to enumerate: a “gesturing hand,” a “young woman” who is faceless, and “the partially obscured outline of a bald head, and the dark arch of an eyebrow which are found above the girl and the hand.” This triad of images is related by Ms. Lesko to Cézanne’s “favorite mountain motifs.”

Later Ms. Lesko states that “the fragment of arm and hand, the faceless female, and the group’s disparate proportions all prevent a unified reading.” She relates the gesture to Cézanne’s Apotheosis of Delacroix sketch (her note 12). I confess to being unable to decipher the so-called artist’s self-portrait, partly because my perception is clouded by the fact that the background in question is not a “sketch pad,” but rather a fragment of the screen Cézanne executed around 1860 for his father’s house (see Venturi, no. 3). In this screen the woman is holding an umbrella. The man on her right leans forward on the rock ledge upon which the woman sits, and gestures toward her face. In the painting in question the peasant’s body obscures all of the man except for his arm and hand. With this information, the “bald head” and “eyebrow” markings cited by Ms. Lesko can be resolved into the “unified reading” which she desires. The painting then stands close to several other works by Cézanne which depict pictures within pictures: for example, Venturi 681, 686, 688, and 706.

Incidentally, Ms. Lesko discusses the painting outside of a chronological framework; her analysis shifts from the peasant to the MOMA Bather, and then to the years 1885–1886. It should be noted that the Peasant in Blue Shirt is dated to about 1896 (see: John Rewald, Cézanne, Geffroy et Gasquet, 1959; p. 34), and that “pictures within pictures” seem to be a phenomenon of only a very few years focused in the first half of the 1890s.

What this “counter interpretation” points out, I believe, is the extreme care we must exercise in reading the “secondary images” of any artist, but especially of Cézanne: He remains the master of nuance and subtle inflection against whom the “faces” of Gauguin seem crude, clumsy, and overtly obvious.

Michael J. Marrinan

Institute of Fine Arts

New York University

Sirs:

Am I alone in finding a large discrepancy between the convincing psychological portrait of Cézanne in Diane Lesko’s article (Artforum, December 1976) and her attempt to find pictures within his pictures? Consider all of the assumptions required to account for these pictures within pictures: 1) that Cézanne painted them, but not consciously; 2) that they are so well hidden in his paintings that only now have they been discovered; 3) that, nevertheless, they illustrate the intimate psychological details of his life. Consider, too, the obvious alternative explanation: any surface not absolutely flat and uniform in color will suggest pictures to a spectator who stares closely, particularly if that spectator is in a suggestible mood.

There is a tradition of “finding” such pictures within pictures. Freud’s suggestion that a vulture-picture is hidden in a Leonardo painting was modest and tentative. In a marvelously crazy book, Rembrandts within Rembrandts, Janos Plesch wrote of how in Rembrandt

these subordinate figures . . . reveal a flood of ideas and imaginings. One follows on the other in ceaseless procession; the creation of one is nothing but an occasion for Rembrandt to weave new associations . . . the figures twist and turn, dance and leap, each idea followed by another in rapid succession, until finally there is a witches’ sabbath of spirits, devils and monsters . . .

And, more recently in his “The Secret Life of Paul Cézanne” (Art International, XIX/9, 1975), Sidney Geist has “found” the hidden face of a woman in Cézanne’s Large Bathers.

I believe that all such approaches are questionable, for reasons eloquently presented in chapter seven of E. H. Gombrich’s Art and Illusion. Finding such pictures within pictures is a mere act of projection on the spectator’s part, without any guarantee that what the spectator sees corresponds with what the artist intended to paint. Is not this point somewhat obscured when Ms. Lesko says that Cézanne’s hidden pictures are “the result of unconscious dispositions”? A further test here might be of interest. It is possible, when looking at these Cézanne paintings, to find further hidden pictures which, because they seem not to correspond to the artist’s unconscious dispositions, can be discarded as being purely accidental. Finding such images, I want to suggest, would make more plausible Ms. Lesko’s suggestion that some of Cézanne’s hidden pictures are of significance.

David Carrier

Pittsburgh

Because the original footnotes which accompanied the Cézanne article were too lengthy for Artforum ’s format, two-thirds of them were eliminated, along with several pages of text. The questions raised above were considered in that deleted material, including references to Gombrich, Janson’s “Image Made by Chance in Renaissance Thought“ and Reutersward’s “The Face in the Rock.”

The dating of the Peasant in a Blue Shirt, which Venturi ascribed to 1895–1900, was discussed in one of the deleted footnotes, where I suggested that the art dealer Paul Rosenberg’s date of 1887–1888, given in a letter to A. Conger Goodyear when he purchased the painting, should be considered as more appropriate. The somewhat thin application of paint and the general facture of the Peasant can be likened to Cézanne’s Self-Portrait with Palette, whose terminus ad quem has been held at 1887.

Mr. Merrinan is right about the background screen in the Peasant. However, while the viewer can choose to read this area simply as a literal translation of a “picture within a picture,” the ambiguity of the “umbrella” form, which because of its distinctive shape can also be identified as the outline of Cézanne’s bald head delineated in exactly the same manner in numerous self-portraits, suggests the possibility of Cézanne’s renewed concern, during 1887 or 1888, with the male-female relationship which is the subject matter of the screen.

Both letters question, in varying degrees, the validity of secondary images. Of course there is no “guarantee that what the spectator sees corresponds with what the artist intended to paint,” nor did I claim otherwise. However, when a secondary image confronts the viewer with startling clarity and is an accurate self-portrait as well, then the observer has an obligation to investigate the significance of that image, despite the fact that it had been unnoticed before.

Diane Lesko

Sirs:

The removal of the editors of Artforum is of great concern to the art community. The dismissal and/or provoked resignation of John Coplans and Max Kozloff is a clear case of the creative autonomy of editors being abrogated by an owner-publisher acting under the influence of political and commercial pressures.

As artists and writers on art we consider a serious art magazine a cultural forum. We feel that Artforum has attempted to play such a role, although we the undersigned do not necessarily support all the policies of the magazine. It would appear that the striving by the displaced editors to make Artforum a clearer voice for social analysis in the arts has displeased those who view art as an embellishment or commodity and would wish an art magazine to be a servicer rather than an analyzer.

Editorial autonomy in serious publishing is equivalent to academic freedom in education and creative freedom in the arts. We object to any act which infringes on this freedom.

Vito Acconci

Dore Ashton

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The critical integrity of Artforum has always depended upon its editorial independence. We trust time will show that these apprehensions, even where they are due to misunderstanding, were at least earnest expressions of concern for the magazine’s future.