FUCKED UP/ GINA BIRCH/ GEORGE CRUMB'S 'BLACK ANGELS (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

FUCKED UP
Patterns, Brighton
Fri 17th March

Recent releases from Canadian punk band Fucked Up have been, respectively, a long and involved metafictional concept album about love and revolution, a reflection on growing older in the punk scene, and an even longer, even more involved metafictional concept album about I’m still not sure what. They don’t get overly confused with the Germs.

They’d always possessed a remarkable ability to combine seemingly contradictory elements. I mean, before you get onto punk and concept albums you have to start with hardcore punk and tunes. But the last-but-one release, ’Dose Your Dreams’, which I initially feared might be their ’Sandinista’ turned out to be more like their version of ’The Gift’. It branched out in so many new directions the centre was no longer holding, it was part something expanding and part falling apart.

Much was unreproducible live, with the result its tour had only a passing resemblance to it. They’d demonstrated a remarkable longevity, essentially running with the same line-up for more than two decades. But at that point some speculated this was the finale, others just took it as read.

Yet as ’One Day’, the title of their new release, suggests they’ve gone back to their more immediate roots, played a back-to-basics revolution on themselves. What do you do when you reach the end? Seems you start again. Except as the title also suggests, this comes with a twist…

While there could hardly be a more central hardcore credo than everyone plays together in a room, this was recorded this in relay form, passed between band members with each having a one-day deadline. (The alert reader may be able to guess from this whenabouts it was recorded.) The lyric “what could you do in just one day?” isn’t really all that speculative.

They boldly front-load the set with new songs, running most of them through together. Which keeps up the energy, but does deprive us a little of Damon Abraham’s engaging stage persona. Is it as good as their classic gigs of yore? In truth, no. The highlights for me were the main set ending withe the double-barrelled blast of ’Glass Boys’ and ’Joy Stops Time’. And after me saying last time that this isn’t really the right venue for the band, look where they’re back.

But it is good, just not as good. And it feels like we got to live in the parallel dimension we’d have otherwise wanted to, the one where that Canadian punk band we all liked so much didn’t split up but found a way to carry on.

There was a further twist, not obvious till I’d got the CD and taken it home. This is the first album since they're first not to be dedicated to a theme. Yet the album so about spontaneity and new starts is lyrically dominated by the past, how it’s neither recapturable nor escapable. 'Lords of Kensington’, for example, is about yuppification undermining Toronto’s DIY scene. (“So now I’m caught up in the past/ Just trying to change the facts/ We over-wrote the map/ Now I’m trying to get back.”) Alas as a Brighton resident I have no way of relating </sarcasm>.

There seems a dearth of decent footage of this tour, so here’s the video for the title track. Keeping to the tradition where the band appear only obliquely...

GINA BIRCH
The Hope + Ruin, Brighton
Tues 21st March

Gina Birch is from the Raincoats, of course one of the greatest post-punk bands if not one of the greatest bands. But as said after I last saw them, they were largely based on a double act. Portugese born, Ana da Silva always seemed beguiling and inscrutably cool. While Birch, English both by birth and manner, was much more an everywoman. I always associate da Sliva with second person songs, and Birch with first person. And she’s touring, perhaps remarkably, her first ever solo album. Would Birch alone be just half the picture?

When I say alone, the others in the trio join in on guitar and keyboards, with frequent swaps. (Bar one number where they all take up bass.) There’s no live drummer but programmed beats which rarely imitate a real drum sound, And the others also add catchy pop harmonies, often over skanking rhythms. They jerk their heads in an equally synchronised manner, like a post-punk Shangri Las. While Birch’s vocals are more stated or ranted. At time she seems to be channelling Marianne Faithful, existential torch songs.

As was common in post-punk, the Raincoats tended to sneak up on their subjects obliquely. While songs here can be more polemical, waxing lyrical on feminism or paying tribute to Pussy Riot. But they can also be laugh-out-loud hilarious. A whole number is given over to refusing to wear stilettos, going into some detail over more preferable forms of footwear. Which makes the whole set quirkily engaging and infectiously fun, never po-faced.

There’s precisely one Raincoats track, their only cover, ’Lola’. And as with the Raincoats lines like “girls will be boys and boys will be girls/ it’s a mixed-up, muddled-up, shook-up world” are less befuddled wail then cry of glee.

Punk nostalgists are always quick to tell you then was the time, and things can’t happen now. Missing the bit that if you make something happen… well then its happened, hasn’t it? First Slits guitarist Viv Albertine decided she was neither going to rest on past glories nor swerve up golden oldies, but break into something new. Now Birch has done the same thing. Or, as she put it itself in her album title, ’I Play My Bass Loud’. Remind them of this.

And here’s that very song from that very… okay, from Rough Trade in London if you must know. Still closer than normal…

GEORGE CRUMB’S ‘BLACK ANGELS’
Manchester Collective
Kings Place, London
Fri 24th March

The programme kicked off with ‘Carrot Revolution’ by Gabriella Smith. (The curious title coming from a Cezanne misquote.) It was one of those pieces which almost need a sign up on stage saying “it’s supposed to sound this way, honest,” as it scrapes and slides it’s way through varying tones and tempos. But rather than a difficult listen it’s lively and exuberant, the players jigging and swaying on-stage like this is one of those gig things.

My probably entirely wrong reaction was to think, as some contemporary composers become influenced by rock music, so had Smith been by klezmer. She’d develop rhythms which seemed just about to take over and turn things in a more regular beat-driven direction, for it all to take some unexpected corner.

Edmund Finnis’ second String Quartet was described as going from earth to air. And as the instruments fluttered and shimmered, it was exceptionally beautiful to listen to. But it didn’t prove terribly memorable, as if suffering from the ‘pretty face’ syndrome. It seemed the least contemporary-sounding work from the first half, though in fact it was written for the Collective.

Moor Mother’s ’DREAM CULTURE’ (in caps, it seems) was different again. After twice dodging the challenging bullet, we were now struck dead centre. Largely cello based with electronic tones breaking in, it was dark and brooding, one of those pieces which envelops you. It had everything the Finnis piece didn’t, and vice versa.

Before the headline work, they placed a section from Schubert which Crumb quotes from. (Though when it came it was inevitably too distorted for me to notice.) This passed pleasantly enough, but I confess such stuff just makes me think of stately homes and Gainsborough paintings. However, they did smartly use the opportunity to segue straight into the Crumb….

People who survived the Sixties will often tell you they were volatile, violent and chaotic, and notions of frolicking barefoot in the park only possible with a heap of hindsight. Political activists, particularly if black, often quite literally didn’t expect to survive. (We may have escaped the most extreme of that in the UK. But Crumb was American.)

And, written in 1970 and subheaded ’Thirteen Images from the Dark Land’, ‘Black Angels’ seismographs that Sixties. Let’s not deny it’s challenging. sometimes feels like the musical equivalent of a wild weather event, complete with eerie calms.

Those unlucky-for-some thirteen ‘images’ are crammed into barely twenty minutes of music. Which leads to a huge variety of sound compressed together. It can feel like there’s more musical ideas in those twenty minutes than most composers manage in a lifetime. But at the same time the mood range is confined - to turbulent, mournful and sinister. There’s no breath-back moments, it’s like a day with no break in the storm clouds, or a horror film which is just the scary stuff. (And that analogy’s not much of a reach, some of it was used in ’The Exorcist’.)

Though at times it feels less a reaction to and more an invocation of all that. To misquote Ken Kesey, less a seismograph than a lightning rod, calling down the storm. The staccato vocal utterances (labelled ‘Ancient Voices’ in the score), often just recite numbers in various languages, following Crumb’s interest in numerology. But they sound witchy conjurations, almost reminiscent of the vocals in some of Goblin’s soundtrack work.

There’s a running debate about what the references to ‘electric insects’ in the section titles comes from. Some have suggested the helicopters then strafing Vietnam. But as many of the effects require electronic amplification to work, it seems more likely it’s simply the instruments themselves. Crumb introduces some aids, such as glass rods and thimbles. But one interesting feature is for all that it is still a work for string quartet. Composers from this time were often moving into electronics and tape effects, particularly so when trying to map their times. Crumb sticking with strings has its own effects, like a dread warning being imparted by a once familiar voice.

Last time I saw this performed I heard a note of optimism in it. This time, to put it bluntly, I didn’t. Which is perhaps due to our own times growing darker. And probably makes it all the more important a work to hear.

The Manchester Collective seem a young and enthusiastic bunch, introducing the work without info-dumping a slew of obtuse music theory on you. And in the interval they turned Crumb’s score to face us, proudly pointing out it looked the scrawlings of a madman.

(This was being filmed... you know, properly filmed, so may yet show up somewhere.)

BURD ELLEN/ CURRENT 93 (GIG-GOING ADVENTURES)

BURD ELLEN
The Brunswick, Hove
Fri 10th March

I came across Burd Ellen the same way I did Fern Maddie, from the Guardian’s ten best folk album list of last year. But the release than won that accolade, ’A Tarot Of the Green Wood’, ploughs quite a different furrow. It’s all traditional numbers, but not as we know them…

They announce they’ll be doing "one of those long, continuous sets like you read about in that ’Wire' magazine”. But it’s separate tracks run together, like a mixtape without gaps. Which is, I suspect, to defamiliarise the familiar folk gig, with all the to-audience explaining that this next song is from South Shropshire, not North Shropshire as was once thought.

What’s more, individual tracks can run so this just plays up that continuous sense they have already. To sound like that ’Wire’ magazine a moment, duration is made into a compositional tool, as much as it is in Minimalist music. It’s a set which takes time to steep but them becomes flavoursome.

The duo play behind a table laden with folk instruments and knob-twiddling gizmos. Even the glass of water gets put to a musical purpose. But if that has you ready to say ‘folktronicia’, that’s a term which suggests creative collisions. Whereas Burd Ellen don’t seem to make any such distinctions in the first place. For most of the gig, you wouldn’t know who was playing what without looking… in fact, it wasn’t always easy while looking. ‘Drone folk’ probably fits them better, taking the natural drone qualities of folk instruments and amplifying them.

In fact, rather than cleverly adding stuff, they tend to work at their best while most stripped down. If that table was laden, the less they pick up from it the better they work. The encore (which they seemed genuinely surprised to get) was down to voice, vocal loops and taps on the violin. Yep taps, not even bowed or plucked. Though I confess the one acapella number perhaps pushed a point too far, and was the one point my attention wandered.

If we have to have a sound-bite description, imagine a Lankum who are less dour and more enticingly eerie. The album, they can be keen to say, was released on Halloween. ’The Lovers’, with it’s references to a “green wood”, could describe a little girl lost in that deep dark wood, or be a siren call drawing you in.

And it warrants stuff I’ve been saying for some while now. We can’t truly reconnect with the past, but neither can we just forget it. So it will continue to haunt us, and so we should talk about how it haunts us. This is music which works like a lightning rod for phantoms.

Not sure there’s any footage of this tour, but this is both Burd and Ellen (note to self, check this is their real names before posting), performing ’The Hermit’ from Gateshead. A low-lit basement made a better setting for their sounds than a brightly lit glass-fronted gallery, but go with it…

Then, the very next day…

CURRENT 93
Union Chapel, London
Sat 11th March

If Burd Ellen are a recent discovery, Current 93 are a long-time fave at Lucid Frenzy Towers, producing one of my all-time favourite albums. If Burd Ellen are drone folk, Current 93 go in for apocalypse folk. They’ve since confessed they only coined the term as a joke, but like so many of these things the tag stuck.

A near-universal assumption has dominated recent years, that downloading has killed the integrity of the album. Current 93, however, continue to be zeitgeist-proof, and David Tibet (frontman and sole constant member) was probably busy learning more ancient Akkadian when that was announced. (Not a gag! The new album title came from some Akkadian he was perusing.)

You can pick out and play individual tracks from their releases, should you choose. But the albums have a thematic unity which turns them into part of a greater whole. And the past two times I’ve seen them they’ve played their last album through in track order, usually (as here) with the track titles projected on a screen.

Except this time, there’s a twist. Up to now each album has stood alone, a unique project with its own dedicated line-up. This time it’s very much a sequel to its predecessor, ’The Light is Leaving Us All'. (Which I saw live back in 2018.) The title, 'If A City Is Set Upon A Hill', suggests a shifting uptown of imagery from the bucolic English village imagery of last time. And themes, images and musical styles recur.

Notably, the post-album section of the gig, the part devoted to the more standard best-of, is dominated by a series of tracks from ’Light’. There was precisely one number from neither album the whole night, ’Sleep Has His House’. I guess, if you see more gold in that seam, you keep mining. And, as I suspected after last time, it all works better back in the atmosphere of the Union Chapel than the regular rock venue they decamped to last time.

Lyrically, Tibet combines the epic and eschatological with the more everyday. (“Read it in the tealeaves, read it in the stars.”) And the music does something similar, somehow combining grandeur and intimacy. Which might stem in part from the characteristically idiosyncratic line-up. Piano probably dominated, but combined with guitar, violin, wind instruments (including bagpipes) and two guys on laptops. One of which occasionally doubled on drums and, solely for ’Sleep Has His House', organ. (But this time no hurdy-gurdy. Perhaps the hurdy-gurdy players have joined in with the strike wave.)

’If A City Is Set Upon A Hill’ refers of course to urban planning coming before a fall. Which leads us to Tibet’s near-fixation with death and dissolution. It would be easy to caricature him as some blood-and-thunder street preacher screaming at us we’re all going to die, who has inexplicably drafted in a backing band. Their Marmitey reputation might well come from here, some look at them and that’s what they see. But, while they are certainly a most intense experience, to me that isn’t really right.

Granted, I’d be harder pressed to tell you what he is doing, but then I don’t think he’s making music with some specific purpose in mind. Not a fan of Damian Hurst, but when he titled a work ’The Physical Impossibility of Death In the Mind of Someone Living’, he was raising an interesting point. (The title was certainly the best part of the artwork.) And Tibet is in part straining against the certainty of that line, devoting decades of music-making to pushing back at a solid-seeming wall.

Further, death was not always seem as an outside interruption to life, but something woven into the fabric of things. And Tibet’s also trying to take us back to those folk culture days where he was a figure you might meet while out walking. A somewhat single-minded character, perhaps, but not necessarily a malevolent one. Ultimately, the intention isn’t at all nihilistic, though it may be somewhat fatalist. And the sombre beauty of their music conveys that.

They sound not at all like the Residents, the last band I saw in this venue. But there’s perhaps a similarity of attitude, of sticking to your thing whether there be head or tail winds. It’s the mark of a band where you leave a gig feeling you’ll see nothing like that until their next thing, and just what I felt here.

Ye Gods! Actual gig footage! The title track (sorta) and 'There Is No Zodiac’…

“NOBODY HEARD HIS DYING WORDS” (ANOTHER SPOTIFY PLAYLIST)

Can there ever be enough Spotify playlists? I say thee nay! This time we kick off in style with post-industrialists SPK sounding like an unknowable artefact unearthed from some ancient civilisation, and Eno & Byrne like a radio tuned to several foreign frequencies at once. Things then take a backwoods turn with the traditionalist country of Gillian Welch and Emmylou Harris. Other sights encountered en route are the playful creativity of Robert Wyatt, the Ex recounting a chance encounter in a Cold War era bar (with some acrimony) and Melt-Banana… well, doing that thing which Melt-Banana do. The illo is Dali's 'Knight Of Death.'

Link here

SPK: In the Dying Moments
Brian Eno & David Byrne: Mea Culpa
Massive Attack & Young Fathers: Voodoo In My Blood
Gillian Welch: The Way It Will Be
Emmylou Harris: Poncho & Lefty
Oakley Hall: Hiway
Robert Wyatt: Team Spirit
The Fall: Kurious Oranj
Mission Of Burma: Max Ernst
The Ex: Grimm Stories
Melt-Banana: Shield For Your Eyes, A Beast In The Well Of Your Hand

“The poets tell how Pancho fell,
“And Lefty's living in cheap hotels,
“The desert's quiet, Cleveland's cold
“And so the story ends we're told”

‘CEZANNE’

Tate Modern, London

”I paint as I see, as I feel. They also feel and see like me, but they don’t dare. I dare.”
-Cezanne

The Dissident Impressionist

When a young man, Cezanne was told by his banker father to abandon his foolish art aspirations and start studying for a respectable career in law. At the same time his best buddy, the radical writer Emile Zola, suggested he join him in Paris. Now, we know how this sort of thing goes. We are already suspecting that it is not eleven rooms of neatly ordered legal papers which lie ahead of us. And indeed, in 1861, at the auspicious age of twenty-one, he did indeed leave his home in Aix-en-Provence for Paris and Zola.

But ultimately, he chose not to choose. Never what you would call a team player, after less than a year he’d left Paris too, and split pretty much the rest of his life between the two places. This cemented him as intellectually as well as literally peripatetic, self-isolating, beholden to no other. He was a paradoxical combination of cantankerous and curmudgeonly, wilfully argumentative while at the same time a recluse who shunned, if not the ways of men, the world of art as much as he could. He fell in with the Impressionists early, exhibiting at their very first group show in 1874. But from then he only appeared in one further. (The third, from a total eight.)

’Rooftops In Paris’ (c.1882, above) neatly demonstrates this by giving up nearly half of the frame to a single angled roof. It’s less of an element in the picture than a barrier placed in front of it, suggesting that even when the artist was in Paris he was never really in Paris.

Early Cezanne, it’s easy to forget, looks almost absolutely unlike his mature style, with paint often slathered on with a palette knife. The show describes this era as “dark, brooding, violent.” (And suggests he was at this point most influenced by Zola’s writing.) He called it Couillarde, which critics and shows take delight in explaining means “ballsy”. Much of it, it’s true, is juvenalia. In fact it’s often literally juvenile, hyper-heightened dramatics - as if he’d gone through a teenage Goth phase. The show seems embarrassed by these, giving only a couple of examples. But in truth, there’s good stuff in among them.

’Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup’ (1865/70, above) is an example of that rare genre, the ballsy still life. There’s a collision between form and content which makes it involving. The objects are painted in such an intense way, then set against a near-black background, that it feels like rather than simply there they’re asserting their presence.

Landscape In Doubt

From 1870, Cezanne was living at least part of the year in L’Estaque, on the south coast. And quite frequently painting nature scenes en plein air, just like a regular Impressionist. But take 'The Bay of Marseille Seen from L’Estaque’ (c.1895, above) and mentally hang it next to a Monet landscape. In fact why don’t we pick the Monet seascape, the one that gave the school its name, 'Impression, Sunrise'? They don’t look like brothers in arms, they look worlds apart.

First, Monet’s vivid use of colour, so integral to what we now think of as Impressionism, is replaced by something much more muted. (On-line, Cezanne’s paintings are often artificially brightened, seen as an error that needs correcting.) More crucially, as we’ve already seen, Monet’s subject wasn’t objects so much as moments, his method to capture fleeting changes of light and weather. To Cezanne, such things were just an encumbrance. Not only does he give us no clues as to time of day, we can rarely guess what season it is. (It’s often suggested he preferred Provence because of its lesser seasonal variation.)

His work is more delineating, more dispassionate, even clinical. There’s no particular focus of interest, the whole view faithfully depicted in paint, with no more favour than a map-maker would show. Not a record of a fleeting moment, more of a summary. Unlike his view of Paris shown above, there’s no formal barrier between us and the landscape. But it still feel distanced from us, an object for examination. We know that Monet painted rapidly, and Cezanne deliberatively. He used small, diagonal ’constructive’ brush strokes, much more regular and even than Monet’s dabs. Look at some of those spanning dates given behind his paintings’ titles. He could hang on to works for years, and died with many still officially finished.

Also, Cezanne’s father may have issued plentiful orders but also left his son privately wealthy. So he had no financial incentive to be as productive as Monet, something he took full advantage of. Richard Verdi states “only thirteen works of Cezanne’s maturity were accorded the distinction” of his signing them. (Disclaimer: Cezanne was closest to Pissarro, whose work is less distinct from his. But Monet is the go-to Impressionist for most.)

Two terms almost impossible to avoid using over Impressionist art are verite and joie de vivre. They’d paint flaneurs perambulating around Paris, with the sense that they could at any time swap places with the figures in the frame. While with Cezanne there are no figures in the frame to be bothered by swapping with. Not even those diminutive dash figures so often used to convey scale.

And this sense of distance should be seen not as any kind of deficiency but what Cezanne does. ’Turn In the Road’ (c. 1881, above) feels less effective for being more of a close-in view, almost like its a section of a larger canvas which has been blown up. (And note even here there’s not a soul on that road.)

Though I’ve started off with a view which is very Cezanne, they’re not all quite as distanced. ’The Sea At L’Estaque Behind Trees’ (1878/9) has a Parisian-like barrier before us. But those trees transform what would otherwise be quite a similar work to ’Bay of Marseilles’. By inserting themselves between us and the view, they give more of a sense of composition and involvement. They create a contract between their twisting and and the rigid geometry of those roofs and (especially) that jutting chimney.

While ’Chestnut Trees At Jas du Bouffan’ (1885/6, above) also uses trees to create compositional order. It’s not just their even spacing. In the lower half, the verticals of the trunks are echoed in the other straight lines of the farmhouse and wall, if at times at right angles to them. But the contoured mountain appears just as the trees break into branches, with the result the trees at once divide and unify the composition. While, from this perspective, the rugged mountain is the same heigh as the two buildings, creating another compare and contrast.

The mountain is Mont Sainte-Victoire. Cezanne painted twenty-nine portraits of his significant other, Marie-Hortense Fiquet. (One is coming up.) A high number, until you consider he painted that mountain no less than eighty times! He read books on it’s geology, the way a portraitist might get to know the backstory of his subject, and in 1902 even moved his studio nearer to it. What was it’s fascination for him?

The later work ’Mont Sainte-Victoire’ (1902/6, above) may answer that. It’s all something of a blur, particularly the foreground. But it’s not like Cezanne came across a blurry image, from a moving train or on a hazy day. This is more like a rough sketch, where lines are tentatively filled in then shifted, then transposed to the painting exactly as they are. Or more like several rough sketches, all combined into one. It’s not the result of a process, it’s the record of a working out.

What could be more of an unchanging fact than a mighty mountain, dominating the horizon? But how well do we truly see it? Is it even possible to capture it on canvas? Isn’t the more honest method to record our continuing failed attempts? In this way the mountain became his white whale.

The show describes his approach to painting “as a process and investigation, where uncertainty plays an integral role.” Robert Hughes is more poetic: “Cezanne takes you backstage...The Renaissance admired an artist's certainty about what he saw. But with Cezanne...the statement ’This is what I see,’ becomes replaced by a question: ’Is this what I see?’ You share his hesitations about the position of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painter's subject.” Cezanne’s method is not about dazzling you with sights, but whispering doubts in your ear.

An Apple For Art History

You can read everywhere about how Cezanne took to still lifes in order to upset the traditional hierarchy of the arts. And there’s little doubt he exulted in that. A famous quote, stuck up on the wall in this show, is “with an apple I will astonish Paris!” But the crucial point is why they were held in so low regard. Which was because they gave little opportunity for either narrative or symbolism, widely regarded as art’s positive and enduring qualities.

With ’The Basket of Apples’ (c. 1893) the basket isn’t just upturned, it’s angle is emphasised by being set against the upright bottle. Added to the white cloth pushed so far in the foreground, and the effect is as if those apples are tumbling out at us. In fact, this ‘still life’ seems a lot more dynamic than may of his landscapes!

Though there’s other reasons. Richard Verdi is probably right to say still lifes partly appealed because in the studio he could control all conditions. (Though even then he could take so long the fruit would start to rot.)

I overheard one punter asking what the apples represented. Which is the wrong question squared. Cezanne is not interested in the apples as apples. To him, the fruit, the bowl, the bottle, all are mere props with which to create form. He’d return not just to these themes but the very same objects, repeatedly, until familiarity stops us noticing them for their own sake, reduces them to elements in a composition. (Picasso and Braque played a similar trick with their short-list of objects used in Cubism.)

And so two contradictory-sounding things are true at once. There’s no great difference between the way he looks at his stiff lifes and his landscapes, they’re both objects of contemplation from which the artist is distanced. Mountains and baskets, bottles and chimneys, apples and cottages, they take on an equivalence. And also, the essence of Cezanne lies in the still lifes. (See up top how they make it into the poster image.)

Even without the title, it’d be clear what the main figure was in ’Still Life With Plaster Cupid’ (c. 1894, above). But here the mini-statue isn’t treated as one more decorative element, as if the pitcher had the week off, the composition is centred around it as if a portrait. Which seems something of a statement, if not an active taunt, rubbing the viewer’s nose in the fact these are not figurative works.

But what we really need to talk about is that table. Nothing has been slipped in your drink, it actually looks so sloped and bent. Then has one solitary apple placed at the end of it, as if atop a slide which it is somehow not rolling down. Yet the foreground is so accurately painted we take a while to notice, we instinctively trust the artist to portray pictorial space ‘correctly’. There’s the second figure at the end, which we come to realise isn’t another statue but a painting within the painting. Then there’s the second frame on the left, forcing us to ask what there is painting-within-painting and what is still life object?

Cezanne does this sort of thing all the time. And he does it to mess with you. To play games with you, to undermine your confidences, to slyly undermine the rules of art you normally take as read. (And the degree to which he took personal delight in being confounding shouldn’t be underestimated.)

One Foot In Arcadia

It’s curious that Cezanne was the Impressionist who most pioneered Post-Impressionism, yet also the one most indebted to Classicism. But to him the timelessness of Classicism, so at odds with the Impressionist drive to capture the moment, appealed. Along with its sense of overarching order. (Which, with typical perversity, he at once pursued and questioned.) This is most evident in his series of Bather paintings, which include the largest work in the show - ’Bathers (Les Grandes Baigneuses)’ (1894/1905, below).

With everything so idealised, with such disinterest in evoking a real place, the doubting Cezanne essentially disappears. For once, we know just what we’re looking at. And the ditching of ‘difficulty’ seems deliberate, for these were the works which Cezanne wanted to be remembered by. Verdi says they were “clearly intended as his artistic testament.”

The trouble is, it’s not good. Not at all.

You can see the thinking. Bathers lack the clothing or other trappings which would tie them to one time period. So they make the ideal subject to combine Classical and Modern themes. But the figures don’t convince as figures. The seated one on the left looks like a sack of flour, strangely sporting a head. Yet neither do they reduce neatly to elements in a composition, the human equivalent of those bottles and apples. Cezanne has one foot in Provence, the other in Arcadia. And it leads to an awkward stance.

Yet these works were popular, including among other artists. Matisse bought one when he could little afford it, and made his credo “if Cezanne is right, I am right.” Now Picasso’s inheritance from Cezanne seems clear enough. There’s twin tracks of it; first Cubism took a similar analytically questioning approach to subjects, and later he took up a similar Neo-Classicism. Matisse’s debt seems harder to discern. Even more than Monet, he was known for his rich and vibrant colours. Colours he delighted to find in the Mediterranean, colours Cezanne stood in front of and disregarded.

But squint at it and it all comes into focus. Cezanne has aligned his figures with the landscape. Look for example at that leftmost angle. Which has it’e echo in Matisse’s ‘Dance’ (1910), where the figures are shown in such abandon they have almost lost individuation, while their surroundings reduced to two simple colour blocks. ’Bathers’ occupies an interchange between more regular depictions and Matisse. Perhaps at the time a necessary one. Yet by the time we get to Matisse it’s just a stepping stone across a river, which we’ve no need to step back on after we’ve crossed. As ever, the peril of being ahead of your time is that time won’t keep you there forever.

The better works here are the ones Cezanne has less grandiose plans for, which he probably regarded as ancillary, such as ’Boy Resting’ (c. 1890, above). The casual pose suggests this figure could get up and walk away, as soon as he chose to.

Friends, Relations, Gardeners

So does this show that Cezanne had a problem with the figure, a stumbling block he was better of circumventing? Nope. In fact, nothing about him could ever be so simple. In fact he could excel at portraits.

’Madame Cezanne In a Yellow Chair’ (18880/90, above) is of Marie-Hortense, as promised earlier. It’s hardly an ostentatious or attention-grabbing work, but a supremely effective one. Her face is more iconic than ‘realist’, yet perhaps for that reason conveys a great sense of self. Accounts usually focus on her inscrutability, those narrow features enhanced by being set in the highly rounded head, the eyes looking off. But that inscrutability can only come through her sense of presence. Much as with his other subjects, he returned to the same few sitters - family, friends or workers on his father’s estate.

’Scipio’ (1866/8, above) is portrait enough to be named after its subject. But it seems pitched to occupy the impasse between portrait and narrative painting, with it’s figure largely turned away from us. With the emphasis on his physicality yet stillness, the mood is one of weary rest. And of course at this time black people would have been very much associated with physicality. The white… well, whatever that white thing is that he’s leaning on seems there to emphasise his blackness.

So is this, as has been suggested, an anti-slavery work? Perhaps. But we should forever be cautious about reading into art what we want to see. Despite his association with the radicals Zola and Pissarro he was mostly silent on political questions, allowing us to project our wants onto him.

Sombre Still Life

By the late Nineteenth century, Cezanne was becoming increasingly plagued by ill health. At which point many of the themes of his early years return, but with a twist. The young man’s thrilling sense of dalliance with death is replaced by an old man’s sense of grim inevitability. What was brooding and violent becomes sombre.

Compare 'Still Life With Apples and Peaches’ (c. 1905, above) to the earlier ’Sugar Bowl, Pears and Blue Cup’. The colour scheme, the paint style, all is less in your face. And yet while it’s closer in composition to his mature still lifes, it seems nearer in mood to that early work. It’s as if all the elements are the same as he’s been using, save for Cezanne himself, whose older eyes now see in more sombre colours. The contained white of the cloth seems there just to set those colours off.

An Artist For Artists

As we’ve seen both Matisse and Picasso owned works by Cezanne. A list to which we should add Monet… yes the Monet we’ve sent so much time contrasting him from. And he continued to appeal to later generations of artists, including Gauguin and Van Gogh, and - some time later - Henry Moore. As the show says, he’s an artist’s artist. And you can see why. Some artists close off a direction simply by occupying it, straddling it until others are forced to detour around. Cezanne, who always posed questions and foregrounded problems, was the opposite of that.

Yet, whenever anyone is called an artist’s artist or musician’s musician I’m tempted to ask - all very well, but what about the rest of us?

Cezanne himself said he was influenced by the Realists. Who, as mentioned before now, are normally written out of popular art history, their existence challenging the popular myth the Impressionists arose from nowhere. (The indicia here has a particularly absurd sentence claiming art had been unchanged the past four centuries before Impressionism.)

True, the art isn’t the same, but the tone is. There’s a dourness to it, a sense of thrusting the truth in the publics’ face and demanding they look. Their truth was (more or less) political, while Cezanne’s is that we cannot claim to know the truth, but the effect is the same. Aesthetic appeal is seen as a distraction, painting exists to prove a point. A sign you can tap, only done in oil.

And this line continues. You can see the roots of Cubism in Cezanne, clear as day. It’s already budding in those neat, angled little brush strokes of his. (And Braque, Picasso’s co-conspirator in Cubism, praised Cezanne just as much.) Which, of all the well-known Modernist movements, was the most formalist, most concerned with questions around painting, the conventions used to convey objects, and so on.

And Modernism was concerned with such questions, inherently so. Anything that wasn’t simply wasn’t Modernism, by definition. Yet Modernism was also concerned with the modern condition, and how changed times might be reflected in changed art. Impressionism was deeply concerned with this, even if that’s part-obscured by hindsight. It’s central paradox was to create paintings which were unambiguously painted, with brush strokes entirely recognisable as brush strokes, which were still of something. Cezanne’s paintings are primarily paintings, his primary subject art and representation.

And without this second half of the equation Modernism soon becomes dry, hermetic and uninvolving. The reclusive Cezanne seems pitched on the edge of this abyss, falling in, pulling himself out, falling back in again. And it’s consequently almost impossible for those of us who aren’t artists not to have a love/hate relationship to his work. Art should interest the viewer, yes. It should be more than merely decorative. But it should also appeal.

(Just in case anyone’s wondering, why does his formalism bother me more than Giacometti’s? After all, both are about constantly re-positing the most essential questions of art. And I’m not sure I’ve much of an answer. Perhaps because Giacometti’s white whale was the human figure, not an apple or a distant mountain. So there’s always a subliminal association between his capturing the figure and getting to know the person.)

Yet Cezanne fits well into art histories, particularly those which reduce to simple flow charts. An original Impressionist who went on effectively found Post-Impressionism? An artist particularly interested in art theory? Those who see their job as telling us about art are likely to be telling us about Cezanne before long. This prestigious Tate show is thick with punters. But had his name slipped from art history and now needed re-inserting, if this show was the first people were seeing of him, would he then prove so easy a sell? Like Cezanne himself before a subject, I remain skeptical.