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A Modern Provincial
by Robert Linsley

city life just got me down
seems I was an encumbrance
on that god-forsaken town
figured it was time to start
just wanderin' around

Rodney Graham, Ramblin' Man

Rodney Graham's singing cowboy may be a musical cliché, but since he belongs in a video installation in an art gallery he is also a picture, and he sits on his fallen tree somewhere between two others, the guitarists of Manet and Courbet. On the rope stretched between these two hangs the dialectic of provinciality, a story of the life and death of a modern artist, the story of lonesome old Cézanne.
Cézanne poses problems for a critical art history. The most influential modernist painter and the central figure in formalist art history should also be at the center of the critique of this constellation, yet Cézanne's works give little purchase for the historian looking for ideological or causal links to social history. There doesn't seem to be enough content; surprisingly there is less than in much non-figurative art. Cézanne's work evidently enables and supports readings that give primacy to painting as a process with its own necessity, and phenomenological readings certainly do nothing to change this. Psychological readings suffer from the same lack of plausability that they always have, and in Cézanne's case they have the air of expedients to turn to when all else fails. For those who can be bothered to look for such things today the structural rigour of Cézanne's pictures seem to lead only to painting.
A start has been made by Robert Simon in his study of fashion illustration and the early paintings - but these are the early paintings and so Simon's analysis doesn't really solve the problem, although his focus on popular culture is very much to the point.
I'd like to suggest that many of Cézanne's mature works - cardplayers, portraits of servants, portraits of Mme. Cézanne, and bathers - can be gathered under the rubric of "Scenes of Provincial Life." Further, these works depict the narrow, petty and stifling atmosphere that stereotypically characterizes provincial French towns as we find them in the novels of Balzac, Flaubert and Maupassant. To understand how this observation might illuminate the history of modern painting, and modern art in general, we have to recognize and look hard at the provinciality of Cézanne himself and at the role that provinciality has played in modern culture.
Like countless other artists and writers of the 19th. century, Cézanne was a provincial bourgeois who migrated to Paris to make a career. Once there he was faced with the competitive atmosphere of the cultural center and the need to distinguish himself from the crowd. Cézanne learned quickly. With naive directness he picked up the strategies of the most advanced art: to challenge the great masters of the past and their academic epigones by drawing from low and popular culture and, more provocatively, to openly display motifs of provinciality. Cézanne must have been very attracted to the persona of Courbet. The older artist had transformed the Parisian art world - after the historical example of Caravaggio - by establishing realism as a third alternative to the classic and romantic schools. Rather than adopting an already established role, and an already established mode of behaviour, Courbet, turning a liability into a strength, used his provinciality to produce a new position in the capital; a new image of the artist and a new social type had entered the artworld.
Cézanne saw that the way to the forefront was twofold: firstly to aggressively spoil and ruin the art of painting - to paint "badly" after the example of Manet; and secondly to play the hick - after the example of Courbet.
But these two strategies were somewhat incompatible. Manet's pictorial solecisms were too sophisticated to be accomodated to Courbet's heavy bluntness, and he was certainly not provincial. In fact, Manet could stand for that minority of urban dwellers who were never provincial.
Manet can provide us with a model of urban sophistication. His attitude toward tradition is complex; he admires the masters but he also interrogates them. He tests himself against their achievement, as do the academics, but he also tests them against modernity; above all the atmosphere and style of the present -fashion - is more vivid for him than the aura of the museums. His familiarity with the masters frees him from a too oppressive sense of their presence and he sees clearly that the path is downwards - that the great tradition can only be sustained through the low, the popular and the minor.
Cézanne got the point, as his pictures derived from fashion illustrations demonstrate. But he lacked the confidence, in the face of the inevitable response, to turn his correct insight into a successful strategy. He was simply constitutionally provincial; he took everything too seriously. This excessive earnestness is the mark of the provincial sensibility. He could not accomplish the ruination of painting with the requisite insousiance; he couldn't be vulgar with style, and vulgarity joined to seriousness is irredeemable.
We know about his difficulties with the salon. With the extreme sensitivity of the provincial whose clothes always feel wrong and who therefore dresses down, Cézanne's defensiveness made everything worse. Here is where he parts company with Zola - he couldn't learn to fit in. Perhaps it is a particular imaginative faculty that is needed, the capacity to imagine oneself in a new suit of clothes.
So Cézanne retired to the country, abandoned modernist negation and reinvented himself as an affirmative artist. He was determined to silence his critics by making paintings that were unassailably great, and he posited this to himself in the famous formula -to do Poussin over again after nature."
It was at the end of the century that Emile Bernard spread the notion of Cézanne as a French classic, but though he was not explicitly linked with the Baroque master until this later date, the linear and intricately patterned compositions of the early post-impressionist landscapes demonstrate that Cézanne was modeling himself on Poussin even at that period. One has to stretch a little to capture what this could have meant in the 1870s. Poussin was not a touchstone for significant art at that time, rather, he was an icon for conservatives. Burdened with a nationalist rhetoric, given a guaranteed "quality" by the classical legacy, Poussin stood for the aesthetics of stuffed shirts, of everything that schoolboys are taught to revere and learn to be bored by. This is not to deny the honesty of Cézanne's response to Poussin, or its acuity, or the greatness of the earlier artist. Though Cézanne's formula sounds reasonable enough to us today we have to remember that he was trying to use Poussin to correct a contemporary vision. We know that the smart approach would be to ruin Poussin with the modern; this is not Cézanne's way. He takes a position against the Impressionists - his closest colleagues and the only group to support his work - and declares the modern vision inadequate and in need of redemption by the classic. He takes the side of the bourgeois art-hater, who of course must also hate Cézanne himself to the extent that he will really succeed in his ambition of achieving leadership of the avant-garde.
Now we can see how it is that his depiction of provincial life lacks the humour and the distance it needs to succeed in the metropolis. Hortense is Madame Bovary, but Cézanne is no Flaubert. There is absolutely no satire in the cardplayers. One might argue that there is none in Courbet, but his audience found it there nevertheless. Cézanne had no audience until a later generation could be persuaded to see Poussin in his work. But why should we want to? What a disappointment - to go in search of the modern and find Poussin!
The most interesting question then is how did the provincial Cézanne become the most important source for radical art movements all over the western world? How could deep-dyed provinciality become modern universality? To try and answer this I will have to approach Cézanne from the opposite historical direction.
Among other insights, the modern city offers a new perspective on the question of provinciality and snobbery. The country landowner feels provincial in front of his exact counterpart, the urban domiciled country landowner whose only distinction is that he belongs to a social set that the new arrival has yet to join. In other words, snobbery is one of the masks of provinciality; or better, the defining character of provinciality per se is to internalize the snobbery of others. It's only in the modern city that a position emerges that challenges both the snob and his country cousin, a position based on the long standing popular insight that "greatness" is a piece of ruling class property. A modern, sophisticated and cosmopolitan attitude is the inheritor of the skeptical and comic view of the established powers that thrived in the medieval marketplace, and Baudelaire's "aristocracy of the spirit" is therefore a gesture of appropriation that succeeds by overturning the cultural heirarchy. We must then recognize that motifs of provinciality are strongly embedded in the culture wherever notions of greatness, of profundity, of mastery, of the canonical, in a word wherever seriousness prevails. The modern artist knows that provinciality is a state of mind, not a condition of place, and that anyone, anywhere can be as sophisticated as they have the imagination to be. Conversely, the provincial artist may well succeed because their work speaks to the long entrenched provinciality in the institutions of the metropolis; there is nothing more gauche than wanting to place one's work in the Louvre, but that won't necessarily prevent it from happening.
The sudden transformation of Cézanne from small town nobody to world historical genius is a phenomenon of modern communication and the drawing together of an entire continent into one urban culture in which there is nothing to prevent Russian or Italian or Spanish or Dutch or English provincials from taking leadership. Yet the generation of artists all over Europe who accepted and transformed his legacy, from Malevich to Boccioni to Lewis to Picasso to Mondrian, also set in motion historical developments - above all abstraction in its De Stijl and in its abstract expressionist wings - that reconciled the new energies with the old cultural powers. To put it simply, wherever themes of universality, historical necessity and profundity obtain, there lies the provincial in its old pre-modern guise as official art. A kind of Euro-modern provinciality set itself up as the new academy, and called itself the Bauhaus. However, a host of critical, mobile, contingent, hybrid, humorous, satirical, vulgar, and of course urban motifs may also be found in the work of those provincial artists I mentioned - with the possible exception of Mondrian - and it is these that are the source of whatever life still remains in modern culture. Cézanne represents a rebellion of the provincial bourgeoisie against the cultural aristocracy of the metropolis; his successors gave that rebellion a productive popular character, but ambiguously, so that it is always in danger of appropriation by the enemy.
Yet one may argue that I haven't really done justice to Cézanne. Could he have been so influential if there was not more to his work than a modern monumentality and seriousness? Of course there is more, and I would like to address this by looking at the bathers.
The various sets of male and female bathers reflect a characteristically small town as opposed to urban relationship toward nature. The small town bourgeois has the same distanced view and possesses the same fantasies of erotic idylls in the garden as the city dweller, but he or she can stroll into the country with more ease, and young people do acquire more intimacy with the countryside, maintaining of course a social distance from the people who actually live there and know it best. Cézanne did go swimming with his friends just outside Aix, and therefore these pictures do track social history, but of course what is most striking about them is not their realism but their incredible distortions. I wouldn't presume to "explain" the nightmarish botching of Cézanne's figures, particularly in the large late female bathers, but "the horror" might provide an adequate caption. The achievement of his more sophisticated and urbane followers, the expressionists, futurists, and above all cubists, was to turn (not completely) the horror into the laughter and so save Cézanne from his own provinciality and "refunction" him for the city. It's this laughter that sounds silently in the breeze through the cottonwood leaves at the end of Graham's song, while the horror remains to be read in the faces of those the artist, any artist, has left behind in his own home town.

As to his opinion of the sedentary life
my father once old me
"when folks can bear the sight
of a solitary type
I'll tell you how I came to be
a ramblin' man."
I'll tell you how I came to be
a ramblin' man.
Robert Linsley, 2000

Un Provinciano Moderno
Por: Robert Linsley

la vida urbana tan s?lo me deprimi?
parece que yo era un impedimento
en esa ciudad dejada de la mano de dios
pens? que ya era hora de empezar
a dar vueltas por ah?

Rodney Graham, Hombre a la Deriva

El cowboy cantando de Rodney Graham podr?a ser un clich? musical, pero, al
pertenecer a una instalaci?n de video en una galer?a de arte, tambi?n es una
imagen que descansa sobre su ?rbol ca?do a alguna distancia entre otros dos,
los guitarristas de Manet y de Courbet. De la cuerda estirada entre estos
dos cuelga la dial?ctica de la provincialidad, el cuento de la vida y la
muerte de un artista moderno, la historia del viejo y solitario C?zanne.
C?zanne trae problemas para una historia cr?tica del arte. El pintor moderno
de mayor influencia y la figura central en la historia del arte formalista
tambi?n debiera estar en el centro de la cr?tica de esta constelaci?n, y sin
embargo las obras de C?zanne le dan poco de qu? agarrarse al historiador
que busca conecciones ideol