Monday, January 5, 2015

Madame Cézanne: The Case of the Miserable Muse

If Mona Lisa is the smile, Madame Cézanne is the scowl. Hortense Fiquet, Paul Cézanne’s model turned mistress turned mother of his child turned metaphorical millstone around his neck, endures as a standard art history punch line—the muse whose misery won immortality through the many masterpiece portraits done of her. Or at least that’s how the joke usually goes. The Metropolitan Museum of Art’s current exhibition Madame Cézanne, which gathers together 24 of the 29 known portraits Cézanne painted of Hortense over a period of more than 20 years, tries to rewrite that joke as it hopes to solve the riddle of Madame Cézanne, aka, The Case of the Miserable Muse. Please come over to Picture This at Big Think to read more of "Madame Cézanne: The Case of the Miserable Muse."

4 comments:

Hels said...

Cezanne might have been a fascinating painter and a direct link into post-Impressionism, but he was not a decent human being.

Cezanne lied to his father for years (to protect his inheritance, I suppose), he was cruel to his close childhood friend Zola, he was horrible to his wife and neglectful of his only child, and was vulgar to his role model Pissarro during the Dreyfus Trials.

If I was Hortense, I would have had other people tell my life story. Not Cezanne.

Unknown said...

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Unknown said...

*TRULY,TRULY BEYOND BOUNDLESSNESS BOUNDLESSNESSES OF BEYOND UNIMAGINABLY UNIMAGINABLE INFINITELY INFINITE INFINITIES OF ETERNALLY ETERNAL ETERNITIES OF PERPETUALLY PERPETUAL PERPETUITIES OF TRANSCENDENTAL TRANSCENDENT TRANSCENDING BOUNDLESSNESS LEVELS OF ETERNALLY PERPETUALLY INFINITELY INDESCRIBABLY INDESCRIBABLE HARDWORK,PERSEVERANCE,SACRIFICE,COURAGE,INTEGRITY,DIGNITY,FORTITUDE,HONOUR,BRAVERY,VALOR.* - *JAEDEN ABNER D'SA.*

Unknown said...

*TRULY,TRULY BEYOND BOUNDLESSNESS BOUNDLESSNESSES OF BEYOND UNIMAGINABLY UNIMAGINABLE INFINITELY INFINITE INFINITIES OF ETERNALLY ETERNAL ETERNITIES OF PERPETUALLY PERPETUAL PERPETUITIES OF TRANSCENDENTAL TRANSCENDENT TRANSCENDING BOUNDLESSNESS LEVELS OF ETERNALLY PERPETUALLY INFINITELY INDESCRIBABLY INDESCRIBABLE HARDWORK,PERSEVERANCE,SACRIFICE,COURAGE,INTEGRITY,DIGNITY,FORTITUDE,HONOUR,BRAVERY,VALOR.* - *JAEDEN ABNER D'SA.*