Art is a ubiquitous concept.
We don’t have to seek it out because it is simply there, waiting to be viewed, appreciated, interpreted, deconstructed and quite possibly stolen to order by unscrupulous elements of the criminal fraternity.
As the famous Italian painter Chiaroscuro once said, art cannot be truly defined or reduced to a simplicity, except perhaps for tempera, which is really just painting with eggs.
A pertinent example of the omnipresence of art was recently illustrated on The Deadly Knowledge Show, a Channel 4 quiz programme currently striving to enlighten its viewers on subjects too numerous to record within the scope of this post.
The section of the show which interests us most features someone being required to place each of a list of names, read out by the quizmaster, into one of two categories. For example, a few days ago, a contestant was given a sequence of names which he had to call as either Impressionist Painters or Ventriloquists.
Now, questions like this are of tremendous benefit to the social dynamic. If you are ever at a party, and a fellow guest commences to pontificate on the relative merits of Renoir and Monet regarding their subtle use of light and shade, you can always say something like “Well, most connoisseurs of art and ventriloquism agree that Edgar Bergen is so far ahead of both Renoir and Monet with regard to dexterous manipulation of Charlie McCarthy that Renoir especially will never catch up.”
Similarly, if you meet someone who has recently seen a variety performance by Keith Harris and Orville the Duck, ask them if they think Manet’s Le Dejeuner sur l’Herbe really merited all that brouhaha at the Paris Salon back in 1863.
But I digress.
Correctly identifying Degas and Pissarro as Impressionists, and with Ronn Lucas properly slotted into the field of Ventriloquism, the contestant was then faced with the dilemma of what to do with Paul Cezanne.
Following a few seconds of angst, Cezanne became a Ventriloquist, a response which many students of the Impressionist movement would strongly dispute. But not me. For it is clear that, in this particular case at least, there should have been three options to choose from, viz. Impressionist Painter, Ventriloquist, or Both.
Because, in one of the most elaborate scams the art world has ever perpetrated, the intelligence that Cezanne (between 1882 and 1887) worked as both Impressionist painter and Ventriloquist has been ruthlessly suppressed. Furthermore, this marriage of convenience between two of the most highbrow disciplines of the arts gave credence to an emerging theory that some of Cezanne’s finest works were, in fact, painted by the hand of his wooden doll Marat and not, as previously understood, by the artist alone.
This is not to argue that the doll worked unassisted, although having seen, and been moderately scared by, the movie Magic , this scenario is entirely possible. I prefer the theory that Cezanne stuck his right hand up Marat’s sleeve and, allowing Marat to hold the brush, applied the strokes for which they have together become rightly and justly famous.
Determining the provenance of a piece of fine art is not as easy as it looks. Fortunately, all paintings by Cezanne and Marat contain hidden clues, which can only be solved by experts like me, thus revealing much about the painting that lesser scholars would fail to discover.
(Please note that picture clues are more complex than character based codes. My neighbour cracked a simple written code yesterday, when he came round and demonstrated beyond any doubt that a descendant of Jesus Christ is alive and well and living in West Oxfordshire. I believe this to be true, if only because the guy in question owns five bread shops and two fishs shops which cater for the entire town of Chipping Norton (pop. 5,000).)
For picture code interpretation, one must analyse each painting minutely for hints to artistic authorship. Exempli gratis, between 1882 and 1887 Cezanne painted what I consider to be a suspicious number of trees. This is the strongest evidence possible that 1882-1887 is the artist’s Ventriloquist period, or Tree period, which he embarked upon after his Post-Impressionist period and followed with his Post-Ventriloquist/Tree period, during which he painted lots of sunbathers, skulls, and people playing card games in bistros.
(If you think that Cezanne went through quite a lot of periods then consider Picasso. It is often said that Picasso had more periods than Mrs. Picasso, although how people get to find out these obscure artistic details is completely beyond me.)
Most art critics who are privy to the Cezanne scandal agree that all these trees are a dead giveaway. In the same way that some artists are irresistibly moved to paint nude people, it is clear to me that Marat was partly responsible for the achievments of Cezanne’s Ventriloquist Period, probably because he wanted to get back to basics in portraying himself as he would have been if left in his natural state, instead of being substantially reconfigured and given two coats of varnish with a proprietary wood preservative.
This productive partnership came to an abrupt end when, in 1887, Marat was lying in a bath of wood stain being recoated when he was cut into small pieces by a psychopathic female Philistine hostile to new trends in the art world. (Marat’s untimely end was foretold almost a century earlier in Death of Marat by Jaques-Louis David and his doll Elizabeth.)
Following the demise of Marat, Cezanne did try to paint a few more trees but failed miserably. In the latter stages of his life he concentrated on apples, watermelons and other less perishable pieces of fruit. But he was never quite the same artist when working alone and he died painting landscapes ad nauseum.
The conclusion has to be that when partnerships are dissolved, the individuals involved often fail to reproduce the standard of work achieved in that partnership.
However, like Laurel & Hardy, Lennon & McCartney, Morecambe & Wise, Leopold & Loeb and the Queen & Prince Philip, the collaboration between Cezanne & Marat will live long in the memories of all those who appreciate what is possible when two like minds form a historic artistic liaison.