![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() The intellectual circle of Cézanne's youth, in which Zola figures prominently, strongly favored a physiological, materialist explanation of human behavior. This chapter offers the range of intellectual models mined by Cézanne to make atavism a prominent feature of early modernist art, from the contemporary definitions of animality, instinctuality, and prehistoricity to the psychophysiology underwriting Zola's naturalism. ![]() Violence, and especially murder, offered Cézanne the most explicit means to represent the juncture between the will and the body, for flesh rests at the border between the two. He returned to the theme so frequently in paint because the nineteenth-century spectacularization of murder allowed him to represent how modern culture continually undid its own illusions of progress. Murder, for Cézanne, was a highly charged scene in which the fraught binary of nature and culture exploded into modernity's most blatantly atavistic signs. But, just as important, the topic opened onto the most defining problems of Cézanne's early work: the conflict between ethics and aesthetics, nature and culture, freedom and constraint the anxious and often violent origins of human agency and creativity the traces of the primal (and precultural) in modernity the uncontrolled and uncensored elements of experiential immediacy. Murder offered Cézanne an antiaesthetic subject, one that paralleled a transgression of the law with his flagrant violation of the artistic, and even the avant-garde, standards of his moment. Violence was the vehicle for Cézanne's emergence from the shadow of Manet and the early impressionists, and this chapter will address why this was so. No other themes were so consistently embraced in Cézanne's early oeuvre as murder and sexual aggression. Cruelty and sensual pleasure are identical, like extreme heat and extreme cold. ![]()
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March 2023
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