Cezanne's Other

In the voluminous scholarship that's been written on Paul Ceacute;zanne, little has been said about the twenty-four portraits in oil that Ceacute;zanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Ceacute;zanne, over an extended twenty-year period. InCeacute;zanne's Other: The Portraits of Hortense, Susan Sidlauskas breaks new ground, focusing on these paintings as a group and looking particularly at the differences that render many of them unrecognizable as the same person. She argues that Ceacute;zanne sidestepped the conventional goals of portraiture-he avoids representing a consistent, identifiable physiognomy or conventional feminine postures and does not portray the subject's inner life-making lack of fixedness itself his subject, which leads him ultimately to a radical reformulation of modern portraiture. Sidlauskas also upends the notion of Mme Ceacute;zanne as the irrelevant and absent spouse. Instead she reveals Hortense Fiquet Ceacute;zanne as a presence so crucial to the artist that she became the essential "other" to his ever-evolving "self." Coupling historical texts from philosophy, psychology, and physiology with more recent writings from women's and gender studies, cognitive psychology, and visual culture, Sidlauskas demonstrates that Mme Ceacute;zanne offered intimacy at arm's length for the painter who has been dubbed "the lone wolf of Aix."