Nina Athanassoglou-Kallmyer’s beautiful and richly illustrated Cézanne and Provence: The Painter in his Culture substantially revises conventional art-historical approaches to this iconic figure. Her book’s achievement is two-fold. First, it provides a way of thinking about Cézanne’s project that is not beholden to the stylistic shift that occurs in his work—between the paint-laden, expressionist, and couillard (“ballsy”) canvases of the work before the mid-1870s and the more neo-classical geometries of his later years—a shift that has largely structured accounts both of Cézanne’s oeuvre as well as of his biography. By avoiding an evolutionary narrative of his career, Kallmyer is sensitive to the ways in which Provençal themes emerge continually in his painting, and likewise sees a continuity in Cézanne’s artistic persona from youth to middle age. Style may change over time, but the difference between early and late (work, politics, persona) is not necessarily understood as an outright rejection or an about-face of earlier values. Second, it allows Kallmyer to escape the normative privileging of Paris as the center of artistic thinking in France. Applying language more familiar to post-colonial discourse, she describes her project as such: “Inverting accepted practices in Cézanne studies that launch their explorations of his oeuvre through the lens of Parisian cultural and aesthetic assumptions, I here redirected my focus to the cultural context of contemporary Provence and relegated the capital to a foil. . . . I attempt to reconstruct what would have been Cézanne’s response to modernity and tradition from the vantage point of, and while immersed in, his decentered and idiomatic Provençal abode” (9). And if Kallmyer’s approach to the question is one that inverts the categories of center and periphery, Cézanne’s Provençalisme was no less mixed up—literally a hybrid, a result of continuous interpenetration of Paris and the provinces, a residual effect of cultural revival reinterpreted within the conditions of modernity, rather than a nostalgic search for the pure, for the authentic, or for the original.

The book takes as its focus a number of aspects of Cézanne’s work, and brings to bear upon the images a vast array of contextual discourses to situate them. The archival work that went into this project is indeed impressive, and the many black-and-white illustrations of her source material make it an especially useful publication. Anticipating the discussion in chapters 5 and 6 on the image of Arcadia as a defining feature of Provence’s self-imagining and the role that the painter’s status as a provincial outsider played in the marketing of his paintings by the dealer Ambroise Vollard, chapter 1 measures Cézanne’s self-presentation, self-portraits, and depictions of his family and friends against contemporary stereotypes of the Provençal, demonstrating the ways in which the artist deployed such picturesque or belittling images to reclaim or transvalue them “in counterpoint to metropolitan representational norms” (12). This project broke down, argues Kallmyer, in the impassive face of his wife Hortense, who had barely managed to escape from her origins and recreate herself as a Parisienne, only to be dragged back to the South by her husband; her unwillingness to reclaim her place on the periphery, demonstrated largely by her fashion choices, disrupts Cézanne’s patriotic goal of recreating her as the image of the noble provincial.

Chapter 2 treats the issue of humor in Cézanne’s work as a mark of its particular Provençalisme—as a Rabelaisian subversion of authority and an introduction of the vernacular into the space of high art. This was not the Parisian “blague” but the provincial “gajalade,” a satirical humor rooted in the comic grotesque, one that marked the carnivals and festivals that took place in Cézanne’s pays and one that also marked Cézanne’s paintings of figures such as his Uncle Dominique, Achille Emperaire, and, later, his paintings of commedia dell’arte characters. And while in its early manifestations, Cézanne’s biting humor could be as easily visited upon his friends as anyone—Kallmyer interprets, for example, the artist’s double portraits of his childhood comrades Emile Zola and Baptistin Baille as Daumieresque mockeries of their abandonment of their Provençal roots in favor of an effeminate, Parisian “chic”—in its later versions, Cézanne reproduces this satirical humor as a soon-to-be-lost part of the increasingly threatened local culture. Kallmyer writes that, “Just as the revived carnival festival was drained of its original social relevance and ideological vitality [she refers here to the institutionalized, commercialized carnivals that were held in Aix starting in 1889], Cézanne’s later paintings of vernacular themes approach the comedic burlesque as a curious cultural artifact devoid of the militant engagement that had lent spunk and spice to his youthful artistic pranks” (99).

Chapter 3 deals with the very real changes—the impact of modernization—on the Provençal countryside, and the various responses to such changes by Cézanne’s intellectual circle. It argues that Cézanne’s resistance to encroaching modernization affected his choice of motifs, and that his work demonstrates a progression from an unproblematically celebratory, generic, modernist gaze (borrowed from Impressionism) to an increasingly particularizing, historicizing, and ethnographic gaze. Cézanne managed to hold modernity at bay in his paintings of L’Estaque from the mid-1860s until the 1880s, and when it was no longer possible to ignore the transformation of this fishing village into tourist resort, he recreated the sleepy inland village of Gardanne as a symbol of the South’s Roman and Early Christian past. And this recreation, being a pictorial project, determined not simply Cézanne’s chosen viewpoint, one that erased the myriad signs of the town’s shabby and industrial present, but determined its painterly strategies as well. “A relic of the past and testimony to historical stasis,” Kallmyer writes, “severe Gardanne conjured archaizing pictorial strategies, a reverse perspective, and an incongruous volumetric treatment reminiscent of the anti-illusionistic primitive aesthetic of medieval images or popular prints” (121). Such preservationist impulses, Kallmyer argues, subtended Cézanne’s depiction of particular local architectural forms within his landscape paintings and the textiles in his still lifes; these images that have seemed so resistant to the social historian’s interpretation now are demonstrated to be part of a complicated moment of cultural recovery and celebration.

The most fascinating chapter, and the one that reveals most clearly the richness and the limitations of Kallmyer’s approach, is chapter 4, concerning the place of the Mont Sainte-Victoire in Provençal cultural imagination and in Cézanne’s art. Noting a stylistic evolution in Cézanne’s work from the early depictions of this geological landmark in the 1880s to his later paintings (dating after the late 1890s), Kallmyer argues that “Cézanne’s approach to landscape painting dovetailed with discursive models proposed by other fields of intellectual inquiry of the time, especially geology and philosophy” (152). Now, this is an idea with particular currency right now. Spurred by Tim Clark’s “materialist” account of Cézanne’s bather paintings, Kathryn Tuma has recently proposed that Cézanne’s Le Rocher rouge (ca. 1895, Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris) was made in the shadow of Lucretius’s notion of atomistic matter, under the influence, that is to say, of certain materialist notions that were circulating in scientific and philosophical discourse at the end of the nineteenth century; for Tuma, what is at stake is the particularly allegorical nature of Cézanne’s atomist brushstroke, of the way in which the constructive stroke yields to a facture that will not fully reconcile itself to its material presence (T. J. Clark, “Phenomenality and Materiality in Cézanne,” in Material Events: Paul de Man and the Afterlife of Theory, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2001; and Kathryn Tuma, “Cézanne and Lucretius at the Red Rock,” Representations 78 [Spring 2002]: 56–85). Where Tuma’s essay stumbles is the lack of convincing evidence that Cézanne was interested in such ideas, apart from his notes to Gasquet that mention Lucretius (a not unsurprising reference, given Cézanne’s classical, humanist education).

Kallmyer, on the other hand, manages to demonstrate that in fact there emerged in the South an intellectual circle whose interest in Lucretius—and in fact in a wide range of thinkers, classical and contemporary, addressing the issue of material reality and the possibility of knowledge—impacted Cézanne’s thinking profoundly. The circle drew upon the ideas of Antoine-Fortuné Marion, the artist’s childhood buddy who achieved great success as a geologist and archaeologist, and whose work promoted the idea of a prehistoric Provençal culture; Jean Jaurès, an idealist philosopher and socialist; and Joachim Gasquet, the poet, nationalist, and, briefly, close confidant of Cézanne’s. Through these thinkers, Cézanne was exposed to what Kallmyer calls a “proto-phenomenological” school of thought that was developing in Paris in the 1890s, and whose tenets were then filtered through a particularly Provençal viewpoint; his paintings are, then, not simply the inspiration for or a posteriori demonstration of Merleau-Ponty’s later twentieth-century philosophical discourse, but in fact were structured by a set of ideas that predated the articulation of phenomenology by half a century. Molded, then, by a belief that neither positivist, material accounts of objective reality nor neo-Kantian, transcendentalist interpretations were sufficient to explain the issues of depth and surface, truth and illusion, external appearances and innermost essences, Cézanne embraced a geological vision of the Provençal landscape: “Immersed in Marion’s geological vision of landscape as a layered descent into earth’s deepest realities, and possibly aware of the new philosophy of perception as a form of quasi-geological penetration into the core of the visible, Cézanne’s understanding of the physical world around him shifted, as did his pictorial rendering of it, from a merely external consideration of its surface, to its visual reenactment from within” (181). Hence, Kallmyer argues, the faceted, shifting, vertiginous scenes of Mont Sainte-Victoire in the artist’s late years.

If Kallmyer proposes an ultimately deeply convincing account of the intellectual context for these late landscapes—a way of understanding the particular conditions by which Cézanne approached the question of materiality—and if she additionally proposes a means of recognizing the significance of his choice of sites and views of his subject, her interpretation is less convincing in relation to the question of how exactly these philosophical and geological ideas relate to Cézanne’s formal practice. At their most tenuous, the relations drawn between context and form are merely morphological (Mont Sainte-Victoire is made to look like the Paleolithic flints that Marion excavated in a cave on that site), and at best they are metaphorical (“The upward thrust of the composition [of Cézanne’s La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Bibémus, ca. 1897] underscored by the anagogical organization of its color harmonies . . . suggest a movement from the material, sensory, and real—below—to the realm of the spiritual, intellectual, and abstract, above” (174)). And there remains the question of brushstroke, of color, of spatial geometries, all of which are crucial to Cézanne’s later practice, and all of whose relationship to the philosophical debates around materialism and idealism are more convincingly argued by Tuma, despite the latter’s relatively myopic attention to the micro-level (the “atomized brushstroke”) of Cézanne’s painting. The question becomes especially acute in Kallmyer’s discussion in chapter 5 of Cézanne’s bather paintings: the reader is left to wonder whether the “Arcadianism” that Kallmyer sees embodied in these canvases is not, somehow, undermined by the particularities and eccentricities of facture and contour—what Cézanne’s critics called his gaucheries—that characterized these pictures. While Kallmyer proposes the baigneurs and baigneuses as an unambiguous reiteration of Provence’s image of itself as a modern day idyllic site, a closer examination of the particularities of Cézanne’s style might fruitfully lead to a more nuanced conclusion.

If there is still work left to do in the face of Kallmyer’s suggestive argument—if there is still a need to understand how these contextual issues structure Cézanne’s formal practice—so much the better. For ultimately Kallmyer has achieved something monumental, something that should not get lost in the details of Provençal life and culture that pack the pages of this book: she has refused to see Cézanne’s subjects, so resistant to interpretation, as blank or meaningless scaffolds for Cézanne’s painterly explorations, but rather, has searched for their significance, and found in them a resonant set of ideas. By following Meyer Schapiro’s call in his classic essay of 1968, “The Apples of Cézanne” (in Schapiro, Modern Art, 19th and 20th Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: George Braziller, 1978), to find the meaningfulness of things, Kallmyer presents us with a Cézanne fully engaged with the world of people and of ideas, a generous Cézanne, a Cézanne whose modernism was not solely a visual one.