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Dr Robert Snell meditates upon Paul Cézanne’s relationship to post-Bionian field theory in this short, personal book. It is packed as well with examples of apparent correspondence between Cézanne’s recorded statements and those of later creative minds including Merleau-Ponty, the art historian T.J. Clark, Wilfred Bion and other psychoanalysts of various theoretical stripe. It is a hybrid work blending a psychoanalytic theory with diverse commentary by philosophers, psychoanalysts, art historians and poets. The beauty of Snell’s homage is that the artist’s “symptoms” are of modest interest.
As a historian of modern European art I can only understand the book as a complex homage to a great artist, because Snell’s central idea that Cézanne anticipated the tenets of post-Bionian field theory does not hold up. There is no reason to assume that Cézanne was interested in the nature of human relationships or those relationships, as Snell describes, within a broad field that included objects. Although Snell wants to engage a “conversation” between Cézanne and field theorists, the artist’s “field” was narrow, solipsistic. In the later years it comprised the motif - what he found visually and viscerally captivating in nature, and how he might transpose what he saw to his canvas by means of a style that held risk - because it was discovered in the moment, and might not be discovered at all.
Cézanne’s artistic followers misunderstood his work, yet their creative paintings led to important twentieth-century movements and styles that we admire. Later commentary on the artist is fascinating, but neither those words nor his own words “echo” (xii) any psychoanalytic theory, if only because we can trust neither the reporters nor Cézanne himself, whose ideas were often changing.
Inspired by the Cézanne “Portraits” exhibition in London, Snell follows their “schematic four-part outline of Cézanne’s journey” (xix-xx). He will:
liken Cézanne’s career to that of a psychoanalyst who set out as