Susan Sidlauskas’s fascinating, well-researched, and important new book, Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense, analyzes nearly thirty paintings Paul Cézanne made of his wife, Hortense Fiquet Cézanne, between 1883 and 1894. In this ambitious undertaking, Sidlauskas advances new and provocative perspectives on Cézanne and his art. Crucial is Sidlauskas’s presentation of a Fiquet Cézanne distinct from the historical image of the uncooperative spouse (the counter-muse), a largely misogynist view that has dominated the Cézanne literature for more than a century. Sidlauskas draws on an impressive array of sources and methodologies, ranging from nineteenth-century philosophical and scientific texts through the familiar commentaries of Cézanne’s friends, associates, and critics, to twentieth-century critical theory, art history, philosophy, material culture, and visual studies, to make her case that Fiquet Cézanne, far from being the impediment to Cézanne’s art that her nickname “la boule” (the ball) has been taken to imply, was essential to it.

Reframing Fiquet Cézanne in philosophical and psychological terms as Cézanne’s “other,” where self and other are conceived as “interacting subjectivities” (9), Sidlauskas argues that Fiquet Cézanne played a critical role in Cézanne’s reconception of the portrait genre and in his larger redefinition of the practice of painting. Specifically, Sidlauskas counters claims that Cézanne’s portraits of Hortense show the painter’s indifference to his wife by demonstrating that Cézanne’s emotional and psychological responses to Fiquet Cézanne were deep, complicated, and not at all apathetic. For Sidlauskas, it is the artist’s psychological complexities and intensely contradictory emotions, shaped by and in relation to Fiquet Cézanne, that are fundamental to these paintings and to his invention of the modern portrait, one that eschews resemblance and emotional insight for mutable identity.

Sidlauskas makes a forceful argument for the significance of the portraits by indicating how and why this body of work is both exceptional and representative in Cézanne’s oeuvre. On the one hand, these portraits constitute the single largest group of paintings Cézanne made of one individual; the variability in presentation of the model is pronounced; and the portraits’ reception history has been highly contentious, not only in the nineteenth century, but up to the present, and among many Cézanne commentators. At the same time, the innovative formal structures and the issues of affect, vision, touch, and gender which appear in concentrated form in these portraits are pervasive in Cézanne’s mature and late work generally from the 1880s on.

Cézanne’s Other begins with a vigorous challenge to traditional readings of the Fiquet Cézanne portraits as depersonalized, and to explanations of that depersonalization as due to Fiquet Cézanne’s ”negative" personality or, alternatively, in modernist accounts, to the diminished human subject as a necessary corollary to abstraction. Sidlauskas first spells out the formal basis for the usual gloss of an “inhuman” presentation: the figure is treated like an inanimate still life; the face is masklike, showing no expression; and the body is bifurcated, flat, motionless, and drained of any sense of being. She then notes that the perceived dissonance of Cézanne’s pictorial treatment was compounded by several additional factors: radical inconsistencies in the subject’s appearance from one canvas to the next; the absence of markers of gender and sexuality; and assumptions viewers made that such odd, discomforting depictions of a wife must have been forged in the personalities and relationship of the artist and subject. These issues frame the subsequent text.

Why Cézanne presents “different Fiquet Cézannes” in almost thirty portraits painted over eleven years is a central issue for Sidlauskas. The answer is grounded, she proposes, in new constructions of self that emerged in the later nineteenth century. She cites prominent, influential philosophers such as Hippolyte Taine (On Intelligence, 1870), whom Cézanne is known to have admired, and medical specialists, in particular the Scottish physician Alexander Bain (The Emotions and the Will, 1865), whose specific writings may not have been known to Cézanne, but who contributed to establishing the general intellectual context for this new construction of the self. These authorities posited self and other, object and subject, not as bounded and fixed entities, but as unstable, porous, reciprocal sensations based on “a continual oscillation between the within and the without” (8) and in the shifting dynamics among beings. Integrating these period notions with twentieth-century philosophy, psychology, and feminist theory (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray, among others), Sidlauskas reframes the issue of Fiquet Cézanne’s shifting appearance, perplexing from the point of view of a humanist conception of a unified, stable identity on the one side, and more or less irrelevant from a modernist account of formalist abstraction on the other, into a new construct where lack of fixedness provides the core and momentum of Cézanne’s portraiture.

In this new construct, we see Cézanne as a psychological being in an interactive, always changing visual-sensorial-psychological relationship with Fiquet Cézanne, the other who partly constitutes the artist’s self. Sidlauskas argues that the penetrating visual scrutiny that Cézanne as painter could give Fiquet Cézanne as model was an engagement possible with few, if any, other human beings, given Cézanne’s paradoxical fear of, and desire for, human connection. The artist’s visual activity was so urgent and intense as to be akin to the physical sensation of touching. While art historians have long recognized Cézanne’s commingling of subject and object, his strenuous looking, and his equally acute effort to realize those complex visual-tactile experiences in the physical act of painting as the heart of the painter’s enterprise, they have more commonly defined Cezanne’s project in terms of still life and landscape rather than portraiture and worked through a different theoretical lens than the one used by Sidlauskas. In Sidlauskas’s complex and lucid account, however, the Fiquet Cézanne portraits move to the center of Cézanne’s pictorial project, now conceived in terms of working out shifting psychological and sensorial relations between the mutable, interlocking units of Cézanne’s self and other, thereby complementing the already established importance of the relation between self and art, and self and world, in Cézanne’s painting.

In uniformly well-plotted chapters, Sidlauskas takes the reader through (chapter 1) the ways in which Cézanne’s favored masters informed the Fiquet Cézanne portraits and how these portraits compare to the examples of his contemporaries (e.g., Edouard Manet, Edgar Degas). In chapter 2, she explains how fluid color modulations serve as Cézanne’s main painterly vehicle for establishing the affective expressions that Sidlauskas convincingly describes, refuting interpretations of these portraits as impassive, static, lifeless. She proposes that Cézanne adapted the Rubensian tradition of rich, blended color to create “a psychology of color" (99) that conveys the complicated, fleeting, and contradictory existential states of modern being. This is the basis for her claim that Cézanne explored “metaphorical enactments of emotions glimpsed and imagined” (94) with Fiquet Cézanne as subject, something he could explore only with her intimate presence. Here Sidlauskas depends on late nineteenth-century discourses on human emotion (e.g., the writings of the French psychologist Théodule-Armand Ribot; the French aesthetician Paul Souriau; the Scottish physician Bain again) which argued for individuals’ simultaneous experience of multiple, even competing, emotions and for the visibility of multiple emotions in the human countenance.

In chapter 3, Sidlauskas stakes out her position in the substantial art-historical literature regarding the conjunction of vision and touch in Cézanne’s art. With respect to the Fiquet Cézanne series, she elegantly characterizes Cézanne’s particular reciprocity of vision and touch as manifested on the physical surface of the canvas in color patches that, on the one hand, can be seen as a myriad of chromatic modulations, varying from shimmering, translucent fluctuations to dense, opaque stubs of pigment, and, on the other, understood as recording the physical traces of Cézanne’s own presence. How this process of “seeing tactilely” works out in individual paintings is demonstrated in highly nuanced formal analyses that beautifully illustrate how seeing differently flows into and out of thinking differently. Incorporating ideas from Susan Stewarts’s aesthetics, Drew Leder’s philosophy, and recent fashion theory into her own interpretive structure, Sidlauskas visually and verbally examines every detail of skin, hair, dress, fabric, eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, and every vibration of color, weight, density, translucency, and opacity in describing the major Fiquet Cézanne portraits.

In chapter 4, Sidlauskas focuses on the second major issue that has so vexed commentators, Cézanne’s continuous and varied alteration and suppression of Fiquet Cézanne’s gender and sexuality. Referring to Irigaray, sexologist Otto Feininger, and art historians Meyer Schapiro, Mary Sheriff, and Robert Lubar, Sidlauskas associates the Fiquet Cézanne portraits with Cézanne’s bather paintings and his drawings after sculpture as further elaborations of his preoccupation with gender ambiguity and transmutation. She again provides meticulous formal descriptions, showing Cézanne’s proclivities toward feminizing masculine subjects and confounding masculine and feminine in the mixed female and male nudes of the bather compositions and the drawn nude sculptures. Both artistic directions are proposed as extensions of Cézanne’s confounding of the boundaries of self and other, and of masculine and feminine. As with identity, Sidlauskas locates these notions of ambiguous and variant sexualities in fin-de-siècle psychological, social, and sexual discourses, which proposed seeing masculine-feminine not as mutually exclusive binaries but as more elastic concepts on a sliding gender scale.

In a coda, Sidlauskas applies spectator theory to the reception of the Fiquet Cézanne portraits at the time of their exhibition at the Cézanne retrospective in 1907. The argument is advanced that the Fiquet Cézanne portraits offered female viewers a stage on which to perform an “identification in opposition” (175) that affirmed their own femininity, in contrast to the presentation of a mute, androgynous Fiquet Cézanne. From this contention, Sidlauskas circles back to extended analyses of Madame Cézanne in a Red Dress (ca. 1888–90) and Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory (ca.1891–92), both exhibited in 1907, synthesizing the book’s arguments about subjectivity and gender: formal features of the portraits—e.g., the awkward, piecemeal “visible suturing” (183) of male and female—are shown to be located in Cézanne’s ambivalent androgyny and to be partial projections of his own self-image, imposed onto and elicited by Fiquet Cézanne. Her oft-noted, perplexingly “mannish” qualities are interpreted as Cézanne’s partial melding of his self to his wife, as when he paints his eyebrow onto her face in the Red Dress, or grafts an androgynous head onto her body in the Conservatory.

It is inevitable that some, perhaps many, readers will not accept all aspects of the conflicted, intensely self-aware artist Cézanne’s Other proposes; nevertheless, the intellectual sophistication and subtlety of Sidlauskas’s analysis should be more than sufficient to compel Cézanne scholars to engage her thesis. More broadly, all readers will be able to see the Fiquet Cézanne portraits with a new sensitivity, as registering, in all their fluid coloristic patches, a complex, mobile, psychological dynamic of human subjectivity as other, self, and both. Cézanne’s Other: The Portraits of Hortense is a major contribution to the literature.