MARY MORTON:
This is one of Cézanne’s greatest masterpieces. It is a painting that participates in a tradition, largely Italian, of the three-quarter portrait. The boy here has his hips cocked, elbow akimbo, and his other arm hanging to the side rather elongated unnaturally.
But unlike those 16th century portraits, this sweet, introspective young boy is not a notable person. This is Cézanne working in a pure, painterly way. He’s concerned primarily with issues of color, of space and volume, and the extraordinarily sophisticated procedure of transcribing a visual phenomenon on two dimensions.
NARRATOR:
Like many of Cézanne’s paintings, Boy in a Red Waistcoat references art historical precedents while hinting at future developments in painting. As Mary Morton points out, it engages the viewer in a subtle perceptual game.
MARY MORTON:
The pleasure afforded in a picture like this is essentially abstract. The way that Cézanne plays colors against one another. The way that the weight of this figure feels simultaneously balanced as well as tilting and sliding downwards towards the right.
Just when you think you’re getting a sense of something, like his shoulder or the curve of his arm, then all of a sudden you realize that all you’re looking at are very meaningless and abstract scratches on the surface, or patches of color on the plane. It’s this movement back and forth between the three-dimensional and the two-dimensional paint structure that makes for such a dynamic visual experience.
