On bodies: Cézanne’s Crouching Venus

Laura Robertson

Have you ever placed yourself in history? Laura Robertson steps into the picture following a visit to ‘Cézanne at the Whitworth’. The exhibition celebrates a collection of drawings and prints by Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) gifted and placed on long-term loan to the Whitworth (Manchester) by gallerist, collector, author and publisher Karsten Schubert. It runs until 1 March 2020.

I have been staring at naked bodies. Right now, my own. Under my arms, that particular, unlikely dark blue cluster of veins are rivulets under sea ice, deep-set in a creamy hypodermis of fat and connective tissue. The outer layer, the epidermis, looks flat until prodded; bullying goosebumps up into the light, fine hairs with them. I wonder if tissue paper is named after this, as it bunches and wrinkles, protesting.

I’m 36, still plump, fleshy, maybe too fleshy – my belly folds when I bend my body, trying to mimic a drawing – a sketch really – of a headless torso by Paul Cézanne, called After the Antiquity: Crouching Venus (c.1894-7). I shift position, look again. My belly is all pink creases and tire tracks from the waistband of my trousers. Her belly, Venus’ belly, is a sweeping landmass of paper and pencil, more hill than woman. My flank is covered in cirrocumulus clouds, almost iridescent when expanded, white scars that turn purple in the cold weather. I look closer, taking off my glasses, squinting. It reminds me of the white rim of supermarket ham. I’m just waiting for someone to cover me in breadcrumbs and lift me up onto the electronic meat slicer. I Google a video of an electronic meat slicer. For best results: pull carriage towards you – place meat in carriage and lock in place – select slice thickness – turn on power – push using only the handles to ensure your hand does not go near the blade – flop, flop, flop goes the meat, a pink cascade. Visualise Venus’ bottom, curves being worn down into a flush edge as the meat slices drop off into a tray. Not a living, breathing goddess of desire, if ever there was one; rather a Roman statue of Antiquity, as Paul would have it. The contrast between flesh and marble, succulent and hard. Would the blade crack against her arse or would her arse crack first?  

I digress. Thinking about pig skin, there’s no substantial hair on this video meat, or on my meat, reflected in the mirror under harsh electric light. Certainly not on Cézanne’s Crouching Venus: an effortless graphite drawing of her trunk, right-hand view, a stump instead of an arm, one plump breast and belly rolls, crouched, legs bent underneath in an unconformable pose. I do it, and it definitely is uncomfortable. I imagine the models who might have sat like this for the artist; either for Cézanne, or the artist of the original statue that this was drawn from. I have a head, so let’s pretend it’s not there. Like her, however, I have two thighs. But hers are rendered in soft, feather-like marks, and she only has one calf and half a foot. Just the outlines, in graphite – no scars, stretchmarks or goosebumps. Not even a crack in the heel or a blister on the sole. Simply pencil. 

To be accurate, I say hairless, but there may be hair; where the stomach meets thigh, Cézanne shaded-in a crescent moon, in this one spot saturating the paper with a repeated arc and an upward squiggle. He spent more time here than anywhere else on the paper. And yet, it’s a flurry. It seems chaste. The suggestion of hair is a different thing to seeing hair; looking at a nude drawing is different to staring at your own naked body and vagina in a full-length mirror. There’s naked and there’s naked. But here we are.  

To get the full Three Graces effect, I consider my reflection, Cézanne’s drawing, and Getty’s photograph of a Crouching Venus, all at the same time. Taken from the Getty Villa collection, and before that, made during the Roman Empire (A.D. 100–150), it is a dirty, anonymous kind of object; Venus is hunched in the same position, in grey marble, the right breast nearly eroded, its arm stump stained with a flush of black acne, ingrained in crystal pores. She has kept her head.  

It’s very, very old, and I wonder how something so soft can survive. Marble as a material is exceptionally interesting. It starts as limestone or dolomite, then suffers a metamorphosis, the pressure of the earth causing recrystallisation which, in turn, creates an interlocking mosaic of carbonate crystals. It is soft enough to sculpt, like the pure carbon of a pencil, yet unlike brittle graphite it is relatively resistant to shattering. The veins in white marble are caused by mineral impurities that experience intense heat, and, thinking of skin – of blackheads and infected pores and hormones and oil – its marks are beautiful, prized. Dust produced by cutting marble can cause lung disease. Did this anonymous Roman artist see the irony in creating a new body while endangering his own?  

Only Getty Venus knows.

Another thing: she has a babe clinging to her back. Grotesque in its deterioration; headless and legless, little arms holding on, impossibly alive and dead at the same time, and Venus seems to look back at it, baffled, like, how did that get there?  

Cézanne didn’t draw Getty Venus in the 19th century. He drew the headless version in the Louvre; specifically, the collection’s Venus de Vienne. Cézanne had her in his studio, too, in a copy of Armand Silvestre’s book of photographic illustrations, Le Nu au Louvre (1891), of paintings and sculptures of nudes from the Parisian gallery. The pages probably fell open at her, naturally, from repeated viewing; a woman away from the crowds and screeches of children, who would never move or age, or make a noise. She would never become corrupted or stretched or stained, immortalised as she was in glossy black and white. She popped up again and again in Cézanne’s work; you can see her in the Bathers series, second from left, in oil, in Les Grandes Baigne (1898); and in the boy’s pose to the right, in lovely colour lithograph Les Baigneurs (Grande Planche) (1896-97).

Have you ever placed yourself in history? Stare at your naked body and imagine it on a pedestal. Do the pose; crouch and turn slightly to the right if you can. Picture a babe clinging to your back, and an artist staring at your every fatty portion with a fastidious scrutiny. When do bodies turn to meat turn to object? Naked bodies are to be looked at, and according to Rodin, worshipped; skin fizzing with shame or pleasure, or not fizzing at all; meat sacks, or ‘skin bags’ as author Olivia Laing likes to call them. Bodies of lust and death pumped with blood or dry and stiff. It is in the contrast that I find an interest in my own imperfections, by lingering over bodies that aren’t really there. Bodies of carbon and carbonate crystals; the cold of marble, warmth of paper, and the heat of flesh.

Laura Robertson is a writer, critic and editor based in Liverpool.