In Cézanne’s Bathers: Biography and the Erotics of Paint, Aruna D’Souza offers a fresh, original perspective on the bather paintings Cézanne made from the mid-1870s to 1906 as well as what has been written about them. Her book has two main objectives: to analyze the construction of Cézanne’s biography, which has shaped much of the criticism and art-historical analysis of his bather paintings; and to demonstrate that Cézanne imbued his bather paintings with the erotic through his process/technique of painting along with the material of paint itself. The nature of D’Souza’s argument requires clear, precise illustrations, which Cézanne’s Bathers contains in abundance. Its forty-seven high-quality color illustrations, including thirteen excellent color plates, are effectively presented in a large square layout more commonly used for exhibition catalogues. With her adroit handling of the book’s arguments, D’Souza has made a major contribution to Cézanne studies.

D’Souza’s intense, lucid engagement with the biographical literature on Cézanne published during the 1890s and early 1900s is especially informative. She examines, for instance, the tendency among Cézanne’s early biographers and critics to describe his paintings of female bathers, the baigneuses, as pictures based on his imagination rather than models posed in his studio, thus explaining their failure as erotic nudes. His paintings of male bathers, the baigneurs, were generally characterized as rooted in Cézanne’s nostalgic childhood memories of swimming in the Arc river or seeing soldiers bathing there. She cogently argues that one of the constant themes of Cézanne’s biographers—a fear of women, which was rooted in an uncontrollable lust for women—was deliberately created in order to explain the strangeness of the baigneuses. Critics/biographers repeatedly emphasized that it was this fear that drove him to rely on old academies or books with poor reproductions of Old Master paintings, resulting in his “poorly” executed baigneuses. Critics’ use of biography to rationalize his baigneurs paintings as unrelated to eroticism is also masterfully treated by D’Souza.

This cluster of early writings established the widely held perception of Cézanne as a misanthropic, paranoid genius who was particularly fearful of women and female sexuality. D’Souza addresses in depth the ways in which Émile Zola’s L’Oeuvre, published in 1886, was the main source for this perception. The novel concerns the life of a fictitious painter named Claude Lantier who cannot complete his paintings, becomes entangled in a complicated love affair, fathers an invalid child who soon dies, and eventually commits suicide himself. D’Souza demonstrates that among Cézanne’s artist-contemporaries who wrote about the book soon after its publication, none spoke of any resemblance between Cézanne and Lantier. Not until the mid-1890s did Cézanne become identified as the inspiration for Zola’s Lantier as artists and writers applied descriptions of Lantier to Cézanne or directly invoked Lantier when writing about Cézanne.

D’Souza skillfully breaks down for the reader why Cézanne’s early biographers, who were also some of his most ardent admirers, turned to Zola’s L’Oeuvre as source material when Lantier is clearly an artistic failure. D’Souza links the biographical reliance on Zola’s account of Lantier to “a new notion of artistic genius” (20) that had emerged by the end of the nineteenth century and often equated artistic authenticity with artistic “impotence” and degeneracy, i.e., the failure to produce a singular, all-encompassing masterpiece. D’Souza asserts that this reformulation of artistic genius had penetrated Zola’s thinking and writing by the 1880s and was rooted in both the medical discourse of the late nineteenth century that paired genius with physical and moral degeneracy (e.g., Max Nordau, Césare Lombroso) and the Romantic idea that the unattainable goal of representing nature by an “authentic” avant-garde inevitably resulted in artistic impotence. Furthermore, D’Souza argues that Zola’s novel is far from being a “condemnation of the failed genius” but expresses “an empathy toward him” (15). Indeed, D’Souza goes on to claim that Zola understood cultural regeneration as one potential positive outcome of personal degeneration/artistic impotence, and she draws from a variety of texts by Zola to support this claim. D’Souza reminds readers that the late nineteenth century is littered with “biographies of failure,” of “troubled masculinities” among “geniuses”—Vincent van Gogh and Edgar Degas, for example. Hence, this textual representation of Cézanne as a neurotic misanthropic failure considerably helped to advance his growing public image as an artist of profound significance to modern art.

D’Souza is deeply aware of both the need to maintain critical distance from the biographical texts, which are unreliable as fully authentic interpretations of Cézanne’s life and character, and the need for engagement with the texts as historical documents that can offer insight into Cézanne’s theories and practices as an artist. She attempts this delicate balancing act in her consideration of L’Oeuvre as art criticism. Moreover, within her analysis of this novel as art criticism, D’Souza proposes that Cézanne himself viewed Zola’s text as indirect art criticism, and not biography. She considers two major themes in L’Oeuvre that critically pertain to Cézanne’s bathers—the belief that the artist should ultimately aim for the creation of a masterpiece that definitively expresses his artistic beliefs, and the matter of the nude in avant-garde art. (Lantier hangs himself before one of his incomplete paintings of the female nude.) D’Souza’s interpretation of L’Oeuvre as a form of art criticism seems valid, to a degree, since she is able to identify similarities between views and opinions expressed in the book about the concept of the masterpiece and those found in Zola’s art criticism. But the equivalence she makes between Lantier’s conception of the female nude and that of Zola’s seems problematic: “It is not too much to suggest that what Zola was proposing—what Claude was attempting to achieve—was the creation of the image of the nude according to the terms of the psychoanalytic concept of the fetish” (28). This interpretation seems to simplify the relationship between a writer and his story’s protagonist—too easily conflating them together, making the character a reification of the author’s ideas.

It is in the second chapter that D’Souza attempts to support the core thesis of her book, that Cézanne’s bathers achieve the erotic not through the appearance of the body but through the process of painting and the materiality of paint itself: “Cézanne’s erotics of paint, as I call it, was a matter, above all, of matière, of the sensuality of the medium and of the process of making a painting” (58). D’Souza’s eloquent and compelling descriptions of various bather paintings by Cézanne, along with the superb color plates in the book, really do heighten one’s awareness of his application of paint onto the canvas and quite persuasively give credence to the notion that it is in the pleasure of painting, more specifically the pleasure of touch and matière, that these images express the erotic. Others have certainly addressed Cézanne’s bathers in terms of sexuality and eroticism, and D’Souza considers the influential writings on them by twentieth-century scholars such as Meyer Schapiro and Kurt Badt. She argues, however, that theirs and several other interpretations of the bathers ultimately fail to see that “the eroticism of the bathers is both overt and an effect of his formal play” (43; emphasis in original).

D’Souza identifies three major scholars who have grappled with the erotic potential of Cézanne’s bathers vis-à-vis the pictures’ formal qualities—Theodore Reff, T. J. Clark, and Tamar Garb (Theodore Reff, “Cézanne’s Constructive Stroke,” Art Quarterly 25 (1962): 214–26; T. J. Clark, “Freud’s Cézanne,” in Farewell to an Idea, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999, 139–67; Tamar Garb, “Visuality and Sexuality in Cézanne’s Late Bathers,” Oxford Art Journal 19:2 (1996): 46–60). D’Souza is particularly concerned with Garb’s and Clark’s discussions, which “are limited by their reliance on psychoanalytic models that privilege sight, rather than touch or other sensory experience, as their organizing term” (58). She turns to Luce Irigaray’s claims of female sexuality as “tactile and plural” and one that “takes pleasure more from touching than from looking” (quoted in D’Souza, 59) as perhaps the means or structure by which to understand the erotics of the bather pictures, especially since Cézanne’s process of creation is characterized by constant repetition of tactile marks on the canvas (This Sex Which Is Not One, trans. Catherine Porter with Carolyn Burke, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985). While D’Souza demonstrates that the issue of touch must be a fundamental component in a discussion of the bather paintings, she artificially divorces it from sight in her attempt to emphatically highlight it. Touch and sight seem to operate in tandem with one another when the female nude in particular is under discussion, and perhaps it is through Cézanne’s rethinking of both sight and touch that he achieves his powerful and radical representation of the erotic.

D’Souza’s final chapter provocatively argues that Henri Matisse, who owned Cézanne’s Three Bathers (1876–77), understood Cézanne’s innovation, his shift of the erotic away from the body and toward the materiality of paint itself. D’Souza’s fascinating study of Matisse’s Blue Nude (Souvenir of Biskra) (1907) and his bather images from 1906–1909, in conjunction with her analysis of the critical reaction to Matisse’s work during these years, lends considerable weight to her claim of his awareness of Cézanne’s reimagining of the erotic in paint. I highly recommend D’Souza’s subtle and challenging study of Cézanne’s bather paintings.