A Projection of Repressed Sexuality:
The Poses of Cézanne’s Nude Female Bathers
Jessica Fields, Princeton Class of 2009At first glance, Paul Cézanne’s depiction of a gathering of female bathers may appear to be little more than an illustration of his adept use of pose to portray an idyllic and beautiful scene. Painted towards the end of his life between 1899 and 1906, Cézanne’s The Large Bathers may seem designed to carefully integrate the poses of nude female figures within a natural setting to impart a pleasant and serene aura. 
As Ulrike Becks-Malorny contends in Paul Cézanne: Pioneer of Modernism, this painting shows delightful women “frolicking on the riverbank” who have nothing erotic about them, unlike Cézanne’s earlier works that incorporate a blatantly brutal eroticism (Becks-Malorny, 88). This assessment is consistent with the comments of most critics about Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, who not only see Cézanne’s female bathers as exuding “happiness and harmony” (Becks-Malorny 88) but also allude to a transformation in Cézanne’s female nudes after about 1880, when his provocative females become serene bathers (Badt 142). Moreover, Cézanne, himself, in a letter to his son written about the same time he painted the bathers, insisted that his major goal during this time was to “create as rich a harmony as possible” (qtd Becks-Malorny 92). For Cézanne, the bather paintings appear to be his way of presenting an alluring fusion of nature and women that would captivate the eye and please the viewer.
Yet can we really conclude that Cézanne’s engaging poses of nude women in his bather paintings merely represent the beauty of female figures set amidst idyllic landscapes? Can we agree with critics like Ulrike Becks-Malorny, Kurt Badt, and George Rivière who believe that Cézanne’s The Large Bathers, as well as his other bather paintings, reflects a marked change from his earlier female nudes that exude excessive sexuality to his later figures that merely impart happiness and tranquility? Actually, the answer is a resounding no. The harmony portrayed in Cézanne’s later bather paintings is just a façade. In both his earlier and his later works, Cézanne is trying to gain mastery over women’s threatening sexuality: in the early works, erotic nude females are subjugated by males through such means as abduction; in the bather series, rigidly and awkwardly posed figures are thrust unnaturally onto landscapes in progressively more compressed settings. Such resolute control suggests that Cézanne’s original problems with women were still quite evident in these later bather paintings. Theodore Reff, one critic, does note this controlled sensuality in Cézanne’s later bather pictures yet he focuses upon contrasting it with Cézanne's lack of constaint in his male bather paintings. Granted, Cézanne became better at inhibiting his emotions in the later bather pictures: he shifted from his earlier overtly erotic and violent poses of women to more pleasant positioning of female figures in lush landscapes. But despite these different settings, Cézanne’s later works highlighting nude women bathing exude the same expression of sexual conflict and his inability to connect with the opposite sex, showing that it would be wrong to dismiss Cézanne’s later bather pictures as embodying just a “harmonious unity between man and nature” (Becks-Malorny 88). Instead, the later bather canvases, through their unnatural posing of women in compressed settings, illustrate the sexual tension that continued to underlie Cézanne’s works as well as his sustained effort to control the threatening sexuality of women in his paintings. This is significant because it not only modifies our view of Cézanne’s bathers by showing us that they signify much more than just blissful women but it helps us to understand how Cézanne’s art is a reflection of his repressed sexuality and difficulties with intimacy.
The Exhibit
Beginnings of Repressed Sexuality
The Early Works
Cézanne and His Critics
Mastering His Bathers
The Large Bathers Revisited
Conclusion
Works Cited
About the Author
The Gallery
Turmoil in Early Poems and Letters
The Unrestrained Paintings
The Other Sex: Cézanne's Male Bathers
Cézanne in Zola's The Masterpiece
