OIL PAINTING: Woman in Blue, 1899
The Woman in Blue is represented as a fabulous, birdlike being. Compared with another of Cezanne's portraits of the same sitter , the Woman in Blue provides a lively example of Cezanne's refusal to believe in a preexisting subject, a fixed essence defining the individual. The sitter seems utterly unlike the stolid matron of the Seated Woman in Blue in the Phillips Collection, although clearly they are the same person, wearing the same outfit. The Woman in Blue is defined by a kind of factitious jauntiness, all angles and juts: the unusual diamond shape of her silhouette predominates and destabilizes her position in relation to the canvas. Our eyes are propelled from the perky hat to the jagged epauletlike elaboration of the fashionable sleeves, and down the exaggerated V of the lapels; then our attention alights on the plaintive, pointy face. The diamond shape of the sitter's body is foregrounded in very different form in the elaborate diamond pattern of the tablecloth; the arms almost but not quite reiterate the generative diamond shape, open it out and re-regularize it, as does the mysterious and undefined scaffolding at the left.