Rethinking Zola and Cézanne: Biography, politics and art criticism

Abstract

Now definitively liberated from the enduring legend that the publication of L’Œuvre (1886) ended Zola and Cézanne’s lifelong friendship, that relationship needs to be explored from a number of other perspectives. This article argues that the Dreyfus Affair, during which the writer and painter were on opposite sides, was a major determinant of their parting of the ways. Ideological differences were exacerbated by the dynamics of the art market and Zola’s writing on Cézanne. For it was in the interests of Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer launching Cézanne’s career with his 1895 retrospective, as well as those of contemporaries sharing the artist’s right-wing views, to disassociate the painter from the defender of Dreyfus. Zola’s contrasting championing of Manet may have added a personal dimension to the rift. But Zola’s art criticism was also strategically exploited by an anti-Dreyfusard discourse effecting a separation between writer and painter. The latter’s acolytes and acquaintances invidiously brought to his attention Zola’s critical ambivalence and the ex post facto identification of Cézanne with the fictional Claude Lantier of L’Œuvre. Both the novel and his art criticism offered further evidence of Zola’s failure to recognize the painter’s greatness, thereby paradoxically validating it at precisely the opportune commercial moment. As well as illuminating the vicissitudes of the Zola–Cézanne relationship, the article thus elaborates the political and critical context without which L’Œuvre itself continues to be misread as a roman-à-clef.