In Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life, André Dombrowski presents an unfamiliar Paul Cézanne: the seemingly awkward, overwrought romantic who produced such works as The Murder (ca. 1868–70) and The Strangled Woman (ca. 1870–72). When this “expressionistic” Cézanne has been attended to at all, he has been characterized as an artist subject to his own immature psychic turbulence—a radically different creature from the modernist master whose influential “constructivist stroke” emerged in the mid-to-late 1870s. Dombrowski sets out to correct this dismissive periodization, making a case for the relevance of Cézanne’s early career. Devoting each of his five chapters to sustained analysis of a single work (or small series of related pieces) from the 1860s and early 1870s, Dombrowski looks to redefine what avant-garde painting meant in that moment, using Cézanne’s early output to grapple anew with the legacies of high modernism.

The book’s splashy title and its introduction promise not only to revisit the artistic merit of Cézanne’s early work, but also to situate this period of his career within the broader framework of mass culture—within the “aesthetic, social, even political” worlds of sensational actualités and popular bizarreries (4). As is perhaps to be expected given its monographic focus, however, the book’s deepest engagement is not with mass culture but with Cézanne’s intellectual and artistic community. Dombrowski’s Cézanne does not approach popular themes directly, but through a series of high-cultural interlocutors. For example, when Dombrowski sets out to illuminate the appeal that the subject of murder held for Cézanne, he turns not to the boulevard press, but rather to its critical theorists (Charles Baudelaire, Thomas de Quincey, and Hector Berlioz). Likewise, his chapter on Young Woman at the Piano—The Overture to “Tannhäuser” (ca. 1868–69) does not provide a cultural history of musical transcription, but rather an illuminating analysis of Cézanne’s relationship to other avant-garde chroniclers of domestic musical pursuits (Édouard Manet, Edgar Degas, and Baudelaire). While Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life does not thus offer a wholly transformed view of painting’s relation to modernity, the book does illuminate a set of contested, contradictory terrains that are too often glossed over. Dombrowski convincingly describes a field of artistic practice where emotion and sensation are not suppressed by cool detachment (à la Manet), but vie with it—the triumph of alienation as aesthetic mode is never assured.

Cézanne’s rivalrous relationship with Manet is crucial to the book’s argument. For Dombrowski, that association—as negotiated in Cézanne’s canvases—gave the artist his primary means to grapple with modernist subjectivity. According to this logic, Manet’s art epitomized one response to the modern condition: the belief that the intensified demands on human experience could only ever be approached through “subjective distancing” (4). Cézanne would articulate the opposite view. His early work thus functions as a manifesto for the irrepressibility of the impulsive, the instinctual, and the deeply psychological.

Murder was a theme that seemed in and of itself to have the power to expose modernity’s impassive attitude. The book’s first chapter, “Violent Beginnings: The Murder,” unpacks the complex nuances of Cézanne’s repeated attempts to make violent crime a subject for painting. Dombrowski traces the ways in which the subject of murder was disputed ground in the 1860s, arguing that Cézanne’s interest in the topic grew directly out of such debates. The theme of murder, he suggests, offered Cézanne a critique of modernist progress through an exploration of primal urges. Under Cézanne’s heavily laden brushwork, murder became an affair of the impulsive and animalistic body. By uniting extremity in technique with extremity in theme, Dombrowski suggests, Cézanne made violence into a meditation on bourgeois individualist ideals of self-control.

Chapter 2 moves from the trope of uncontrolled violence to the trope of authorial presence, with an extended evaluation of Cézanne’s Olympia paintings (ca. 1869–70; 1873–74). Tackling directly the artist’s oft-noted invasion of Manet’s modern-life narratives, Dombrowski argues that, far from simple egoism, Cézanne’s use of his own image in these canvases constituted a complex attempt to challenge the conventions of avant-garde painting. Setting himself against both the Realists and the Impressionists—and their concomitant faith in the possibilities of experiential truth—Cézanne emerges as something of a modernized romantic. Manet is clearly Cézanne’s primary foil here; however, as Dombrowski makes clear, the stakes of the rivalry extended beyond personal jealousies, touching upon modern conceptions of selfhood in society at large. If, as Dombrowski surmises, Manet’s Olympia (1863) posits the artist as “the eternal other,” Cézanne inserts himself into Manet’s painting because he “wants to be the eternal participant” (65). By literally picturing himself within Manet’s picture of modern life—and underscoring his own presence through his signature style of paint handling—Cézanne establishes a “more self-expressive, even immediate form of authorial modernism” (65).

The book’s third chapter centers on Cézanne’s narrative portraits of Paul Alexis Reading to Émile Zola (both ca. 1869–70) and one related still life, The Black Clock (ca. 1870). In these images, Dombrowski argues, Cézanne set out to rival Manet’s famous 1867 portrait of Zola. He characterizes Cézanne’s portrait as articulating an alternative image of modern subjectivity. Unlike Manet, who defined Zola through a network of externalized signs, Cézanne mobilized an intimate narrative of intersubjective exchange. The self, in this revision of Manet, is not simply denoted by an accumulation of things, but rather as a fraught terrain, with anxious interiority expressed in the painting’s charged spatial regime. This chapter makes much of the often-cited fact that Cézanne’s relationship with Zola predated Manet’s, casting the younger artist as a sensitive interpreter of Zola’s modernity. It was from Zola, in fact, that Cézanne had learned “how to use intimacy as a rhetorical trope” (111). Along with The Black Clock, which Dombrowski reads as related to the portrait series, Cézanne’s images of Zola reveal a complex exploration of the full psychic and emotional dimensions of modern subjectivity.

Chapter 4 is an in-depth study of The Overture to “Tannhäuser” series, a set of highly wrought domestic interiors “about the ubiquitous privatization of art” in Second Empire France (140). Here Dombrowski’s Cézanne strays from his direct appropriation of and rivalry with Manet—though given the latter’s well-known fascination with Richard Wagner, we still remain immersed in Manet’s intellectual universe. However, Baudelaire’s 1861 essay “Richard Wagner and Tannhäuser in Paris” provides the primary interpretive framework. Dombrowski points out that Cézanne’s carefully chosen title (anomalous for him at this time) shows the artist’s insistence on a symbolic reading of this parlor: The Overture to “Tannhäuser” addresses the domestication and feminization of Wagner’s repertory. Dombrowski boldly (and somewhat perplexingly) twins The Overture to “Tannhäuser” with The Murder to show Cézanne grappling with the modern subject at “deliberately polar extremes of social chaos and control” (140). In one—The Murder—the primal triumphs, undoing the myth of modernist progress; in the other—The Overture to “Tannhäuser”—the myths of artistic originality and immediacy are subverted and parodied. For Dombrowski, then, this is not a painting about music (as an aesthetically pure form) or about modern domesticity. Rather, it is a painting “about a performance of a transcription of another work,” which offered Cézanne “a concrete manner in which to investigate the conditions and possibilities of originality in modernity” (157).

In chapter 5, Dombrowski looks at Cézanne’s unusual practice of appropriating fashion plates during the “année terrible”—the traumatic upheavals of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune. Between 1870 and 1871, Cézanne produced three paintings whose subjects and compositions were taken directly from La mode illustrée, one of the few Paris-based magazines to continue publication throughout these events. Cézanne’s manipulations of these fashion plates did not render the latter unrecognizable, but neither did his paintings simply replicate their models. Instead, Cézanne’s images occupy a nether world between original and reproduction; they are “originals that can never lay full claim to their originality” (194). In this way, Cézanne’s fashion-plate paintings cut to the heart of the paradoxes raised by modern bourgeois fashion generally—and wartime fashion specifically—by highlighting the ambivalent forms of self-expression and politics offered by the modern fashion industry.

In his epilogue, Dombrowski makes many of the aims of Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life explicit. He seeks to reconcile the emergence of Cézanne’s “constructive stroke” in his later landscapes and bather paintings with the artist’s earlier practice, and indeed to demonstrate a continuity of concerns threading from his early to late works. Cézanne’s contact with Camille Pissarro results in neither rupture nor revelation, as previously has been argued, but instead a slight change in direction. Ultimately, this book provides “context and community” for the early Cézanne, something that had been missing from earlier accounts, while also offering suggestions for a more nuanced understanding of Cézanne’s “mature” work. For Dombrowski, the later Cézanne is as much concerned with modern selfhood as was the early Cézanne. The crucial shift occurs in the means by which he pursues them: form, not narrative, became his means to grapple with such subjects.

Cézanne, Murder, and Modern Life takes up a challenge leveled by Robert Simon in 1991, in an insightful but little-known piece called “Cézanne and the Subject of Violence”: to take these “strange early pictures” seriously by investigating them “as meaningful and fully intentional” (Robert Simon, “Cézanne and the Subject of Violence,” Art in America 79, no. 5 (1991): 122). Dombrowski brings just such a critical eye to Cézanne’s early works. Though he uncovers in the artist’s practice a less comprehensive immersion in the popular than Simon preliminarily suggested, Dombrowski succeeds in restoring “meaning” and “full intentionality” to both their form and subject matter. More importantly, he pries open a space from which some of the most cherished views of modernism might be challenged, by acknowledging the multiplicity of its conceptual stakes and its visual cultures.