NEW YORK PSYCHOANALYTIC SOCIETY & INSTITUTE:
WORKS IN PROGRESS
Marianne and Nicholas Young Auditorium
247 East 82nd St., between 2nd & 3rd, NY, NY 10028
212-879-6900
www.psychoanalysis.org
www.nypsi.org
Wednesday, December 2, 2015, 8 p.m. Cézanne’s Mirrors: The artist, his wife, his friend and the book
Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D.
FREE. All are welcome.
RSVP
The painter Paul Cézanne and his friend, the writer Emile Zola, became fast friends during their adolescence in Provence. Zola went on to enjoy acclaim as a journalist, critic and novelist, while Cézanne pursued his art for decades with virtually no commercial success. In 1886, Zola published L’œuvre, a novel about a failed painter—a thinly disguised caricature of Cézanne. Furious at Zola, Cézanne wrote him to thank him for the book, but broke off the relationship, never writing him again…. Or so was long believed. The recent discovery of a letter written in 1887 by Cézanne to Zola thanking him for La Terre, the latest installment in the Les Rougon-Macquart series, upends this legend. Clearly, the cause of the relationship’s decline was more gradual and complicated than Cézanne’s presumed anger. As a means to understand the rift, a second look at L’œuvre reveals volumes. In this talk, Adele Tutter will present a close reading of L’œuvre and the Cézanne-Zola correspondence alongside an analysis of Cézanne’s self-portraits and his portraits of his wife, Hortense Fiquet—works whose importance has only recently been appreciated, many of them painted in the late 1880s. This juxtaposition allows fresh insights into the unfolding dynamics of Cézanne’s complex relationships, and suggests a new formulation of the fascinating role of mirroring in adult life—in particular, in creative artists. Many images will be shown.
Adele Tutter, M.D., Ph.D. is Assistant Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Columbia and University and Faculty, Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research and the New York Psychoanalytic Institute. Her interdisciplinary scholarship, which focuses on the relationships between loss and creativity and between art and the artist, has received the Karl Menninger and CORST prizes, among others. Active on the editorial boards of The International Journal of Psychoanalysis, Psychoanalytic Quarterly, Psychoanalytic Inquiry and American Imago, Dr. Tutter is author of Dream House: An Intimate Portrait of the Philip Johnson Glass House (University of Virginia Press, 2016); editor of The Muse: Psychoanalytic Explorations of Creative Inspiration (Routledge, 2016); and coeditor, with Léon Wurmser, of Grief and its Transcendence: Memory, Identity, and Creativity (Routledge, 2015). She is working on a second monograph, Mourning and Metamorphosis: Poussin’s Ovidian Vision.
NO CME OR CE CREDITS WILL BE OFFERED.
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