Note on Cézanne

Montagne Ste.-Victoire (Grand Pin)

Paul Cézanne is omnipresent in Aix. There is even a Cézanne trail which takes in the sights of the town and places where the painter might have hung out. Yet, during much of his lifetime, the citizens of Aix had very little time for the master. His intense but unconventional daubs left them bemused and uncomprehending. He became, even, the subject of popular mockery. There are less Cézannes in the Musée Granet at Aix than might have been the case if the curators had been a bit quicker off the mark. What they could have picked up for a song was only purchased much later and at great expense after Cézanne's rise to celebrity. That Cézanne should ever have been a controversial figure is difficult to fathom today. Reproductions have made his work an all-too-familiar part of our cultural landscape. With his reputation as the father of modern art, we inevitably tend to see his work through the prism of Art History. What is it in the quiet intensity of his structured landscapes and still-lifes that presage the radical breakthrough into the world of the modern? Herbert Read in his A Concise History of Modern Painting suggests that the two most important factors are what Cézanne himself called réalisation and modulation. Réalisation is the extraction of an essential structure from an apparently confused and random nature. Modulation is the modelling of blocks of colour to create a definitive, monumental effect. Cézanne's ambition was to be a classical master in a modern idiom; what he succeeded in doing was separating the work from the motif, thus paving the way to L'art pour l'art - the work as something with its own intrinsic value, independent of whether or not it is a successful imitation of nature. Even today, controversy still surrounds the topic of Modern Art. How strange that Cézanne's painting, often giving the impression of an almost cramped obsession with control, should have opened the flood gates to the wild effusions of a Wassily Kandinsky or a Jackson Pollock!

Wishing to find out more about the artist, I picked up Bernard Fauconnier's "Cézanne". Inevitably there is a lot of focus on the vicissitudes of his life, in itself ironic for a painter seeking to create an art of timeless monumentality. But a biography, hélas, is a biography and Fauconnier goes about his work with an almost breathless verve and enthusiasm. He gives a lively impression of Cézanne's idyllic youth, his friendship with his schoolfriend, Emile Zola, his strained relations with his rich but miserly father, the official rejection of his work, his stubborn, cantankerous persistence, his disasterous marriage and his final acceptance and recognition. It was interesting to see how Cézanne, in his obscurity, despised those who lacked the insight to appreciate what he was trying to do and how, once famous, he despised his admirers for their failure to comprehend the true nature of his work! There are memorable passages in the book that seek to encapsulate Cézanne's ambition. For example:

Plus vrai et plus savant. Les deux seuls adjectifs qui puissent définir la recherche artistique qu'il a entreprise. Vérité et science, conscience que l'oeuvre d'art n'est pas affaire de spontanéité, ni simplement d'habile exécution. Il s'agit de créer un autre monde, d'arriver au vrai non par le vraisemblable ou l'imitation, mais par l'autonomie de la forme. L'impressionisme est une étape, un renouvellement, une boufée d'air pur. Mais cela ne suffit pas. Il ne suffit pas de peindre la beauté de la nature, la lumière, le plein air et de se laissé guider par ses sensations: tout artiste est dépositaire d'une vision du monde, donc d'une architecture.

Cézanne is often his own most persuasive advocate:

Pour l'artiste, voir c'est concevoir, et concevoir c'est composer. L'art est une religion. Son but est l'élévation de la pensée. Peindre d'après nature ce n'est pas copier l'objectif, c'est réaliser des sensations. Tout se résume en ceci: avoir des sensations et lire la nature. Travailler sans souci de personne et devenir fort, tel est le but de l'artiste, le reste ne vaut même pas le mot de Cambronne.

[For the artist, to see is to conceive, and to conceive is to compose. Art is a religion. It's aim is to elevate thought. To paint after nature is not to copy what you see, it is to give concrete form to sensation. It all comes down to this: experience sensations and read nature. To work without worrying about what people think and to become strong, that is the aim of the artist, the rest isn't worth s**t.]

Can art be a religion? Instinctively one senses the presence of a false god. However the final proof of the pudding must surely be in the eating. Does the contemplation of Cézanne's work induce in us a sense of the numinous? Are we called to some higher part of ourselves? It's unlikely, in all honesty, although you'd need to spend a lot of time in front of the originals before being able to pass a definitive judgement. The poise, harmony and stillness of some of the Sainte-Victoires testify to a hard-won artistic insight. Not so much a religion, perhaps, as a way to a certain understanding and self knowledge for the artist. In this sense too, Cézanne is a precursor of the modern. The work is of considerable interest to the artist, but increasingly the artist speaks a personal language in which it becomes virtually impossible to engage in a dialogue with the public. We find ourselves in a solipsistic hell, listening only to the sound of our own thoughts. HELP! IS THERE ANYBODY THERE?

It's ridiculously unfair, but "A Year in Provence" (HB) somehow put me off the South of France. The fear of being taken for a Peter Mayle groupie became an almost insuperable barrier to revisiting a magnificent area which we had explored only briefly years previously. [I can't help thinking that objective self-examination would reveal countless such childish inhibitions which cramp a natural way of being - perhaps, dear reader, we should set up a self-help group, Hangups Anonymous or something!] Probably I am most embarrassed at my own inner Peter Mayle: the would-be ironic connoisseur of good living smugly mining other cultures for colour and anecdote, and successfully selling it on to a gullible public. Less susceptible to such invented inhibitions, Carol has always been straight-forwardly intrigued by the fact that places we visit to satisfy curiosity are home to people whose whole lives are lived out there. We come and we go away, but their life carries on as before. That instinctive humility towards the other is the antithesis of the Maylist approach which reduces people and places to raw material for a book - or a blog.

Aix by night



All to say that I allowed myself to be persuaded to travel down to Aix-en-Provence for the Easter weekend. From the Gare de Lyon in Paris to Aix's TGV station takes no more than three hours, so it's really not very far. We booked ourselves into a hotel for three nights, which gave us two full days and an afternoon and a morning to take in the area. We'd had visions of shirt-sleeved sauntering in perfect spring sunshine. Nothing of the sort. It was perishingly cold. Blowing off the snows of the Massif Central, the Mistral funnels down the Rhône valley and gives an object lesson in wind-chill. So we spent our time in the South of France all wrapped up in coats and scarves. Our first afternoon we devoted to acquainting ourselves with the town, wandering from fountained square to fountained square, braving the elements to take coffee on the terrasse coûte que coûte, trying to get lost among the dinky streets, investigating the dinky shops, soaking up the inimitable Frenchness of the scene. I adjusted my ear to the rhythms and cadences of midi French. French is the Latin language adopted by the Germanic Franks, but as spoken in the south its Latin-ness is far more apparent. And it's not a question of the sound alone. It also has something to do with a whole attitude to language. In the north, the assumption is that language is primarily a means of communication, a pragmatic tool which enables you to explain your requirements and get things done. In the south it is more a means of decoration, something which invests the irreducible practicalities of life with elegance and charm. The ostensibly workaday topics of conversation are no more than pretexts for a pleasant passing of the time, in agreeable mutual acknowledgement of each other's presence in the world. Of course, this can lead to a divorce between language and "reality", which in turn can give rise to accusations of double-dealing and hypocrisy. Which reminds me of a story. As a race, the Celts tend to share this same love of language for its own sake. It seems that a famous Irishman, on returning to Ireland after many years' exile, was asked what he had missed most. "I think the hypocrisy" came the reply!

The next morning after a leisurely breakfast we set off in the direction of the Lubéron. There is a significant incidence of les plus beaux villages de France in the area and our ambition was to to tick off as many as we could in the time available. Probably quite a bad plan, but anything more elaborate or reflected would have taken up a lot more time than we had. Succumbing to our weakness for ecclesiastical ruins, we headed off in the direction of the Abbey of Silvacane, only stopping off in Rognes to make a few purchases for our picnic - a crusty fresh baguette, a couple of slices of delicious jambon aux herbes, a bottle of water and some fruit, in other words the simple rudiments of heaven! The sing-song voices and the elaborate formules de politesses made each transaction a secret joy, as when, on my first ever school-trip to France, I was amazed at the fact that the Whitmarsh French I had learned using the same brainless method as for the study of Latin revealed itself to be a valid and even indispensable means of communication between actual living people! Arriving at the abbey, we got embroiled in an intense discussion with the car park attendant. It being nearly half-past-twelve, he was off for his lunch and didn't recommend actually leaving the car in the unattended car-park as there had been break-ins and you never know these days. Also, the staff of the Abbey ticket office would also be off for their lunch, but not until one o'clock, which meant that we could, if we wanted, have a quick look round the Abbey, although most people took about an hour, but if we did anyway, it would be better to drive down the little lane and park nearer the converted outhouse which served as ticket-office and bookshop. This wasn't normally allowed but, while he was away they didn't usually mind. Anyway, if there was a problem, he knew them and would be able to iron out any difficulties. We replied that we would in fact be quite happy to go for a walk and return to visit the Abbey afterwards. Would it be easier to park in the village? In actual fact we had a walk book, perhaps he could show us where to start? Well, there was a marked trail, but it didn't start here, but somewhere else, but anyway it was a circular route so you could go round the other way, although (looks at book) it might be easier to follow the order of the text. I see, they mark the start from the cemetery and then up through the Forêt de la Roque d'Anthéon. Yes, it's nice up there, but that wasn't actually the walk I had in mind. The one I was thinking about starts over there (points vaguely in the opposite direction from the village) and ends up in an acoustically indecipherable place. There seemed no way in which this conversation could ever be brought to a conclusion. The fact was, he was bored and in need of the indispensable Latin stimulus of conversation. However, after seemingly interminable tergiversation, we concluded that it would be easiest to start from where we were. Royally waiving the fee, our cicerone insisted on our parking down the little lane and so we finally set out. Five minutes later we were lost by the Canal de Marseilles. Not so much what we would call a canal as an aqueduct. Drinking water for the big city? It was marked on the map as owned by E.D.F., the French electrical company. Cooling water for a power plant perhaps? What had once been rights of way were now blocked off, perhaps for security reasons. Anyway, we retraced our steps, praying not to bump into the attendant, and, finally making it into the forest, sat down at the first available picnic spot to tuck into our Gallic ambrosia.

The marked trail took us on a charming two-hour wander in the woods, largely through a scrubby tangle of oak and pine, with the occasional olive grove. It never ceases to amaze me how different different types of forest can be. Here the oaks were twisted, gnarled, low-to-the-ground, the pines, pins maritimes, rugged, coarse-barked, sun-beaten. The soil is different, the smells are different, the light is different, the feel is different. We gradually became permeated by this world of new impressions. Out of the wind, the sun began to warm us, and we slung our overcoats across the top of my little pack. The absence of appropriate, modern gortex-style hiking paraphernalia gave our walk a sort of innocent bohemian feel. Abandoning all notions of "efficiency" and "achievement", we could simply enjoy being together and being alive.

Cloisters at Silvacane

Back at the abbey, we bought our tickets and went in. Silvacane is a collection of 12th century Cistercian buildings with the sober and austere beauty typical of that order's architecture. It is as though the Cistercians strove deliberately to distance themselves from the sculptural extravagance which so marks Romanesque architecture in general and which so touches us today with its profound sense of the sacred and yet its deep comprehension of the human. The Cistercians sought to return to the strict adherence to the Benedictine rule, even exceeding it in austerity. Did they wrongly neglect the human? I learned recently that St. Bernard, who did so much to spread the order throughout Christendom, was foremost among church leaders in preaching the Albigensian crusade. The ruthless sectarian cleansing of the Cathars remains a dark blot on the conscience of history. It would seem that it is but a short step from self-righteous austerity to appalling crimes against humanity. Apparently a Cathar community survived in what is modern-day Bosnia. During the Ottoman period they converted to Islam. What a nightmarish irony that the descendants of the Cathars should again become the victims of "ethnic" cleansing in Srebrenice-style massacres, in a modern-day re-enactment of Montségur!

View of Gordes


We motored on, past the village of Lourmarin, up and over the dramatic Lubéron massif and onward towards Gordes in the heart of the Vaucluse. Driving along the country roads of France is one of the simple, yet truly civilized pleasures of life. Cyril Connolly listed not being able to drive in France among the greatest deprivations of wartime austerity. The "swish, swish, swish" as the car drives along a lane of poplars was for him the very essence of life itself. Difficult not to agree. Gordes, "village perché", is irresistibly spectacular, but an impossible tourist magnet. Despite the chilling ferocity of the Mistral, the traffic police were out, guiding people to a vast parking area at the top end of the village. Blown back down to the central square, we rapidly took shelter in what revealed itself to be the world's chicest and probably most expensive tea room. Trendy colours, designer wrought-iron furniture, original art-work on the walls. Affecting a tired familiarity with this category of establishment, I quickly rang the bank to check my overdraft facility before ordering coffee and pancakes. Settling the bill with an air of casual insouciance, I thought to avail myself of the facilities, just to get my money's worth really. I promptly succeeded in locking myself in the loo! Maintaining "cool" when stuck in the lavatory is an interesting modern challenge. A rising crescendo of concerned voices could be heard outside the door. They finally got hold of a handyman who was able to open the cubicle and set me free. It occured to me that I should be striding through the crowd of onlookers dispensing purses of gold ducats by way of largesse. In the end I just kept focussed on not falling over! Driving back down from the village, we spotted a number of "bories" - dry-stone, beehive constructions ingeniously raised without the use of mortar or other binding material. I remembered seeing similar erections in the West of Ireland - the Gallerus Oratory on the Dingle peninsula, for example, or the "clochans" of the monks on Skellig Michael. The purpose of the "bories" remains a mystery. Were they permanent settlements or temporary shelters? Comparisons with Ireland tempt me to imagine them to be anchorites' cells. I was overcome by a schoolboy urge to try to build one of my own in the back garden. Something to keep me occupied (and out of the way) during my retirement perhaps!

Next, on to Rousillon, the dramatic red village coloured, and set in its landscape of, ochre. Parking anywhere even remotely convenient was totally out of the question. We ended up driving into the village in the sanguine hope that the gods would smile and someone would pull out just as we arrived. No such luck. Tremulously we squeezed the car through the steep narrow streets, miraculously finding a way out the other end. I normally don't feel I've "done" a place unless I've at least had a cup of coffee in it. On this occasion, however, by mutual agreement we deemed it to have been ticked off and continued on our way. We headed down past Apt, then, in the slanting afternoon sun, back through the the looming limestone escarpments of the Montagne du Lubéron. We past a signpost to Buoux, but it was getting late and we didn't have time to explore that rock-climbers' paradise. Striking across country, we just managed to take in Ansouis and its splendid fortress bathed in the luscious evening light before finally heading back to Aix for a well-deserved meal and rest.






Among the Calanques


The next morning we headed down to the coast. I'd first come across the Calanques in my readings of the great alpinist, Gaston Rébuffat. His "Neige et Roc" was one of my teenage mountaineering inspirations. It contained fabulous photographs, mostly of Rébuffat himself demonstrating some aspect or other of climbing technique. With his lithe, wiry figure, his trade-mark guide's jumper and his shock of dark hair, his every pose was a study in self-conscious elegance and style, sending out the subliminal message that you, mere mortal, would never be in the same league! A native of Marseilles, Rébuffat cut his climbing teeth in the Calanques. I'd sort of imagined them a bit like the sea-cliffs at Swanage, only bigger and warmer. They were certainly a whole lot bigger! In fact, they are an entire range, a "massif" in their own right, streching some 20 kilometres between Marseilles and Cassis. The term "calanques" refers properly to the steep sided valleys where the streams run out into narrow sea inlets in a chaos of limestone pinnacles and cliffs. We opted to visit the Calanque d'En-Vau, which was reputed to be the most spectacular of all.


We parked at the Col de la Gardiole. Stepping out onto the Karst-like limestone plateau, the Mistral chilled us to the bone. It was in full overcoat order that he headed down through the Forêt domaniale de la Gardiole, enjoying sweeping views across the Baie de Cassis to the cliffs of Cap Canaille. As we descended further, we found ourselves sheltered from the wind. In warming sun we continued on down through an enchanted world of beetling crags and soaring towers, tastefully set off by the increasingly abundant plant life. Rare tropical species thrive in this microclimate; uncommon trees abound - holm oak, pubescent or downy oak, flowering ash, Judas tree, Aleppo pine. Arriving at the the water's edge, we crept in as close to the rocks as possible to have our lunch out of the wind. The pebble beach was lapped by the blue Mediterranean. I thought of taking a dip, but quickly thought better of it. It was perishing! Nearby, climbers were working their way up a route. I was touched by a pang of envy. The Calanques are a wonderful place to climb. Truly what the Germans call a Klettergarten - a climbing garden. But how foolish to be envious. Just being where we were was its own reward

The sea at Cassis


After our exertions in the Calanques, we thought ourselves deserving of a cup of coffee and a moment or two of la dolcefarniente. With this self-indulgent end in view, we proceeded to Cassis. Cassis is everybody's preconceived notion of the South of France. A sunlit small town by the Mediterranean, its houses and shutters combining to form a delightful harmony in pastel. We lolled studiously as we sipped coffee at the waterfront terrasse, took a stroll about the town and the little port and hasarded a quick visit to the windy beach to admire the breaking rollers. Cassis has a "holiday" atmoshere, which, though difficult to describe, is instantly recognisable by the smile it brings to the face.

It was time to start back. We headed cross-country to take in St-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume. A sarcophagus in the crypt of the Basilique supposedly contains the remains of Mary Magdalen. They must have felt that so precious a relic required special protection. The church is a bulky gothic pile like some vast medieval fall-out bunker! Was it constructed to keep people out, or, conceivably, to contain the unique vibrations emitted by the saint who some maintain was Jesus' common-law wife?

From there we drove west towards Aix. In an orgy of pinks, oranges and reds, we followed the dramatic flank of the Montagne Sainte-Victoire into the setting sun. It became clear how Cézanne could have devoted so much of his life to seeking to decipher the mystery of the mountain in its various moods. Not even the wildest of the Fauves could have captured the extravagance of colour that we experienced that evening. We could almost begin to understand what Rilke wrote in the Duino Elegies:

...das Schöne ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch gerade ertragen..

[...the beautiful is nothing other than the beginning of the terrible that we are just able to stand...]

Sunset by Montagne Sainte-Victoire