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?