Paul Cezanne (1839-1906) was an isolated figure for most
of his life. Only when he was younger did he spend time
as an artist in Paris. Having understood what the life
of the artist in Paris was all about Cezanne decided
life was much better in Southern France. For his life
and times that was a good idea. But it was even better
for us, because in the isolation of Cezanne's native
countryside he was able to discover himself and in that
process created and constructed a new art. Turning his
back on the standard for art held by the French
Institute, not wavering under social pressure, Cezanne
went about living his own original life -- discovering
freedom along the way.
It is the neglect of Cezanne we most often hear about
- a life time of neglect as an artist. His banker Father
was very disappointed with his only son and died without
realizing who he was. So masked was Paul Cezanne's
relationship with his Father that Paul did not reveal
for quite some time that he had a wife and son. Other
clues of this estrangement can be found in his
paintings. In one case Paul actually removed the figure
of his Father from a painting composition - only Paul's
sister and mother remain. On one of Paul's many trips to
Paris he met another out cast artist named Pissarro, the
great landscape painter who took the younger Cezanne
under his wing. Together the two artists painted the
countryside outside Paris. The relationship influenced
Cezanne to paint nature in a new way and some of those
paintings are among his finest landscape works. Yet they
too were rejected when first exhibited in Paris. In fact
it wasn't until after the turn of the century that
Cezanne first exhibited a one-man show of his paintings
in Paris. By then he was too old - too abused by the art
public to be impressed - Cezanne didn't even bother to
attend his own exhibit, even though it was considered a
great success. For him it had come forty years too late.
He thought he had been born way before his time. Which
was certainly true because it has taken the rest of us
almost a hundred years to understand his visual
language. The solemn colorful poetry of a truly great
man who had been ridiculed through his everyday by the
lesser spirits surrounding him. There's a message in
that for all artists to understand. Though I'm sure he
didn't intend it, Paul Cezanne became a pivotal
character in the history of man and art by showing us
the way to individual freedom of self expression. A true
inner look inside of man.
Today we give a lot of lip-service to the words Free,
Free-spirit and Freedom. Truth is there are very few
people in the world who are Free. Most people are too
caught up with being politically correct, sacrificing
Freedom for materialism to the point of excluding their
full human potential as individuals. Cezanne's mind was
never clouded by all that confussion and that is why the
integrety of his product is so unique. While those
around him scurried in the trivia of their lives, Paul
Cezanne quietly labored with his private invention until
the day he died. His project took one full lifetime to
complete. Of his thousands of art works I have selected
only eight to introduce you to. Please only consider it
a basic introduction to the great masters works.
Self-Portrait
WE HAVE FROM CEZANNE'S HAND over thirty
self-portraits. They are not only documents of his
appearance over the four decades of his career as a
painter; they also indicate a continued self-concern
surprising in an artist of classic tendency. In several
of them, this self-awareness struggles with his
pictorial impulse or habit, and we sometimes find
together in the same portrait acutely observed
physiognomic features and some geometric detail that
gives an abstract inhuman air to the part. We have
become so used to looking at Cezanne's forms as
constructive relationships that we enter with difficulty
into the expression of the lines and areas. In this
portrait with the intense right eye, the prominent brow,
the beard and mouth sunk into the body with hunched
shoulders, what is the meaning of the lozenge pattern of
the wall paper? What does it do to the face and the
picture? It surrounds and glorifies the bald head with a
starred angular halo - its enclosing character is
assured by omitting the lines of the ornament that would
meet the head and pass behind it. This angular form, so
much like the zigzag of the lapel, is opposed to the
massive roundness of the head and of the shoulder thrust
towards us. The duality of round and straight forms
appears at first as a contrast of the living and the
geometric, but we discover soon that the zigzag of the
ornament and the lapel are not altogether distinct from
the face; their diagonal angular form recurs, though
less rigidly, in the nose and beard and eyebrows; and
the little star-cross lozenges correspond to the eyes
and nose. This wedding of the organic and the geometric
has a beautiful simplicity which makes us overlook or
accept the arbitrary treatment of the wallpaper pattern.
The ornament is not used for surface interest, but as a
necessary element of structure in a whole of great
concentration and weight. The opposition of curved and
straight is only one of several strong dualities
pervading the work: light and shadow, the modeled and
flat, the vertical and diagonal, the concave line and
convex, the open and closed - all interwoven or crossed.
On the physiognomic level, there is a similar search for
contrast in the upper and lower parts of the head and
especially in the eyes, one dulled and recessive, the
other more strongly marked, alert, and opened towards
the light.
In execution as well as in forms, this portrait marks
a new stage. It is painted in a cooler, more meditative
spirit than the head of Chocquet, with greater economy
of pigment, pressure and movement, and is more beautiful
in substance and tone. The search for clarity and a
firmer order determines a smaller, more uniform brush
stroke, with a common slanting direction which is
subordinate, however, to the power of the larger forms.
There is more drawing of shapes - we see this especially
in the dark lines defining the curves of the bald brow
and the shoulder; but these rhythmical lines, which are
so clearly responsive to the neighboring forms, are also
notes of color in the grave scheme of interchanged
contrasts of dark and light, warm and cool.
Young Italian Girl
CEZANNE USES HERE SEVERAL of the elements and devices
of an earlier still life - the ornamented drape, the
table tilted upward, the large mass of white with many
tints. It is also like the still life in the big slant
of the dominant form. Yet the effect is very different -
a more balanced play of the simple and rich; the stable
and unstable. The whole is treated with a breadth that
recalls the great Venetian portraits of the Renaissance.
The forms are amazingly substantial and well-defined.
The bent figure fills her space grandly.
It is a powerfully constructed work, compact and
clear, with parts beautifully fitted to each other and
to the canvas surface. The tilted mass of the upper body
(with right angle at the elbow) is opposed to the
rectangular masses of the skirt and drape; yet the
vertical and horizontal rarely come to view, and then
only in short segments (as in the bracelet and the wall)
or as parts of more complex lines. The most stable
masses are covered with lines and spots of
unarchitectural quality - diagonal, crossed, or curved
on the draped table, convergent on the skirt - a typical
device of Cezanne's later art by which the severity of
construction is softened and opposed qualities are
interjoined.
The color is rich, grave, and strong. The simplicity
of the large aspect conceals at first the variety of the
color relationships that have been employed. The dark
blue of the skirt has a different kind of contrast with
each of the large areas of color. Its darkness or low
value is opposed to the white; its coolness, to the warm
complementaries of yellow and orange in the fichu and
face; its uniformity or evenness, to the mottled color
of the drape; its purity, to the mixed, neutralized
brown of the wall. At the same time, the blue mass is
harmonized with all these distinct, opposed fields: its
convergent stripes reappear in the white sleeve, which
is also toned with blue and grey; dark blue lines mark
the contours of the face and features and right arm, and
there is blue, grey, and black in the fichu; it is tied
to the wall, not only through vague green and purple
tints within the brown and through the lines of the wall
and dado at the left, but through the dark key - there
is a progression from the skirt to the purplish dado to
the upper wall; and last, the blue area is related to
the tablecloth through its similar position and shape,
and also through the analogy of lines. Touches of red
and green bind the face to the decoration of the drape.
In this analysis of the color, I have ignored other
equally interesting aspects, for example, the position
and order of these colors, which have an expressive
sense - the warmer, closer, more intimate range being in
the left half of the picture, the side of revery, and
the cooler, but more powerfully contrasted, elements on
the right half, the side of the body.
Beautiful too is the refinement with which Cezanne
has related the varied inclinations of the large masses
in a depth without horizontal planes; the succession of
overlapping tilted surfaces between the picture plane
and the wall is an exquisite thing. Another subtlety is
the handling of the vertical and nearly vertical
directions in an unmarked band from the upper wall to
the right side of the drape, passing through the head
and fichu. I must mention finally the wonderful modeling
of the head with its strong accents of the brush -
thickly painted blue lines, very considered and precise
- which give a sculptural firmness to the contours.
Still Life with Compotier
WITH THIS PAINTING begins the series of great still
lifes of Cezanne's middle and late periods. Beside the
others, it seems a return to tradition in its studied
outlines and great depth of shadow. It seems also one of
the most obviously formal in the sober pairing and
centering of objects, from the apples on the cloth to
the foliate pattern on the wall. But through the color,
which has its own pairing of spots, the symmetries of
the objects intersect or overlap; the same object
belongs then to different groups. The resulting rivalry
of axes gives a secret life to the otherwise static
whole. In the foreground plane, a dark spot - perhaps
the keyhole of the chest - anchors the design and ties
the vertical elements above to the horizontal base.
The color is beautifully mellow and rich within its
narrow range. In the long passage from light to shade,
different in every object, each color unfolds its scale
of values in visible steps. How solid the forms emerging
in atmosphere, deep shadow, and light through subtle
shifts of color from transparent tones to luminous
pigment of a wonderful density and force!
Indifferent to the textures of objects, Cezanne
recreates in the more palpable texture of paint the
degrees of materiality: the opaque, the transparent, the
atmospheric, and the surface existence of the pictorial
itself in the ornament on the papered wall - the shadow
of a shadow, an echo of his own art.
To define the forms in this unstable medium of air
and light in which the colors at the contours merge with
the surrounding tones applied in similar slanting
strokes, Cezanne has drawn dark lines around the
objects. More definite than in his other pictures, these
outlines are not as uniform and thick as the enclosing
lines that later artists derived from them. , who
owned and passionately admired this still life,
reproduced it in the background of a portrait in which
he took one of his first steps towards a style of
abstracted decorative lines.
Most original in the drawing are the ellipses of the
compotier and glass. Just as Cezanne varies the
positions, colors, and contours of the fruit, he plays
more daringly with the outlines of the vessels. The
ellipse of the compotier becomes a unique composite
form, flatter below, more arched above, contrary to
perspective vision and unlike the symmetrical forms of
the glass. In its proportion, it approaches the
rectangular divisions of the canvas and in its curves is
adapted to the contrasted forms of the apples and
grapes, the straight lines of the chest, the curves of
the fruit below, and the foliage on the wall. A line
drawn around the six apples on the cloth would describe
the same curve as the opening of the compotier. If we
replace it by the correct perspective form, the
compotier would look banal; it would lose the happy
effect of stability and masculine strength.
This magnificent painting, at once subtle and strong,
has the grave air of a masterpiece of the museums. Like
other masterpieces by young artists who aspire to a
grand order, it is a little meticulous and stiff. The
idea of the work, its method and devices, are more
tangible than in Cezanne's later art; but this absorbing
seriousness and frankness are part of the charm of the
work.
The Bather
IT IS A STATUE IN A LANDSCAPE; not of a bather but a
man in thought. Completely absorbed in himself, he is
welded to his surroundings: the color of his flesh is
like the ground, and the shadow tones of blue, violet,
and green, the rosy and lightened high lights, are like
the water and sky. His great vertical form rests on a
world of horizontal bands; verticals and horizontals
belong together. The bent arms resemble the sloping rock
profile at the right. The opening of the legs is like
the fingers of water laid out on a contrasting ground.
Besides the symmetry of the rock edge and the bent arm,
there is the symmetrical pattern of the segments of sky
between the body and the arms and the related belt - a
tight construction of upright and horizontal forms. On
the belt, the banded lines are seen together with the
fingers above them, but also with the banding of the
earth at the left - the reddish prongs of the ground
which alternate with blue inlets of water.
It is a strange landscape, imagined in the studio,
yet natural for the naked figure, his only possible
milieu - empty, mostly barren, and delicate like revery.
Figure and landscape echo each other and bear the same
brushwork, the same substance of color, equally free,
spotted, and changing. The main lines of the landscape
coincide with divisions of the figure. The upper body is
in the sky, the lower is on the earth. Where the knee
advances, marked with red, begins a green band of the
earth. The bent arms call out luminosities and
turbulence in the adjoining sky, like the angels
fluttering about a holy figure in old art.
The drawing is an effect of naive searching, an
empirical tracing and fitting of the forms, a little
awkward yet rhythmical and strong, and finally right;
some touches, as in the well-articulated legs, exploit a
past study; other parts are more arbitrary and fresh.
This drawing, so earnest and free, was a revelation to
young artists about 1906 and helped to liberate them.
The body is not stylized nor reduced, but reconstructed
scrupulously according to an ideal of harmony and
strength. It is a drawing without banality or formula,
even a new formula.
But is it essentially a "pure form," an
"abstract" construction? I do not think so.
There is in this monumental bather a complex quality of
feeling, not easy to describe. Rigorously tied to the
landscape, the figure is nevertheless detached, unaware
of the world around him. But the meditativeness is only
half the story. The upper body is immobilized by its
posture; it looks inward and closes itself. The man
walks, yet holds his sides. This upper body is ascetic,
angular, strictly symmetrical, and relatively flat, the
lower body is more powerful, athletic, fleshy, modeled,
and in motion - an open asymmetrical form. Two opposed
themes are joined in one body, and this opposition
appears also in the character of the sky and earth, one
vaporous, the other more stable and solid. The drama of
the self, the antagonism of the passions and the
contemplative mind, of activity and the isolated passive
self, are projected here. The contemplative dominates in
the end, but the body remains warm in color, powerfully
set, while the world - an enveloping void - is distant
and cool.
The Blue Vase
A NEW TYPE OF STILL LIFE, of the mid-eighties, with
luminous high-keyed colors throughout, in the background
as in the objects. The relations of intensities and pure
hues come to the fore.
In spite of the greater brightness, the small
differences count for more in the harmony and expression
of the whole. The sensitiveness is a marvel; to
reproduce it perfectly is impossible. Together with the
richness of hues goes an incredibly refined gradation of
tones. The blue dominant, which is more than a local
color - it is a prevailing mood - has a different
quality in the vase, the wall, the platter, and the
smaller units; observe the flowers and the blue touches
on the table, which are contrasted with warmer neutral
tones. The blue is an exhalation upward and into depth.
The rich green is concentrated in space, the reds,
yellows, and whites are in smaller scattered bits - the
blue is diffused over a large area. The greys and
neutralized tints are toned with yellow or blue in
exquisite intervals.
The arrangement is no less interesting than the color
and just as refined. It is formal, very deliberate
looking, through the dominant theme of the vase, set in
the middle between verticals; and through the
calculated, naively stiff alignment of objects beside
and behind the vase, as if in prescribed rows, parallel
and frontal, like pieces on a chess board. But against
this apparent rigidity plays the expansive lyrical
movement of the bouquet, with its shapeless spots,
reaching out to the limits of the space (yet the red,
green, white, and blue spots maintain in their positions
the perpendicular scaffolding of the whole). The
formality is challenged, too, by the strong diagonal
behind the vase, so sensitively broken near the vase's
edge, and by the details of execution - they are
amazingly free, like the details of a distant landscape,
yet are so near that one object - the bottle - is cut by
the frame. The fine scalloping of the edge of the plate
is a pure painting variation in contrast to the smooth
strong curve of the vase's shoulder, but seems inspired
by the wavy mouth of the same vase. The many tiltings
and discontinuities soften the severity of the
architecture of the whole. In the fruit, the outlines
lie partly outside the object. Such disengaged strokes
deny the substance of things and make us more aware of
the artist at work - a wonderfully delicate,
scrutinizing, weighing, balancing, eye and hand.
The Card Players
OF THE THREE VERSIONS, this little painting is the
last and undoubtedly the best; it is the most monumental
and also the most refined. The single shapes are
simpler, but the relationships are more varied. The
extraordinary conception of the left player is the
result of a progressive stabilizing and detachment of
this meditating figure.
It is the image of a pure contemplativeness without
pathos. Given the symmetry of the two card players
looking fixedly at their cards, Cezanne had to surmount
the rigidity and obviousness of the pair and yet
preserve the gravity of their absorbed attitudes. It is
remarkable how thoroughly interesting is this perfectly
legible picture, how rich in effective inventions of
color and form.
The problem: how to image the figures as naturally
symmetrical, with identical roles - each is the other's
partner in an agreed opposition - but to express also
the life of their separateness, without descending to
episode and weakening the pure contemplative quality, so
rare in older paintings of the game.
It is accomplished in part by a shift of axis: the
left figure is more completely in the picture; his
partner, bulkier, more muscular, is marginal - but oddly
also nearer to us - and takes up more of the table. His
head is bent forward; he is more intensely concerned.
The first man is the more habitual player, relaxed and
cool, and his long columnar form is contrasted with the
horizontal line behind him. The two hats, one with
arched brim, firm and poised, the other with turned-up,
irregular brim, soft and battered, convey this
difference of feeling - two tonalities of meditation.
The left player has a bright mind and a sluggish body,
the right has a slower mind and a livelier body or
temper. The former's arm begins very low, his limbs are
detached from the tiny head which is intent but not
anxious (it is remote from the body and is like the hat
on the head). The other has a hunched effect; if he is
ready to play, he is more strained in deciding. The arms
of the first are parallel, the other's arms converge.
The first head is set against a vague landscape, the
second against an architecture of verticals, a more
rigid, pressing form which measures the inclination of
his body. The long man's face is shaded and lit with
inner contrasts that subdue the silhouette; the other's
is more open, more fully given. The first has light
cards, the second, dark, and his hands are nearer to us.
The tablecloth ends in a stable right angle at the left,
in a sharply pointed form at the right. The color too is
a subtly contrasted expression: violet against yellow,
but both neutralized; in the left figure, violet jacket,
yellow pants; the converse in the right. The latter is
therefore more strongly contrasted with his surroundings
in color as well as form. But this contrast is crossed:
the straight figure against a sloping chair, the
inclined figure against a vertical edge.
The inherent rigidity of the theme is overcome also
by the remarkable life of the surface. There is a
beautiful flicker and play of small contrasts, an
ever-responding sensibility on every inch of canvas.
Still Life with Apples and Oranges
ANOTHER SIDE OF CEZANNE COMES INTO fullest play here.
This still life is of an imperial sumptuousness. We feel
throughout the work the painter's joy in the luxuriance
and profusion of colorful things, unconstrained by his
meditative habit. The old stabilizing (and detaching)
construction - the rectangular framework of the table
and the clear plane of the wall - has disappeared.
Instead, the space as a whole is draped and richly
broken; the difference between depth and surface, the
vertical plane and the horizontal, is veiled. Everything
comes forward; yet there is also a palpable depth, as in
the succession of fruit at the left. We are reminded of
the space of the quarry and the mountain in the picture
of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
Cezanne seeks here a continuity of elements more
complete than in his earlier work. The compotier grows
out of the beautiful white cloth, and the decorated jug
seems to be a fusion of that cloth with the apples and
oranges and the ornamented drape behind it. The effect
is dense, even crowded, like his landscapes with woods
and rocks, and is enormously rich in unexpected shapes
and chords of color, almost to the point of engorgement.
It is not at all a "natural" still life -
something we might encounter in a home - but a fantastic
heaping up of things, in which we discern, however, a
clear controlling taste. The complexity of this work
belongs both to the pride of a well-exercised
masterliness and the delight of the senses. More than
most of Cezanne's still lifes, it impresses us as an
orchestrated work, because of the wealth of distinct,
articulated groups of elements carried across the entire
field of the canvas. The white cloth is magnificent in
its curving lines, its multiplicity of contrasted
directions, its great rise and fall, and in the spectrum
delicately toning its brilliant white surface. Against
this complication of whiteness and the subdued chords of
the mottled drapes (warmer and more angular in ornament
at the left, cooler and with curved ornament at the
right) play the rich pure notes of the fruit. These are
grouped simply, in varying rhythms, and are so disposed
as to form together a still life on a horizontal axis -
a secret stabilizer among the many sloping shapes. A
delightful metaphoric fancy is the decoration of the jug
with red and yellow flowers like the nearby fruit; it is
a bridge between the fruit and the ornamented drapes, of
which the patterns, broken by the folds, are a rich
flicker of less intense, contrasting tones.
A characteristic theme in the larger design is a
sharply pointed form, which appears in many parts: in
the silhouette of the white cloth, in its angles with
the table and the edges of the canvas, in the drape at
the upper left in the tall, peaked fold, and elsewhere.
Painted during a period when Cezanne produced many
powerful images of solitude and unrest, this still life
has the same emotional force and masterful inventiveness
in the expression of joy.
Woods with Millstone
CEZANNE PAINTED THE WOODS WITH MILLSTONE in the South
near his home at Aix. A photograph of the spot proves
him remarkably faithful to the encountered scene which
offered him an example of a natural chaos with traces of
man in the abandoned blocks of quarried stone. But what
concern us are the qualities of the picture which are
more intense or of another order than those of the
original site. The image is of an interior of nature,
like a cavern, obstructed and without horizon or exit or
outlook beyond, a wild romantic site with something of
melancholy and hopelessness, but also the fascination of
a huge disorder. It is the grotto of the raging, blinded
Polyphemus, strewn with natural and human debris. Only
the millstone with its smooth and centered form set
oddly in a corner is a note of humanity at home, against
which we may measure the turmoil of the other forms. Yet
its purity or abstractness of shape makes it seem less
human than the roughness of the rocks and trees.
The space as a hollow has no definite form; the
tilted ground fuses with the objects that rise from it
and with the masses of foliage in a vertical effect like
the still lifes of the same time. Lines radiate in
different directions from the same axis or cross each
other in their opposed movements. It is a painting built
of unstable forms, without vertical or horizontal lines,
completely un-architectural in spirit. Yet it is a
powerfully ordered canvas in which we discover as
intense a search for harmony as in the most serene
works. Very striking is the pairing of elements: twin
trees, twin branches, twin rocks, twin blocks of cut
stone, which are composed with an eye to contrast and
delicate variation as well. Especially fine is the
conception of the graceful trees, twisted and divergent
at the left, more smoothly curved and parallel at the
right. Within the chaos of the site survives something
of a natural order and rhythm.
An interesting invention is the trail of the diagonal
on the ground: a shadow line at the extreme right
continued in the blocks of stone and resumed in a
further shadow line carried to the other end of the
canvas. In its slope and fine curvature, in its changing
color and branching detail, this line is like the tree
trunks and introduces in the ground an element that
appears most strongly in the vertical planes.
The color is a somber harmony of brown, violet,
green, and grey - mixed tones that belong to an
enclosed, sunless world. But this scale is illuminated
