Apples and the simplicity of space

Still life with milk jug and fruit     FWN 878        1900       45.8cm x 54.9        Washington

In this short series of blogs, I will look at three of Cezanne’s paintings of Apples from around the turn of the century, 1900, just as he turned 60 years of age. Spending more and more time in Aix rather than Paris, he became a kind of rural myth, and began to attract young writers and would-be artists who heard of him through the admiration of artists living in Paris, and because he had been the school-mate and soul-friend of the now notorious anti-establishment critic, Zola.  And - who’d have thought it – he was receiving his young admirers graciously! I hope you enjoy the last of the three blogs….

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” Pissarro

The more I look at this painting, the more I love it! I try simply to behold it in its fulness and in its simplicity. If my mind tries to alight on one specific feature, then I gently say: “not yet”, and return to my beholding. My intention is to behold the whole, without thought or analysis, distinction or distraction; just with focus and openness, joy and gratitude. In this way, I can approach its fulness and its simplicity at once; for in this meditative practice, fulness and simplicity are not two separate entities but one. I begin to behold the whole.

It is the experience of the beholding of the whole that Cezanne discovers at the heart of his practice of painting in the last fifteen years of his life and work, though he had no words to express it. Fortunately for us, we live in an era when the experience of the beholding of the whole is one of its defining features; and so we can utilize that experience to understand more fully what was inspiring Cezanne.

If you do not approach this painting in search of the whole, then all kinds of problems can crop up. Erle Loran, in his brilliant analysis of Cezanne’s composition published in 1943, entitles one chapter: ‘The problem of Cezanne’s bent tables’, and goes on to ‘prove’ that Cezanne bent his tables intentionally, because elsewhere, Cezanne did paint some dead-straight lines – so Cezanne could draw straight when he wanted to! John Rewald in his comprehensive and detailed catalogue of Cezanne’s works published in 1996 after a life of dedication to the task, comments that Cezanne’s ‘concentration on a specific section prevents him from straightening linear features’, having described it as ‘the badly aligned table’. Comments like these suggest that even the experts were not quite sure whether to describe these features of Cezanne’s work – precisely the features that the general public of the time found so wanting, and often, so annoying – as quirky Cezannean stuff or as the intentional practice of a Master. (There was talk in Cezanne’s lifetime of the possibility that Cezanne’s sight was defective, and later that his sight might have been affected by diabetes.)

If we ask what’s going on here, we do well to think about how society has developed. Loran and Rewald realized Cezanne’s genius, and explained it from within their understanding: a ‘Modernist’ world-view (one that Cezanne had himself co-created when he was an Impressionist painter). We saw in the first blog how our writers, T J Clark and C Armstrong, have since presented critical analysis of the ‘Modernist’ approach, in an attempt to ‘rescue’ Cezanne’s work by re-interpreting it from a different world-view.

Nina Maria Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, in a book of 2003, entitled Cezanne and Provence is not bothered about bent or badly aligned tables, but rather about ‘The painter in his culture’ (the subtitle of the book). Her understanding of Cezanne’s genius stems from her ‘Pluralist’ world-view, in which prominence is afforded to diversity – absolute truth is replaced by truth-fulness; the sum total of everybody’s truth. For Athanassoglou-Kallmyer, the genius of Cezanne lies in paintings where he views a motif from different viewpoints. The thesis of her book is rooted in Cezanne’s decision later in life to leave Paris and return to Provence, where he can imbibe once again the traditional culture of Provence. Athanassoglou-Kallmyer seeks thereby to re-balance our traditional understanding of French Culture away from Paris, towards Provence.

A new worldview is beginning to grow in our time: ‘Integral’. One of the most important elements of this burgeoning worldview is that of seeing ‘the whole’. We see this shift towards ‘beholding the whole’ in all kinds of disciplines – in traditional economics towards doughnut economics; from monoculture to bio-diversity and eco-systems; from thinking of individuals to institutions; even in physics, from atoms and elements to waves and relationships.

As a new worldview comes on stream, there is a linguistic gap: the language and the enshrined concepts of the old worldview do not fit the new; the new worldview has not yet developed a language and concepts of its own. In his book entitled ‘Cezanne, A Life’, Alex Danchev astutely writes: “Contrary to popular belief, it is given to artists, not politicians, to create a new world order”. In his translation of Cezanne’s letters, Danchev records the letter written by Cezanne in November 1889 to the secretary of the Belgium avant-garde group Les XX, in which Cezanne acknowledges: “I have resolved to work in silence, until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavours”. Cezanne was never to achieve this; not because of his lack of intellectual prowess, but because he was ahead of his time, and painting out of a worldview that did not yet exist in words and concepts.

A generation later, the close colleague of Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque did not have the ‘right’ words either to express Cezanne’s genius and names it as best he can as ‘a new moral intimation of space’. He says:

“The discovery of his work (Cezanne’s) overturned everything. I wasn’t alone in suffering from shock. There was a battle to be fought against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire or love. In Cezanne’s work, we should not only see a new pictorial construction but also – too often forgot – a new moral intimation of space” George Braque, 1882 to 1963

And maybe, one of those young admirers who Cezanne received so graciously in Aix, the Expressionist painter Charles Camoin, had it right: “From the novelty and the importance of his contribution Cezanne is a genius. He is one of those who determine evolution.” (1905)

An ‘Integral worldview’ provides a more comprehensive understanding of generative change and evolutionary transition, and, more pertinently here, of the complexity and simplicity of Cezanne’s Oeuvre.

For an introduction to ‘Integral’, have a look at the work of Ken Wilber and Integral Dynamics (not mathematical references). (for a quick intro you can go to Jeff Salzman’s Quick Intro to Integral Theory - The Daily Evolver)

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes,

and it would be most convenient to impose

its old rooms –

just tack them up like an interior tent.

Uh Oh!

But the new holes aren’t

where the windows went!

Kay Ryan

Apples and the fulness of space

In this short series of blogs, I will look at three of Cezanne’s paintings of Apples from around the turn of the century, 1900, just as he turned 60 years of age. Spending more and more time in Aix rather than Paris, he became a kind of rural myth, and began to attract young writers who heard of him through the admiration of artists living in Paris, and because he had been the school-mate and soul-friend of the now notorious anti-establishment critic, Zola.  And - who’d have thought it – he was receiving his young admirers graciously! I hope you enjoy this, the second of three blogs….

Still life with faience jug and fruit      FWN 877        1900      73.1cm x 101         Winterthur

We left off our last blog encouraging our two authors - T.J. Clark in ‘If these apples should fall’ and Carol Armstrong in ‘Cezanne’s Gravity’ - just to enjoy the painting and forego the analysis!

And please, spare some time for beholding, and enjoying the painting: give yourself a break!

Ok, let’s analyze! Because, it is precisely the ‘space’ between our immediate perception of stuff and our pre-conceptions that we need to confront. We are more and more aware that we do not approach stuff with anything like a pure and balanced vision; our layers of interpretation, our understanding of the meaning of stuff, flow not simply from our own stories, but also from the collective understandings and values of the societies we inhabit. Hajo Düchting, in his book ‘Cezanne’, expresses it like this: ‘the conflict between flatness and depth becomes the spatial angst of modernity’. We are disorientated by the possibility that what we see, might not be the way it actually is.

Rainer Maria Rilke, as you might expect, expresses it somewhat more poetically in a letter to his wife and soul-friend, Clara : ‘Starting with the darkest hues, he (Cezanne) would add a layer that went somewhat further, and so forth, till by moving outward from shade to shade he arrived in due course at another, contrasting component in his picture, whereupon he would begin again, in similar manner, from a new centre….so that they instantly began to talk, as it were, constantly interrupting each other, continually at variance. And the old man put up with their disharmony.’ (Letters on Cezanne)

Let’s look at a couple of ‘centres’ that Rilke refers us to, as he tries to describe and understand how Cezanne constructs the space within the painting. Let’s focus on the plate and the jug: let’s see them as two adjacent spaces, and each of them is constituted by a space surrounding spaces. We understand the spaces within the plate-space to be apples; and the spaces within the jug-space to be flowers. Our mind tells us that the apples are real, but that the flowers are just a design. Our mind knows that jugs can stand up, having a base; but plates can’t stand up on their edge, so the plate must be held in its position by something – the fabric it sits on. So the fabric must be heavy, to hold up a plate full of apples; so it’s probably a heavy curtain. This conversation between the plate-space and the jug-space is how Rilke describes Cezanne’s method of constructing a painting.

The conversation continues not just in the delineation of spaces, but in the use of colours as well (indeed the delineation and the application of colour are very often one and the same). The colours of the plate-space and the jug-space are repeated and mirrored in each of the spaces within the spaces, as the jug-space leans into the plate-space and indeed holds it up where the curtain cannot accomplish this task. These tensions provide mutual support and interdependence for the plate-space and the jug-space. “They begin to talk, constantly interrupting each other, continually at variance. And the old man put up with their disharmony”.

Now zoom out – and consider these, from Erle Loran: Cezanne’s compositions:

This analytical tool shows how the painting achieves its structural power; Cezanne’s masterpieces have that kind of ‘bumf’ to them – they’re somehow solid and earthed, like an ancient pyramid; they’re just there! Strong and confident enough to face you as equal; existing in their own space, in their own right! You approach them with respect, and even reverence!

We understand vertical and horizontal lines as static, while diagonal lines we recognize as moving and dynamic. There are no vertical or horizontal lines in this painting.

So, while it’s solid and earthed, it’s still moving and dynamic.

This analytical tool demonstrates the decorative and abstract elements of the painting. The dotted lines, now extended from the pyramid shape into a diamond shape, “are based almost entirely on subjective or carry-through lines”(Loran) – non-objective or abstract shapes. Within the diamond, Cezanne places as many decorative shapes of different sizes as he feels able, while maintaining a balance: circles, ellipses, triangles, rectangles. Three of the six apples at the bottom right form part of the abstract line of the diamond, while the lower three (with the help of the white table cloth) towards the edge of the table act as a counterbalance to the heavy curtain, pushing their corner of the table down, as the heavy curtain tends to topple the table over.

Now we can clearly see how Cezanne has gone about the promise he made “to make out of Impressionism something solid”. He has taken the beautiful things in humble places realized in the Impressionistic painting ‘Two apples on a table’, and made of them something solid, yet dynamic in the painting ‘Still life with faience Jug and Fruit’.

What’s fascinating is that Cezanne is painting these paintings around the same time, maybe side-by-side: he is describing the stages of his own development, in the language he knows best – oil paint on canvass.

I’ll examine Cezanne’s development and his awareness of his own development in the next and third blog.

Apples

In this short series of blogs, I will look at three of Cezanne’s paintings of Apples from around the turn of the century, 1900, just as he turned 60 years of age. Spending more and more time in Aix rather than Paris, he became a kind of rural myth, and began to attract young writers who heard of him through the admiration of artists living in Paris, and because he had been the school-mate and soul-friend of the now notorious anti-establishment critic, Zola.  And - who’d have thought it – he was receiving his young admirers graciously! I hope you enjoy this first of three blogs….

Two Apples on a table          FWN 864         1895-98          24.1cm x 33.2        Kentucky

“I will conquer Paris with an apple” – so predicted a youthful artist who lived as far away from Paris as you could get, from a place where a generation before, a horde of revolutionaries marched north singing the Marseillaise on a journey to create a land of beauty, goodness and truth.

A mythical millennium before that, another youthful guy was given a golden apple by the god of the gods to decide where beauty resided most; he gave the apple to the goddess who offered him the most beautiful woman in the world – Helen, whom he carried off to Troy. His name was Paris.

The new boy was bullied: he had no father, his school fees were paid out of pauper’s funds, and his name was foreign. The bigger boy intervened with some gravity, and put an end to the bullying. The next day, in gratitude, Zola brought Cezanne a punnet of apples; they remained soul-friends for the rest of their lives.

Our perception of stuff is overlaid with story upon story, interpretation on interpretation, with layers of meaning, like layers of paint, bringing forth generative iterations towards realization. Cezanne would spend long periods simply looking, beholding, stripping away the layers of interpretation that the mind imposes in fulfillment of its primary function of survival. Only then, when the ‘impression’ was beheld, would he put brush to canvass. Pissarro would make a beatitude for Cezanne’s meditative practice: “Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.”

There are two very recent books written about Cezanne’s oeuvre which speak to this idea of ‘layers of interpretation’. T.J. Clark’s ‘If these apples should fall’ and Carol Armstrong’s ‘Cezanne’s Gravity’  have a peculiar affinity, obvious from the very titles; and yet they are miles apart. T. J. Clark’s book is a personal and intimate, rambling and free-ranging reflection, an outpouring of life-long admiration, that exudes a love of Cezanne’s work that I appreciate more than I understand. For, like my love of Cezanne’s work, it is something of a mystery. T. J. Clark’s centre of gravity rests in the socio-political conditions of life; he is not afraid to abide in the contradictory and ambiguous nature of ‘modernity’ which brings forth so much achievement and so much suffering: ‘The latter value (ambiguity) in particular – the ambiguous as a realm of truth…- is one that a Cezanne painting ironizes as it brings it on.’ It is the work of a man, using the interpretative model of dialectical Marxism, who is searching, as Cezanne was, for beauty, and goodness and truth.

In ‘Cezanne’s Gravity’ Carol Armstrong lets her imagination rip, considering Cezanne’s affinity with a diverse ensemble of people including Virginia Woolf and Albert Eistein, as well as some Cezanne admirers of old - Rainer Maria Rilke, Roger Fry and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. “I have put still life at the top rather than at the bottom of the scale and returned to it repeatedly from more than two vantage points. Some of these vantage points were available during Cezanne’s own historical moment; some of them were not, and some of them are only available now, more than a century later. But all of them were made possible by the paintings he produced then, which remain open to us now, to see anew again and again”. Her work is a passionate and intellectual endeavour, that you feel has been bubbling away for an age until it burst forth, almost uncontrollably. It is the work of a woman, using the interpretative model of phenomenology, with a skepticism about modernity, searching for a meaning for our time.

Both books are heav- vy; and in a sense, not at all like Cezanne’s two apples on a table. You feel like saying: ‘Hey guys, just enjoy it!’.

enjoy the blue, and what it means to you….

enjoy how there’s no white paint used to create the white plate…..

enjoy how the colour of air, blue, is used to create the weight and substance of the apples and plate….

enjoy the leaning together of the plate and middle apple….

enjoy the quivering of the right apple…

enjoy the colours……

enjoy the colour harmonies……

enjoy the richness of colours in the tabletop….

enjoy the bare canvass around the edges….

sit back, and enjoy, and smile, coz blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.

But, hey, writing books is how some people enjoy stuff! (and yea, I might do the same some day!)

The work of a lifetime and beyond

1839

Paul Cezanne born 19th Jan

1887

Self Portrait with palette                    FWN 499         92cm x 73        Zurich

There was always a deep deep tension, if not a paradox, within the very heart of Cezanne’s strivings to express himself before a motif with oil-paint on canvass. It morphed through-out his life: sometimes enraging; ofttimes retreating; between times, lost and found; in good times enthralling in human company; in bad times drained by inhuman criticism; in younger times overzealous of the protection of personal space; in elder times soothed by the tender touch of pain-relieving massage; in end-of-life times yearning to be forever one with brush and mountain. I’m not simply referring to the “randomness of the tumbling flow of a life’s unfolding, gorgeous” as that often is; and, in my opinion, not expressed more beautifully than in Alex Danchev’s ‘Cezanne, A Life’.

No, I’m referring to our understanding of ‘the self’; it is here – how we understand the human self – that the paradox presents itself most acutely. For Cezanne, and we ourselves, live in the flow of the self-same narrative; a narrative of the self that was gathering pace throughout Cezanne’s lifetime. We sit within the same trajectory of the paradox as Cezanne. It is the paradox of the atomized self.

“I paint as I see, Monsieur!” Cezanne fumed to a critic. “The others see, but do not dare to paint as they see. I dare.” It was to be a key facet of the modern age, co-created by Cezanne - of Modernism – that the individual would assume a prominence far beyond that of traditional times: that someone who didn’t have any claim to status, or power, or wealth should take unto themself the right to express themselves as they saw fit: this enraged the traditional art-going public. Not simply because the works themselves were deemed not to have any depth or substance, being by their artist’s own admission, mere ‘impressions’, fleeting whims of passing associations; but that this new generation of artists seemed to care little for the foundations upon which rested the old ways.

But by 1894, the old ways, the ‘Old Regime’, was gone; and a new one was growing in its place: modernism.

1894

Self portrait in a floppy hat     FWN 511         60cm x 49        Artizon, Tokyo

“The most striking fact of the day was the misery of the industrial proletariat. Despite the growth of the economy, or perhaps in part because of it, and because as well of the vast rural exodus owing to both population growth and increasing agricultural productivity, workers crowded into urban slums. The working day was long, and the wages were very low. A new urban misery emerged, more visible, more shocking, and in some respects even more extreme than the rural misery of the Old Regime.

“From the first to the sixth decade of the Nineteenth century, workers’ wages stagnated at very low levels (in France and England), while economic growth accelerated. From 1880 to 1914, the so-called ‘Belle Epoque’, what we see is a stabilization of inequality at an extremely high level.

 What was the good of industrial development, of all the technological innovations, toil, population movements - of modernism itself - if the condition of the people was just as miserable as before?”

1895

Self Portrait                FWN 517         55cm x 46        Qatar

“In a way, we are in the same position at the beginning of the Twenty-first Century as our forebears were in the early Nineteen Century: we are witnessing such impressive changes in economies around the world, but inequality at an extremely high level is stabilizing”.

1900

Self Portrait of the artist in a beret    FWN 529         63.3cm x 58.8 Boston, USA

1906

Paul Cezanne 22nd Oct RIP

2024    19th January 2024

“We live in a culture that prizes the atomized self, inappropriately foisting medicine onto individuals when disease and discomfort are the multi-causal snares of systems of oppression within which we are stuck like flies in a spider’s web. We think we must heal individually and succeed individually. We are taught, also, that we feel and sense individually, keyed only to direct contact with our skin-delineated corporality. This preoccupation with personal health and personal responsibility for health as primary, has led to the detriment of understanding that the health of one person is intimately tied to and representative of a whole population. Illness, trauma, and pain do not belong to an individual; they are a web that includes the individual self”.

Illness, trauma, and pain do not belong to an individual; they are a web that includes all our selves.

We see the same stabilization of inequality at an extremely high level.

We sit within the same paradox.

We can strive, together, to move through the paradox.

It is the work of a lifetime and beyond!

With thanks to the writers, in quotation marks, Roger Magraw, Sophie Strand, Mary Oliver, Thomas Piketty, Alex Danchev, and of course, the Integral Dynamics of Ken Wilber.

Wholeness

“Once, I lived on the tarred lonely highways of truth –

Slugging towards the looming horizons – the promised dwelling places for those who did not waver. The whole world was about being either right or wrong. I was either lost or found.

That was many years ago though.

Today, when I (meet people) paint paintings, I recognize how utterly beyond right and wrong they are – how (their lives) they are symphonies beyond orchestration, how mistakes and failings are actually cosmic explorations on a scale grander and of a texture softer than our most dedicated rule-books could possibly account for.

You see, something happened on my way – and I lost my coordinates, my map, my directives.

Now the whole journey is the destination – and each point, each barren point, just as noble as the final dot. Every splotch of (ink) paint is become to me a fresco of wisdom, a beehive of honey, a lovely place – and every aching (voice) brushstroke a heavenly choir.

The world is no longer desolate and empty and exclusive; she is now a wispy spirit, whose fingers flirt through the wind – a million roads where only one once lay.

And I need not be certain about the road travelled – since I arrived the self-same moment I set out.”

Bayo Akomolafe, adapted: the brackets indicate Bayo’s original words.

It seems to me right and fitting to interpret these words of Bayo Akomolafe, modern day wordsmith of poetry on paper as if spoken by Paul Cezanne, artist of oil-paint on canvass: for the experience they describe in their different communication mediums seems to me to be the same, despite being one hundred and twenty-five years apart.

On the 25th May, 1895, Cezanne met Pissarro in the Durand-Ruel gallery in Paris to behold the series of Monet’s paintings of Rouen Cathedral.

Monet admitted to being obsessed with this motif, so extraordinary had he found the portrayal of the effect of light at different times, different days and different seasons. He had chosen a dozen of the twenty plus Rouen paintings for the gallery; and his two old Impressionist comrades were duly wowed!

Pissarro, personally, had by this time moved on from Impressionist painting to follow his students and paint in the mode of ‘pointillism’, as it would come to be called.  

Cezanne, earlier that same year, before leaving Aix for Paris, had finished a painting of Bibemus Quarry, and had just started another of the same motif.

All three were searching anew: but, unlike Monet and Pissarro, who were searching within different modes of expression, Cezanne had ‘lost his coordinates, his map, his directives’; and this fracture enabled him, through the other side of the pain, to discover the stages of his own growth, such that in this, his mature phase, his paintings would become ‘symphonies beyond orchestration’. Cezanne’s development became generative.

I offer this first of three paintings called ‘Bibemus’ (FWN 305) as Cezanne’s expression of the beauty inherent in Impressionism; a second called ‘Bibemus Quarry’ (FWN 306) as an expression of the truth inherent in his ‘constructive phase’; and a third called ‘Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bibemus’ (FWN 315), as an expression of the values inherent in his final, generative phase. All three Cezanne painted in a two-year period: 1895 – 1897.

Bibemus               FWN 305             46.3cm x 55cm                 1894/5                 Barnes Foundation              

There’s a joyfulness about Impressionist landscape painting; as if they say - “hey, we’re just going to paint the stuff of ordinary life, because that’s where beauty lies. And we’re going to paint it in a way that offers an invitation for you to feel the rich atmosphere that we paint. We’re not interested in the precise detail of the motif; we’re not interested in attaining such a polished finish that you can’t see the paint. We want to be raw, honest and simple, rich and vibrant, joyful and inclusive.” Their higher purpose was in remembering that beauty is the beholding of the graciousness of ordinary life; how freeing that sensation was, encapsulated in paint on canvass, panoramas of our earth in sunshine and breeze.

Here is Cezanne, twenty years after the Impressionists made their mark in history, celebrating the essence of their achievement. This is how we did it!

*****************************

Bibemus Quarry               FWN 306            65cm x 80cm          1895            Folkwang, Essen

“The interlocking and interpenetration of planes and volumes presents one of the most complex and perfectly integrated examples (of pictorial construction) in Cezanne’s work” Erle Loran: diagrams in Cezanne’s Composition.

This is how Cezanne expressed in paint on canvass the truth of the new and exciting, liberating and progressive era which we now call modernism.

*********************************

Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bibemus                FWN 315             65.1cm x 81.3    1897               Baltimore

We can see how Cezanne has encountered, and included, a number of different world-views: the Traditional worldview (his ‘avec couillard’ phase); the worldview often referred to as Modernism (which was just beginning to manifest); and the worldview that would begin with Existentialism (which some now call simply ‘post-modernism’, but which is more clearly named ‘pluralism’ – which was foreshadowed in Cezanne’s work).

There is such a beauty in discovering your own development. The truth within the beauty of discovering your own development is that you are lifted up beyond your own development. The goodness within the truth of discovering the beauty of your own development is liberatingly expansive, awesome, and humbling.

I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in anything. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.

Georges Braque

We are now beginning to see, as Cezanne began to see, in that quarry, that the spaciousness of our living is interlocking and interdependent, complex and integrated, interactive and creative: in a word, generative. We are beginning to be Integral.

The poetry of mimetics is the active contemplation of our fractal universe.

For more insights into ‘Integral’, try one of the following sites:

 Quick Intro to Integral Theory - The Daily Evolver

Home ⋅ Spiral Dynamics Integral

Integral European Conference - IEC 2023

The wholeness of spaciousness

Mont Sainte Victoire seen from Bibemus                FWN 315             65.1cm x 81.3    1897               Baltimore

This is the third post of the mini-series of four posts focusing on three paintings by Cezanne, all with the same motif – Bibemus Quarry – and all painted in a two-year period 1895-7, in Cezanne’s ‘mature phase’, when he was just a few years shy of 60. The first post focused on Cezanne’s painting ‘Bibemus’ FWN 305, in the style of Impressionism. This second post focuses on the painting called ‘Bibemus Quarry’ FWN 306. This third post focusing on Bibemus and Mont Sainte Victoire. For me, it is clear that these paintings represent Cezanne’s understanding of his own development; he now sees clearly the stages of his own growth, and expresses that development in the mode of communication in which he is most proficient – oil paint on canvass. The beauty of growth is that it is the expression of your deepest yearnings; the truth of growth is that it requires dissonance, pain and resolve; but the goodness of growth is that it lifts you beyond yourself to wider horizons. I hope you enjoy this mini-series.

Sometimes it can take a long time – years – to comprehend the full implications of our own development. It is so hard to resist the habitual residue of our old ways of understanding. Old polarities insinuate themselves into our thought processes. Family, friends and acquaintances transport us back to the good old days. We slip into easy choices between this and that. Our space is confined by polarities.

But maybe, our spaciousness does not have to be confined by polarities, confined as an example between the self and others, confined within our skin. We breathe the air’s oxygen and we exhale carbon dioxide; we are part of an ecosystem, ourselves an ecosystem within an ecosystem. A part of a whole, a whole within a part, and a whole within a whole.

The assimilation of this fractal understanding is I believe what Cezanne is struggling to express. It is the spiritual experience of wholeness that informs his mature stage of painting. This is what Cezanne is trying to express here as he stands within the ecosystem that encompasses Bibemus quarry and Montagne Saint Victoire: deep within, entangled in, the ochre molasse sandstone compressed into orange rock by the geological formation of the mountain Sainte Victoire, enfolded haptically in pigments and brushes, and the breeze of bushes and trees.

The birds have vanished from the sky;

now the last cloud floats away.

We sit together, the mountain and me,

until only the mountain remains.

Li Bai of the Tang Dynasty   (adapted)

I believe Cezanne experienced this sense of wholeness, and it was this experience that underpinned his mature phase. The following is an exploration of ‘how’ he expresses his experience, using all the lessons, skills and techniques that he has acquired on his journey of development.

Firstly, ‘Scale’ is thoroughly flexible – ‘plasticity’; Cezanne does not abide by scientific perspective, but through the denial of polarities moves towards a complexity of harmony. Cezanne diminishes the foreground, and increases the background size of stuff – in the diagram 1, below, the shaded area, A, is the size that Mont Sainte Victoire appears in a photograph. (all diagrams and analysis is based on Erle Loran’s Cezanne’s Composition).

Cezanne avoids aerial perspective by excluding the fuzziness encountered when viewing something that is far away (Impressionist beauty), by defining quite clearly and intensely the outline of the mountain using bright blue stokes of paint. Cezanne tilts the background up out of depth so as to counteract any falling away within a traditional perspective. And finally, Cezanne scatters the fusing of different colourful planes to excite our viewing.

Secondly, by using the organizational techniques of pictorial composition (Cezanne’s ‘Constructivist Phase). This is illustrated by Loran’s second diagram below.

Open forms (without defined edges) are integrated by the overall circular movement of the painting. There are rhythmic flows created by overlapping and leaning plane on plane. In fact, Cezanne maintains a surprising resemblance to the motif, despite the freedom he enlists in expressing the intricacy of the forms.

Thirdly, Cezanne employs decorative features through-out. This is clearly expressed by Loran’s third diagram below, in which we can see how the shapes of the trees, (circular, flamelike, triangular, oval, and random) are scattered through-out.

Fourthly, Cezanne uses repetition of colours to link and align, (integrate) the dominant feature, the mountain, within the whole. The final Loran diagram shows how Cezanne reflects the colour of the mountain across the middle ground, and forefront of the painting.

And finally, Cezanne’s use of complementary colours, the colours of Provence. ‘The orange of the cliffs and earth is the most intense and dominant colour, covering over half the surface’; the green of the trees is less saturated, but more complex; the blue sky providing the cool contrast with the orange cliffs. The whitish, and dark purple of the mountain provides for its magnificence.

Modern day photo of Bibemus

The energy of space

Bibemus Quarry        FWN 306        65cm x 80cm             1895               Folkwang, Essen

This is the second post of the mini-series of four posts focusing on three paintings by Cezanne, all with the same motif – Bibemus Quarry – and all painted in a two-year period 1895-7, in Cezanne’s ‘mature phase’, when he was just a few years shy of 60. The first post focused on Cezanne’s painting ‘Bibemus’ FWN 305, in the style of Impressionism. This second post focuses on the painting called ‘Bibemus Quarry’ FWN 306. For me, it is clear that these paintings represent Cezanne’s understanding of his own development; he now sees clearly the stages of his own growth, and expresses that development in the mode of communication in which he is most proficient – oil paint on canvass. The beauty of growth is that it is the expression of your deepest yearnings; the truth of growth is that it requires dissonance, pain and resolve; but the goodness of growth is that it lifts you beyond yourself to wider horizons. I hope you enjoy this mini-series.

In the early mornings, Cezanne, now in his late fifties, would clamber down from the old stone cabin where he often spent the night; down, down into the depths of the earth, amidst the shear rock face of the ochre molasse sandstone, hewn by ancestors long ago: cathedrals of rock. Indeed, the traditional interpretation of the geological layers of our earth, was that the biblical story of creation would be discovered, in six layers that matched the six days of creation. In their youthful expeditions for fossils, his old school friend Marion (by 1895, a Professor and the Director of Natural History at the University of Marseilles) had taught him a different story – a story of the development of all beings on earth. Marion had not just taught Cezanne: together they had extracted the fossil evidence on expedition, down into the depths of the earth, that proved the Theory of Evolution to be well grounded.

And here in the depth of this sandstone quarry and the solitude of the earth, Cezanne understood this new story of development as his own too: he saw it now, just as plainly and impressively as the rocks towering before him. He could now see how his development had thus far taken him through three stages: his initial youthful stage of rejecting the notion that art is respectable: “what bastards respectable people are”, he shouted, as he painted ‘avec couillard’. The Impressionist stage, as he admitted “It is true, I don’t conceal the fact. I was an Impressionist”. And what we now call his ‘Constructivist’ stage, where “I want to make of Impressionism, something solid and enduring’.

And here it is: Impressionism rendered solid and enduring.

The wonder of its solidity is that it is chaotic.

We now appreciate that rock is “Molecules vibrating with such intensity as to produce the illusion of solidity” Sophie Strand.

Cezanne inverts traditional perspective; he increases the size of stuff in the background (mass with axis at B), and decreases the size of stuff at the forefront (mass with axis at A), and then sets up all kinds of movements and countermovements, into depth and out of depth, gently held with serenity within the picture frame, by which its resonance becomes enduring.

“The interlocking and interpenetration of planes and volumes presents one of the most complex and perfectly integrated examples (of pictorial construction) in Cezanne’s work” Erle Loran: diagrams in Cezanne’s Composition.

This is how Cezanne expressed in paint on canvass the truth of the new and exciting, liberating and progressive era which we now call modernism.

“The discovery of his work (Cezanne’s) overturned everything. I wasn’t alone in suffering from shock. There was a battle to be fought against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire or love. In Cezanne’s work, we should not only see a new pictorial construction but also – too often forgot – a new moral intimation of space”

George Braque, 1882 to 1963

Let’s drink to Impressionism!

Bibemus          FWN 305         46.3cm x 55cm          1894/5            Barnes Foundation           

This mini-series of four posts focuses on three paintings by Cezanne, all with the same motif – Bibemus Quarry – and all painted in a two-year period 1895-7, in Cezanne’s ‘mature phase’, when he was just a few years shy of 60. For me, it is clear that these paintings represent Cezanne’s understanding of his own development; he now sees clearly the stages of his own growth, and expresses that development in the mode of communication in which he is most proficient – oil paint on canvass. The beauty of growth is that it is the expression of your deepest yearnings; the truth of growth is that it requires dissonance, pain and resolve; but the goodness of growth is that it lifts you beyond yourself to wider horizons. I hope you enjoy this mini-series.

Sometimes it can take a lot to leave a group. You maybe expect to be treated the same as usual, but you’re not; there’s a distance, an invisible border, a forcefield. Leaving the tribe, forsaking the common purpose, is the worst sin of all!

In 1873, the Impressionist Group was so strong that they formed themselves into the ‘Société Anonyme Coopérative des Artistes-Peintres, Sculpteurs, Graveurs, etc’. They were ‘anonymous’ because it was still illegal for people to band together. The abuse aimed at Cezanne from the general public and critics alike so depressed Cezanne that he didn’t send any paintings for the 1876 Impressionist Exhibition. It would be Monet who persuaded Cezanne to exhibit again; and he does so with gusto! But by 1879, Cezanne has realised he must leave the group, and happily, this time, not because he was hurt by artistic criticism, though he still received more than his fair share; but for reasons much more difficult for the group to understand.

This is the first of three paintings of Bibemus Quarry that I will present as a series, all three painted within a two-year period, late in Cezanne’s development, 1895 – 97. There were many such quarries between Aix-en-Provence and Montagne Sainte Victoire, worked decades ago, even centuries, in a sporadic fashion, and then left and forgotten. For a few years, Cezanne became fascinated by this particular one, and he was able to rent a stone cabin nearby to rest and keep all his stuff in.

Back in the 1870’s, Impressionist paintings were criticized for three reasons: firstly, they were common and vulgar! The Impressionists painted ordinary life and ordinary people, nature, streets and cities; there were no noble and awesome scenes, no majestic kingdoms, nor rural peasants happy with their lot. Their paintings were verging on the revolutionary!

Secondly, their paintings were painted outdoors, in the full glare of the sun. The paintings assaulted the senses of the exhibition-going public! Many swooned and fainted, so bold and glaring was the use of vibrant colours. They seemed to have no respect for the well-established traditional techniques of classical painting: depth and shadow were represented by different bright colours, not darker fading. Their paintings were almost childlike!

Thirdly, the paintings were unfinished and crude: you could see the brushstrokes of the paint quite clearly; the paint was even pronounced and seemingly haphazard, rather than hidden and polished! It was rough and uncivilized! Objects were not clearly delineated and tended to merge into each other creating a fuzziness that undermined the intellectual and normative aesthetic of art itself: which, the critics maintained, should be to reinforce the moral certitude and noble standing of civilization.

Classical art was a product of the context within which it developed. The most important object of the painting was the one most visible, with all else fading away in a supportive role; mere acolytes for the enhancement of the main motif (usually involving a man). It was hierarchical, in its subject matter, its construction and its presentation.

The influence of the old ways had faded; and the Impressionist group of the 1870’s had expressed in art what it felt like to be modern! In place of hierarchy, and in the spirit of this new democratic era, through the use of vibrant colour, they sought to celebrate the radiance emanating from each object on the canvass. They sought to invert hierarchy by presenting the beauty of ordinary things; and presented objects in the distance with emphasis relating to their impact not their position in depth – the last shall be first, and the first shall be last! That was the Impressionist purpose: to create an art for the modern era, liberated and adventurous, vibrant and radiant, emotive and engaging. Liberty, equality and fraternity expressed through the application of paint on canvass.

But Cezanne is not painting this painting as part of the Impressionist movement: that was twenty years ago! He’s painting this painting in 1895, not 1875! What I think he is doing is trying to capture the essence of the movement, so that, as he moves beyond it, he can include it as part of his development.

There’s a joyfulness about Impressionist landscape painting; as if they say - “hey, we’re just going to paint the stuff of ordinary life, because that’s where beauty lies. And we’re going to paint it in a way that offers an invitation for you to feel the rich atmosphere that we paint. We’re not interested in the precise detail of the motif; we’re not interested in attaining such a polished finish that you can’t see the paint. We want to be raw, honest and simple, rich and vibrant, joyful and inclusive.” Their higher purpose was in remembering that beauty is the beholding of the graciousness of ordinary life; how freeing that sensation was, encapsulated in paint on canvass, panoramas of our earth in sunshine and breeze.

Here is Cezanne, twenty years after the Impressionists made their mark in history, celebrating the essence of their achievement.

This is how we did it!

my grandmother's hands (FWN 422, 1867)

In the second room of the Tate Modern Cezanne Exhibition, this portrait of Scipio has been calling me during both my previous visits; I had passed it by, with difficulty; its pain pulled on my body. I knew there was something deeper than my conscious intentions for the day. But now, on day three, my conscious intention is in harmony with that deeper pain, and I stand before the portrait, knowing I must shed a tear, in sorrow, in healing and in rage.

At the time of Cezanne’s portrait of Scipio, (a life model at the Art College of the Academie Suisse in Paris), ‘a photograph of an enslaved man named Gordan was broadly circulated within abolitionist networks: the image is a three-quarter view of the enslaved man’s back, criss-crossed with keloid sear tissue – irrefutable proof of a horrific whipping’. In Cezanne’s portrait, Scipio and Gordan are one.

“Our bodies have a form of knowledge that is different from our cognitive brains. This knowledge is typically experienced as a felt sense of constriction or expansion, pain or ease, energy or numbness”. Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother's Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies.

As Menakem advises, I take some time to allow my body to feel the constriction, the pain and the numbness, here in front of Cezanne’s portrait of this man. I allow my body to express its reaction; I do not judge or analyse; and, for a while, I just stay with what I feel; and with the tears.

It is the first step on the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies of the racialized trauma of the centuries of violent enslavement of black people. I am filled with such sorrow. And yet, paradoxically, so grateful, to have such a book as My Grandmother’s Hands: it helps heal me; and in doing so, helps to develop my understanding of the Cezanne portrait before me.

At the time of the rebellion of 1791, there were some half a million enslaved people living in the French colony of Haiti, who were replaced at a rate of 40,000 a year newly enslaved people stolen from Africa. ‘For more than a century, from 1825 to 1950, the price that France insisted Haiti pay for its freedom had one main consequence, namely: that the island’s economic and political development was subordinated to the indemnity. At bottom, the enslaved people of Haiti took the French Revolution’s message of emancipation more seriously than anyone else, including the French, and it cost them dearly.’ Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology makes the economic case for reparations abundantly clear in his chapter on the ‘Extreme Inequality of Slave Societies’. Rage must be brought to completion through reparation.

Francisco Oller, close friend of Cezanne and an Impressionist painter born in San Juan, Puerto Rico, painted a portrait of Cezanne, painting outdoors in 1864, as they spent the day painting and in conversation, with Camille Pissarro, who was born in St Thomas. Oller would return home in 1865 and develop as an abolitionist and painter known for his depictions of decayed sugar plantations and New World class struggles.

I am grateful for Ellen Gallagher and her research; and for pointing out that Scipio wears thick cotton indigo workpants (denim), slave-produced on cotton plantations through-out the Americas; and that Scipio leans on a large bail of cotton. Picking cotton was indeed the immediate cause of the painful trauma of Menakem’s grandmother’s hands.

Sous Bois (FWN 303, 1893-4)

It’s my fourth visit to the Cezanne Exhibition at the Tate Modern in London, and in a moment I know what will happen. I will carefully manoeuvre through five rooms full of Cezanne’s earlier works; and there in the spaciousness of this painting, ‘Sous Bois’, I will join Cezanne in the flow.

The moment comes

I bow,

and wow.

From within

the pulsating heart of an ecosystem

vibrations of colour

embrace us

our purpose

and beyond

expressing the inexpressible

holding the space

for the whole

for a while

be still

live

for a moment

in the flow.

“Right now a moment of time is passing by! 

We must become that moment”

Paul Cezanne.