I do hope that you find these blogs are a meditation on beauty; the oil paintings of Paul Cezanne are presented as nourishment for our spiritual journey into the next epoch of human life on this earth. With hindsight, we can appreciate how Cezanne was energized by the epoch change from a society based on industrial growth and materialism to one based on the struggle for a community of humanity. I will use the ideas of Spiral Dynamics Integral Theory as tools for putting Cezanne’s oeuvre in the context of human development, exploring how he came to terms with the sixth great wave of emerging consciousness, just as we ourselves are feeling the energy and turmoil of the subsequent waves of our day.
This is a journey, and like pilgrimages of old, requires time to allow our palette to savour the sweetness of the nourishment. The blogs are presented each week so that the pilgrim can gently but firmly move along in tranquillity. It is a pilgrimage of discovery, where the development of Cezanne’s art is intertwined with the moving tectonic plates of memetic paradigms.
It is a spiritual journey – in the fullest sense of the meaning and import of spirituality in the development of human history: that evolutionary energy which impels and draws us to experience the fullness of living on this earth, discovering personal freedom as part of a larger conscious whole, amongst wondrous diversity, in multiple dimensions, thirsting always for ever more integrated systems. Cezanne’s habit of gently but firmly clasping his hands together, fingers interlocked, aptly signifies this spiritual realization.
Each of the blogs will focus on a different facet, so that by the end of the journey we will have unfolded the four major stages of development of Cezanne’s art and the techniques he used and developed; the magic moments in Cezanne’s life when inspiration dawned; the major themes of his oeuvres; the life conditions of France at the time; and the major influences of his family, friends, and associates. In doing so, we will have the opportunity of exploring our understanding of what are the values by which we wish to live, and there-by enhancing our appreciation of the beauty and colour of our own lives. The first twenty-six or so blogs will cover Cezanne’s early phase of artistic development, up until he was 30 years old, 1869. FWN refers to the online catalogue raisonne under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jayne Warman, and David Nash: The paintings of Paul Cezanne, which in turn was based on the paper catalogue raisonne under the direction of John Rewald, who passed away just before publication.
I hope it will be fun
Mike Bold
click here for link to Catalogue Raisonne Paul Cezanne
What should you do when you wake up, discombobulated or raring to go?
Don’t start working!
Let the beauty you love, be what you do.
: Take down a musical instrument, be still, paint, whatever….
there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi c1250 (adapted)
Of things unknown but longed for still ~ Maya Angelou
Sugar bowl, pears and blue cup FWN 706 1865/6 30cm x 41
Paul Cezanne was well pleased with this little painting– he gave it to his dear friend Emile Zola who kept it till the end of his life. Cezanne would reproduce it as the backdrop to one of the portraits of his father. It’s almost a sculpture using paint – “a sparkling rectangle of crusty paint with colours alone, renouncing lines altogether.” (Rewald)
Science marched on into the 1850’s: Bessemer pioneered mass production of iron and steel; Pasteur invented pasteurization; Lenoir, the internal combustion engine; Monier, reinforced concrete; Sholes, the Qwerty typewriter. In France, 183 financiers in banks, railways and metal firms controlled 20,000m French Francs capital. But something was not right – Zola saw poverty in the urban sprawl of Paris, and Cezanne saw the stagnation of rural life in Provence, Marx saw alienation, Durkheim called it ‘anomie’ (normlessness), and Max Weber, the disenchantment of ordinary people. Here began ‘sociology’ itself.
In the history of human development, 1850 is cast as the date of the start of the sixth great wave of human development: the time when a new era of human values began to emerge in the human collective consciousness; a time when people began to realize that things needed to change. The values of the previous era were based on the amazing and continued success of scientific development, and culminated in industrialization, driven by opportunity for fame, fortune and prosperity; but those same values brought poverty, displacement and social disintegration. The challenge was to discover new values for the forthcoming era.
A free bird leaps on the back of the wind
and floats down stream until the current ends
and dips his wing in the orange sun rays
and dares to claim the sky.
But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage
can seldom see through his bars of rage
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing
the caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for a caged bird sings of freedom
the free bird thinks of another breeze
and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees
and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn
and he names the sky his own
but a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams
his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream
his wings are clipped and his feet are tied
so he opens his throat to sing
the caged bird sings with a fearful trill
of things unknown but longed for still
and his tune is heard on the distant hill
for the caged bird sings of freedom.
Maya Angelou