The Cutting, with Montagne Sainte Victoire 1870 FWN 54 80cm x 129
The railway cutting itself, in the centre of this painting, reminds me of Cezanne’s painting of a leg of lamb (FWN 705): it’s like the hillside is the Sunday roast joint, being sliced for the feast. I’m no vegetarian, but it somehow makes me shiver! The house to the left, on top of the hill recoils somewhat, and looks rather aghast as Mont Saint Victoire becomes no longer part of the same landscape. It’s pretty brutal, like the charged atmosphere of unrest on the eve of the devastating Franco-Prussian war; a country divided. As he’s done before, (cf The Summer of ’66, Bennecourt, FWN 42), Cezanne puts together the religious and industrial symbols of chimney and church spire (the venerable old church of Saint Sauveur in Aix is on the horizon above the cutting to the right of the chimney) with the symbol of industrial development much larger than that of the spiritual. The impact in this painting lies in the horizontals, beginning with the wall over which we behold this raw cutting; there is no gap in the wall, no invitation into the painting; rather, the horizontals act as an affront. The painting is the first to include Mont Saint Victoire, but in a supporting role. There are other landscapes that have a mountain in the background, and indeed Cezanne had a doodle at this same landscape in 1864 (FWN 48), but this is the first proper attempt. Cezanne is now moving into his Impressionist phase of painting (1870’s), when he lightens his palette and begins more consistently to paint outdoors. His focus in these decades was on coastal landscapes – around the Bay of Marseilles. He painted just two paintings of Mont Saint Victoire in the 1870’s, ten in the 1880’s, 8 in the 1890’s and 16 after the turn of the century (1900 to his death in 1906). For the last five years of his life, Cezanne’s contemplation of Mont Sainte Victoire took on monumental proportions.
“If you trust in Nature, in what is simple in Nature, in the small things that hardly anyone sees and that can so suddenly become huge, immeasurable; if you have this love for what is humble and try very simply, as someone who serves, to win the confidence of what seems poor: then everything will become easier for you, more coherent and somehow more reconciling, not in your conscious mind perhaps, which stays behind, astonished, but in your innermost awareness, awakeness, and knowledge.”
"Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly" Rainer Maria Rilke