Countryside near Aix FWN 31 1865 40.5cm x 59.5
“Provence was Cezanne’s country: he was at home there as nowhere else. His sense of being grounded in so particular and so familiar a place, resonant with memory and emotion, caused him to concentrate much of his extraordinary pictorial intelligence there and to create from that landscape some of the most remarkable and original images of late 19th and early 20th century art…this was the country of his affective bond.” This is how Philip Conisbee introduces his book ‘Cezanne in Provence’. And it’s so, so true; and more, Cezanne was to discover where beauty dwells.
In this painting of the French countryside around Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne is still using his ‘maniere couillarde’ - ballsy - method of applying the paint - finishing off the top layer with full and heavy brushes of paint. Interestingly, that seems to be Mont Saint Victoire in the background: this mountain dominated Cezanne’s landscapes in his final years of life, but here it’s secondary, linked somehow with the diminutive human figure at the lower right.
There was a movement to re-instate the language and traditions of Provence: the Felibrige cultural movement initiated in 1854, by the poet Frederic Mistral. Some of Cezanne’s (and Zola’s) closest friends were involved in the movement: Henri Gasquet, the local baker, (and pipe smoker) remained a close friend of Cezanne all through their lives; Cezanne painted him late in life, trying to capture his ‘stability’ (groundedness, we might say). The son, Joachim Gasquet (who Cezanne also painted) married Marie Girard, described by Cezanne as the ‘ Queen of the Felibrige’. When human society is undergoing tremendous change there can be a variety of reactions, one of which is to re-affirm your roots, to try and re-claim your past, and go back to the way things were. This reaction did not tempt Cezanne, who never got involved in the Felibrige movement, but who, thirty years later, was to paint local people with such solidity; Zola didn’t get involved, describing Mistral as a ‘poet of the past, lost in our century of science’. Cezanne’s painting of Provence is particular, but somehow it’s not ‘regional’; it doesn’t seem to be limited by the place of its origin. How is it possible to love to be Provencal and at the same time, not be provincial? Integral Theory makes use of the idea of ‘Stages (or structures) of Consciousness’. Stages of consciousness represent a measure of our growth and maturity; these stages are to our growth as grammar is to language - they represent the ‘rules’, the structures, that seem to govern the development of maturity; just like ‘grammar’, we don’t usually think about it, we just construct a sentence, without thinking about ‘subject-verb-object’; but we can identify the rules, the structures, that help us construct our communicating. And so, we can also identify the ‘structures of our conscious development’ (our maturity). Furthermore, there appears to be a ‘direction’ in developing maturity; and that direction is to move from the self to the clan to the country and so on. Maturity seems to involve an ever-widening expansion of the heart and mind. Maturity, like beauty, is grounded, but not bounded.
I am at home here, I feel my God is near, in this place
Earth yellow green, red orange clay, star iron blue, sacred space
Out of these colours, we have come whirling, and we dance
Beauty resounds, fullness found, from Provence to boundless grace.