Paul Alexis reading to Emile Zola FWN 602 1870 130cm x 160
Henri Fantin-Latour Studio of the Batignolles 1870 204cm x 273.5 cm
Paris Rebellion March 1871
“Four days later, on the 18th March, the insurrection broke out…For two months, I lived on the streets, in the furnace: cannon fire day and night, and towards the end, shells flying over my head into the gardens at the back. Finally, on the 10th May, I was threatened with arrest as a hostage; with the help of a Prussian passport, I fled and went to Bonnieres to spend the worst days there!” So wrote Emile Zola to his close friend Paul Cezanne, as the Communards of Paris fought the now combined forces of the defeated Emperor’s army and the invading Prussian army. Zola is lucky to escape the final, bloody week of destruction of the communards, 21st to 28th May 1871. Cezanne was holed up somewhere in the countryside around L’Estaque, hiding from conscription, with his partner Hortense, who was just pregnant.
It was so different when they were at school, just 10 years before: Cezanne was the strong one, defending the small Zola from the school bully; now Zola was in the thick of it, while Cezanne was in hiding. Zola was living with determination: he would be a writer, and what’s more, he had a vision! Cezanne was living with uncertainty: he wanted to be an artist, and he borrowed the vision of the Impressionists! The 1870’s was the decade when Zola made it.
Henri Fantin-Latour painted the group of artists and writers who met in the Café Guerbois, of 11 Grande-rue des Batignolles. Manet, at the easel, is the elder leader of the Batignolles Group, Zola is the bearded one posing, standing above the guy sitting down (Astruc), and Renoir with the hat, facing to the left; Bazille is the tall guy in tartan trousers, and Monet behind him; strangely no Pissarro; not so strangely, no Cezanne. The press nicknamed the group, rather disparagingly: Jesus and his disciples. And Zola, who was rather aggressively anti-Catholic, continued Jesus’ prayer, in the letter to Cezanne: “A new Paris is being born – it’s our kingdom come!”
This large work of Cezanne depicts Paul Alexis reading to Zola; Cezanne uses pretty dark colours, and it’s obviously before Cezanne is tutored by Pissarro: it’s really from Cezanne’s first artistic phase of the 1860’s. The figure of Zola is unfinished, and represents just the first application of paint on canvass – it would appear that the Franco-Prussian invasion of Paris’ commune interrupted the work. Paul Alexis, from Aix himself, was a lifelong friend to both Cezanne and Zola. He moved to Paris to become a writer, and became the kind of secretary to the Impressionists. He it is who drafted their “constitution”, or maybe they thought of it more as a manifesto!: “the collective is not a sect, but an association; uniting interests, not systems, and soliciting the support of all the workers who aligned themselves with such a cause….as a matter of principle, we want no school…only those with some fire in their belly, and nature, in the open air.” These appear to be the ‘minutes’ of a discussion at the Café Guerbois.
Zola had already seen his vision, formulated in a philosophy (naturalism), and encapsulated in a series of books (his monumental 20-novel series charting the family fortunes of Les Rougon-Macquart): “I want to portray,” he writes: “at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself to possess all the good things that progress is making available, and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a New World”. For Zola, his philosophy meant telling it as it is – no theory, no moralizing, no religious interpretation, no philosophizing! The raw, sordid, brutal, violent life history of one family, and what the Industrial Revolution and its New Age meant for them! These were the necessary pangs of the birth of a New Age; collateral damage, we might say.
Cezanne had no such philosophy, and no such vision; but there was something deep down, something not yet expressed, not yet formulated in words, ink or paint. So, encouraged by his school-mate, he joined the crew, and became an Impressionist artist. And for ten years, that’s what he did – learning what it was like to paint outdoors, free from the schools and their formulas, experiencing the brightness of the day, and the shimmering colours of the afternoon sun, and the full richness of the evening’s intensity.
Happy he was, mostly; but fulfilled? Not yet. He had not yet found a vision to live by….
“Make your intention clear:
- to be in service to life.
make it with humility
make it with honesty
about what you have to face.
coz actually, it’s a real joy
living with purpose.
Make your prayer;
and join us on the streets”
Gayle Bradbrook
Non-violent Direct Action.
Extinction Rebellion April 2019