La Maison du Perdu - The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise FWN 81 1873 55cm x66
What a drama this painting is! – dancing, intense, energetic, focused, expansive: tactile. It’s like a knitted jumper! I remember when I saw it first, in the Museum D’Orsay in Paris, being struck by the intensity of the yellow bush, right bang in the centre, bursting out from the “V” of the roofs, with the swirl of the path and foliage drilling down at its unseen roots – the dazzlingly bright yellow bush, vibrant, pushing both cottages back, so that they lean back, lean back, lean back… I saw the painting again at the exhibition here in London at the Tate, and yea – it had the same effect!
Amazing!
If ever you’re in Paris, do go gaze, spend your days, in its haze!
Cezanne was happy with this painting (he signed it!); more than happy, he was proud of it, and more than proud of it! – if he didn’t do nothing else for the rest of his life, this would make up for it all!
It’s good on so many levels, and he knew it.
We can identify four elements that seem to inform all individual beings, all individual life-forms as we know it; we’ve mentioned ‘communion’ in a previous blog; here I want to suggest another element: “agency” – it is that ability to do stuff; “ability” is too weak a word, coz it’s not something you learn in a classroom; it resides in your deep, deepest heart, soul, whatever you call that part of yourself that must express itself. By ‘Agency’ I mean doing stuff that expresses the real you, that fulfils your potential, and in doing so, it fulfils your destiny. It’s powerful – in the sense that it empowers you, because you suddenly see that you can act from within your own power, your own agency. Once you’ve done it, once you’ve acted from within your own power, then it stays with you for your whole life through: it’s your solid ground! Or better, it’s your expression of your solid ground.
(think: Rumi’s poem - Let the beauty we love, be what we do)
That’s why Cezanne chose this painting for the Impressionist Exhibition of 1874; that’s why he had it exhibited in exhibitions again and again, through-out his life. When the criticism of the press and public got too much, when even Zola would doubt the efficacy of his work, Cezanne could return to this painting, and re-engage with his own strength. And so could other painters too: a certain Count Camondo, expressing a rather understated hesitancy, was encouraged to buy this painting by Monet, and recalls –“Well, yes, I’ve bought this painting which isn’t accepted by everyone yet….But I’m covered! I have a signed letter from Claude Monet, who has given me his word of honour that this painting is destined to become famous…I keep the letter pinned to the back of the canvas… and show it to friends who think I’m soft in the head!”
Matisse, in an interview much later in 1925 said: “I am very surprised that anybody can wonder whether the lesson of the painter of ‘The House of the Hanged Man’ and ‘The Cardplayers’ is good or bad. If you only knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life. In moments of doubt, when I was searching for myself, and sometimes frightened by my own discoveries, I thought: ‘If Cezanne is right, I am right. And I knew that Cezanne had made no mistake!” Cezanne became the artists’ artist.
But, who’s the guy who was hanged in this house then? And was this why Cezanne painted his house? I think not! - I think we’ve been led down the garden path! Despite much research, there is no evidence or any reference anywhere to any hanging connected with this house, or Auvers for that matter! It is in this same year 1873, that Cezanne and Pissarro were painting together in the village of Auvers, that they were also working in Dr Gachet’s study, with Gauillaumin using the printing press there, and doing etchings (Pissarro produced political pamphlets – extinction rebellion kind of stuff). One of those etchings, done by Cezanne of Guillaumin, has in the top left hand corner, the figure of a hanged man, drawn like the game in English called “hangman”; in French called “Le Pendu”. I reckon, the three of them was playing “Le Pendu” in their coffee and croissant breaks! Hence, when it comes to the First Impressionist Exhibition, the painting gets the title “La Maison (de le = ) du Pendu”. Subsequently, critics and writers have waxed lyrical on how the painting conjures up the atmosphere of a hanged man; and the misinterpretation compounds even more when Zola writes a novel where the main character, an underachieving artist, hangs himself in despair! Suffice to say: Cezanne himself refers to this painting simply as “a cottage in Auvers”.
I want to mention three other things arising from this painting: about Cezanne’s use of colour – the paints he used; Cezanne’s ‘construction’ of the painting; and about ‘memetics’ – the study of the propagation of ideas (memes/information). I hope you don’t mind an extra long blog!
of Cezanne’s colours and its application fantastic though it is when you achieve it, expressing your own potential, your own power, takes hard work and dedication! (no pain, no gain!) The ‘Cottage in Auvers’ has a dozen or so colours, all of them bright: cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue (pure and mixed with azurite) viridian, Verdigris, emerald green, yellow ochre (or Mars yellow), chrome yellow, and vermillian, and white. Over time, Cezanne would add to these: brilliant yellow, Naples Yellow, raw sienna, Indian red, burnt sienna, madder lake, carmine lake, burnt crimson lake, green earth, Prussian blue, peach black. Individual strokes of paint can often be a mix of five colours. It was not uncommon for Cezanne to take twenty minutes between each stroke of paint. Here in this painting, where possible, Cezanne uses the natural, organic oil-paint made from the object that he paints. He also uses the application of the paint in a ‘representational’ way; thus, the brushstrokes of the green verge are horizontal (like ‘bricks’ of paint), to express the breadth of the landscape; while the rising vertical greens of the trees, painted with long upward strokes, point to the sky, and to depth. Cezanne maintains the discipline of this brushwork though-out the painting.
of ‘construction’ I’ve pointed out how Cezanne uses the actual brushstrokes to represent not just the objects in view, but their relationship to breadth and depth in this painting. We’ve also seen before (in the gift of self-worth blog) how Cezanne likes to stick a ‘V’ in the centre of his paintings. “I too” he would say later in life “was an Impressionist, I won’t hide it! Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. But I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art of museums.” And he did it too: chiefly by ‘constructing’ the paintings so as to achieve the effect of solidity. His next phase is usually described as his ‘constructivist phase’.
of memetics It is possible in this painting to identify the first three stages of human development by which we discover our understanding of how ‘meaning’ works. The first stage (think of child development) is the appreciation of an ‘image’ – the child gets to a stage where she can identify the family dog ‘Fido’ by looking at a photo of Fido. The second stage is when she can understand that the written word ‘F i d o’ indicates the family dog; we say that the written word ‘Fido’ is a symbol for the actual family dog, Fido. The third stage is when she understands that the word ‘dog’ signifies not just Fido, but all dogs. ‘Image-symbol-concept’ is a developmental emergence that we all go through, and it underpins our ability to understand how we assign meaning -the study of memetics. The emergence of the child’s understanding to the level of ‘concepts’ paves the way for the understanding of objects, and language, thence her own intentionality, and thereby begins the emergence of the independent person.
Cezanne uses natural pigments to signify the natural objects from which we get the pigments.(representation as an image); Cezanne uses the brick shaped brush strokes of the green verge and the dramatic curve of the road as a symbol of movement, cascading down into the village, in contrast with the still blue expanse of sky. (representation as a symbol). Thus it is, that we can understand the ‘concept’ of the painting as the unfolding emergence of a cottage in Auvers. (representation as a concept).
This is my summary of one of the main theses of Joyce Medina’s book: Cezanne and Modernism, the poetics and memetics, of painting; I bought it in 1995, and still haven’t got to the bottom of it yet – it’s dense!…but I find it fascinating, and so relevant in this Age of Information, and memes!
One last point, to bring us back to the painting – what are the two trees at the top left doing growing out of the roof of the cottage? Maybe covering up a game of hangman?
and, finally, some grounding
Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breathe. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.
Joy Harjo