Flowers in a vase FWN 732 1877 56cm x 46
How lovely is this! I invite you just to gaze, take a moment from your days, let feelings stir and words concur, for a while, and sit with a smile ……
Lots of colours beautifully blended, in such a way that it’s full, fresh, alive; simple and natural; expressive, blessed; deep as the ocean, expansive as the sky; whole and respectful; swirling, wild, tumbling – these are the words that concurred with my feelings.
I say the colours are beautifully blended, but not mixed together: the paint is applied in an “impasto” way, so that you can still see the brushstrokes in the finished painting. This does two things – it literally lifts the paint towards you, and so we instinctively move towards it; and it maintains the freshness of the painting. Its fullness is formulated in the fountain of the flowers flourishing and full. It’s so fresh that it appears not quite finished. It’s alive as your eye dances to make sense of the different perspectives. The uniform background adds simplicity to the natural richness of its grounded setting. It expresses itself in the joy of living, supported by the light blue and green and brown of ocean and sky. It is a whole experience, each floret demurely gathered, yet all looking aside. The blue of the base of the vase swirls around, and the colours intermingle wildly. The greens of the leaves tumble down, unconnected by paint but brought into communion with us: “A communion of paints”, as Derek Walcott would say.
“One of the finest of Cezanne’s bouquets” says Stirling in his “Great French Paintings of the Hermitage Museum”…”Its savage luxuriance, its minute richness, the simple opposition to a uniform background are traits of an Impressionist seeking to capture and to impose the sensation of a vegetative life bursting with sap and colour.” Stirling wrote these words in 1958, but in 1877 very few people would have agreed! One critic describes how his elderly companion is driven completely insane by the time he reaches the last room of the Impressionist Exhibition, dancing round crying “Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho, I’m an Impression, I’m an avenging palette knife, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho; Monet and Cezanne, Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho…” The first few Impressionist Exhibitions (1874 – 1877) were a disaster. True, Monet and Bazille had considered an exhibition of Independent artists ten years earlier, but then the Franco-Prussian war of 1870 happened; then, just as the young Republic was finding her feet, in 1874, recession blew in across the Channel. The Industrial Revolution of Britain was roaring ahead of any other Western country, such that over-production was sending prices down, and French markets were being swamped with cheap foreign (British) goods, undercutting the home production. The initial jubilation of the Third Republic began to waver as the reality of economic recession hit hard. People didn’t have the time or money for this new-fangled impressionistic art stuff….
Yes, true enough, but I think there’s something more, and it’s to do with the way we see, and the way human beings develop. I love the story of Archimedes climbing into a bath of hot water one night, and suddenly realizing that the displacement of water offers an easy way of measuring the volume of his irregular body! Sometimes the penny just drops, and we see it, clear as the day. In fact it’s so clear, we wonder why we didn’t see it before – it’s obvious! Not only that, but it becomes obvious for everybody else. We call these moments: ‘awakenings’, or ‘paradigm shifts’. It’s as if we need to move up a gear! But, wow, are they challenging! In 1877, people suggested Impressionists were mad: ‘what on earth are they doing to our art!’; but by 1957, people meditated mindfully: ‘yea, that’s lovely’.
“The great and rare mystics of the past were in fact ahead of their time, and still ahead of ours; in other words, they most definitely are not figures of the past, but figures of the future. In their spirituality, they did not tap into yesterday, they tapped into tomorrow; in their profound awareness, we do not see the setting sun, but a new dawn; they absolutely did not inherit the past; they inherited the future.”
Ken Wilber
Integral Dynamics