Panorama of Auvers-sur-Oise FWN83 1873/4 65.2cm x 81.
Arthur Conan Doyle published his first story in 1887, Study in Scarlet. The one that always amuses me is the story about the dog that did not bark – well, one of the main clues is that the dog did not bark when the villain was stealing the horse. Sometimes, it’s as important to look at what didn’t happen, or what’s not there, as it is to look at the evidence itself. In this painting of Auvers, there are three things that aren’t there!
There’s no modelling: that’s the traditional artistic technique of shading objects to show how they recede into the distance (fancy name is chiaroscuro). If we look at the row of cottages on the right, they’re just painted all as boldly as each other – if fact, the furthest one away is the bluer, and more pronounced. Cezanne was quite a perfectionist, and knew how to ‘model’ his paintings; but he didn’t want to do it, because he said it’s not the way we see stuff! Indeed, Cezanne makes quite a habit of not modelling his paintings; so he has to find ways of achieving the same effect. The main reason for modelling is to show ‘depth’ within painting – it’s about producing a 3D effect on a 2D canvass; lots of people do it naturally , but it is a technical method that you can learn at art-school. One of the alternative ways Cezanne uses to describe depth in his paintings is through the judicial placement of buildings or ‘shapes’ (walls, apples, bodies…); if one shape obstructs another, then we the viewer interpret it as one behind and another in front – so, the start of depth. The row of cottages gives depth, as do all the little cottage roofs, and sides of buildings through-out the painting. But for me, what gives the painting the most depth is the curl of the volume of cottages that starts behind the tree in the central foreground: my eye seems drawn up the middle of the painting, in between the row of cottages on the lower right, and the greenery on the lower left, towards the tall white building at the back on the left (which is in fact Dr Gachet’s house), round the back of the village, and back to the front passed the high trees on the right; that swirl of the movement of the eye gives the village depth, and makes it more alive. The row of cottages on the right act more importantly as a funnel for our vision.
Which leads nicely to the second thing that’s not there: the greenery to the left foreground does not act as traditional ‘repoussoir’: this is the fancy name for the technique of putting something up the side of the painting to push the viewer over to what the artist wants us to see. Cezanne uses it quite frequently – think of the Lac D’Annecy, or landscapes overlooking the Mont Saint Victoire eg…..
But here, this greenery is an attempt to locate another ‘plane’ of vision into the painting. In comparison to the rest of the painting it’s even more ‘fuzzy’ or ‘impressionistic’. Cezanne paints it like this because he wants us to see it as the hillside, but not way over to our left, but underneath where we are standing; it’s as if the viewer is standing in the shoes of the painter! So, Cezanne is trying to describe three planes – the spot on the hillside where he’s standing, the swirl of the village below, and the green fields arising on the hills beyond the village.
There is, finally, no fading of clarity, as we see further away. Usually, and most typically in a photograph, the horizon is less clear than the rest of the photo. But not so with Cezanne: there is a broader execution of the paint work towards the horizon, and slightly duller colouring, but the ‘hues, values and textures are distributed evenly enough to create a sense of uniform illumination, a light that encompasses, but does not determine or define” as Richard Shiff would say.
This stuff is all about the ‘form’ of the artwork; Cezanne rejects the traditional form of painting: he wants to be free to express what he feels deep in his being, as he sits with the landscape. In emptiness, there is a radical freedom; in form, there is a radical fullness. More and more, Cezanne will delve into this paradox as he aims for the ‘realization’ of painting to be when emptiness and form are not separate, but one.
One last personal word: for some reason, way down deep in my DNA, I love the reds of Cezanne: they delight me. There are lots of them scattered all around the painting - ‘attenuated and sonorous notes of vermillion’ says the Tate Cezanne exhibition catalogue. It’s a Study Scattered with Scarlet, and I love it!
I’ve said before that every craftsman
searches for what’s not there
to practice his craft.
A builder looks for the rotten hole
where the roof caved in. A water-carrier
picks the empty pot. A carpenter
stops at the house with no door.
Our real hope is for emptiness, so don’t think
you must avoid it.
It contains what we need!
Rumi