Still life with open drawer FWN 750 1877-79 33 cm x 41
Male and female bathers FWN 946 1890 22.6 cm x 32.4
There’s a certain synchronicity sometimes in the affairs of humanity; maybe it’s there all the time and we just don’t notice. The Egyptians, ancient Greeks and Chinese all had thoughts about ‘the method of exhaustion’, whereby you divide an irregular shape up into ever smaller and smaller little squares – and then you can add them all up. It is as the name implies – pretty exhausting! Different ideas, often in different disciplines, seem to ferment independently for a while, and then, some bright spark thinks of putting them together, and wham - all of a sudden, their potential is realized: their time has come! Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz both discovered ‘the calculus of the infinitesimal’ at the same time, independently. While the boys were both claiming the glory, (in fact they both worked on different facets of Calculus), the person to bring the two facets together was Maria Gaetana Agnesi.
As far as I can tell, it developed naturally – Cezanne found that by applying the paint in short ‘hache’ of paint, short brush strokes of paint, like commas, he could better describe what he saw. ‘hache’ of course means cut up in little bits – like mince. It was particularly expressive for foliage, adding a shimmering effect. And of course, wonderful with apples: Cezanne is able to use different colours next to each other, as an alternative to the receding colour of traditional perspective, to augment the animation of the fruit: making it come alive!
In 1885, Paul Nipkow, a German inventor, invented the Nipkow disk – a rotating disk, with a formatted system of small square holes arranged in a spiral; and because it’s rotating, it comes alive: you get the picture – shine a light onto the spinning disk, add a lens and projector and you’re half way to a TV. Pointillism would develop in art before the end of the century; but it would take another fifty years before ‘pixels’ sank into our psyche.
I’ve said up to now that Cezanne’s constructivist phase covered most of the 1880’s: but I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. After searching in detail through the online catalogue raisonne, these paintings above are the first and last time Cezanne uses his constructivist style through-out the painting. We might therefore date this phase from the late 1870’s to 1890 – but I think we’d be wrong. I don’t think the date assigned to the bathers painting is correct: I think it should be 1885. Other than this bathers’ painting, there is no other one painted fully in this constructivist style after 1886. That would mean the phase went from 1877 to 1885 (in fact April 1886). I do believe that Cezanne reached an all-time emotional and mental low, that stayed with him from summer 1885 to April 1886; he never thereafter painted using his constructivist style through-out the painting. (cf ‘Spinning’ blog, later)
I quite like the ‘still life with open drawer’: it’s my kind of colours, and I always love Cezanne’s apples. It’s unusual not only because it’s among the first he painted in this constructivist style, but also because he never drew another open drawer. I guess he thought it became a bit of a barrier between the painting and the beholder; he often uses a knife, or a piece of cloth, sticking out over the edge of the table; and that works better to bring the beholder into the painting; whereas the drawer acts like a fence! The other thing to note is that the mirror has no reflection: it reminds me of the clock he painted in his couillarde phase of the 1860’s with no hands (FWN 708). It adds a timeless, dreamlike effect to what is a gentle domestic scene.
I think the bathers painting is wrongly dated for the reason I’ve suggested above – namely that it doesn’t fit in with Cezanne’s artistic development. It was originally dated 1890 by Venturi (who produced one of the first catalogues of Cezanne’s works), but he subsequently changed his dating to 1885. Rewald – who produced the latest catalogue, and on whose work the online catalogue, FWN, is based – puts the date back to 1890, but I’m not sure why. He has no commentary on this painting in the two-volume bound catalogue. From the provenance of the painting, it seems that it remained amongst Cezanne’s possessions at home, and when he passed away, all the paintings at home were passed on to his dealer, Vollard, by Hortense and son Paul. Vollard was at this time in partnership with the brothers and gallerie Bernheim-Jeune. They in turn began a partnership with a Prince of Wagram (Alexander Berthier): he it is who is marked down as the first owner of this bathers painting (1906). The partnership broke up in some disarray, reputably because the Prince did not pay his bills. Where the date of 1890 came from, seems a bit of a mystery – and to me, a bit dubious.
While the style of small brush strokes works well for foliage – trees, bushes – and even the grass of the earth, and clouds, (landscape painting that is), it’s not as effective for the human form. By the late 1880’s, Cezanne has not ceased to make use of the hached brushstrokes, but uses them more sparingly; they remain a valuable tool in his box of tricks, but he acquires more and more tools, and learns to use them as and when required. By the time he reaches his mature phase from the 1890’s onwards, the last fifteen years of his life, he has acquired a full toolbox, and can work creatively and give fullest expression, without having to find new ways of applying the paint.
It is a strange and wonderful thing that the de-construction of the application of paint into small commas of different coloured paint enabled the next generation of artists to behold objects, not simply as objects but as relationships within a context. And it is the discovery of the importance of beholding ‘things within a context’ that sets the scene for the introduction of the next phase in the evolutionary development of humanity. From now on, there is no longer any absolute truth, beyond; there is ‘my truth within my context’, and ‘yours’, and ‘yours’. In this phase, our calling is to accept each other’s truth, in the belief that, if we allow our deepest truth to shine through without fear or aggression, this will not bring conflict, but growth, and thence fulfilment to each and every one.
For great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.
Vincent Van Gogh 1853-1890
You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.
Alvin Toffler 1928 - 2016