La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves FWN 351 1902-04 69.8 cm x 89.5
“Taking the right fork down a lane called Chemin des Marguerites, you come to a large sloping meadow that opens up on the right. It was here, on a knoll with views towards the east, that Cezanne undertook his last and most heroic paintings and watercolours of Montagne Sainte Victoire. Seen from this vantage, the mountain presents its most dramatic profile: the gentle contours of the Northern slope crest in a stupendous peak of rock, then fall steeply away to spread over the broad slopes of Le Cengle. Before it, lies the wide plain northeast of Aix, a patchwork of walled fields, farm buildings, and copses of trees.” (Tate Cezanne Catalogue p486)
We’ve travelled in these blogs through the first three stages of Cezanne’s development as an artist, and I hope you are able to situate his work within the historical and evolutionary development of the 1800’s in France. It was a time, like ours, of transition from one era to another; indeed, three major eras came to overlap, and co-exist – like the crunching together of the earth’s tectonic plates: the era of Tradition, the era of Modernism, and the beginnings of the era of Post-Modernism. Since the time of Cezanne, the era of Post-Modernism has fully developed, and is available for people who feel moved by the values thereby expressed. A fourth ‘plate’, or ‘value-system’, has now come on-line with the civil rights movements of the 1960’s which focuses on the importance and contribution of indigenous, minority and diverse groups, and a fifth one is glimpsed by the artists and prophets of our day, as we begin to move towards the possibility of eras that are expressive of values that enfold the earth and all living beings; and of eras that embrace the cosmos itself.
The first three stages of Cezanne’s development – his ‘ballsy’ phase of the 1860’s, his Impressionist phase of the 1870’s and his ‘constructivist’ phase up to 1886 – lasted for just more than half of his artistic life, some 25 years. His final, mature phase lasted twenty years. And it’s this phase that I will concentrate on in my blogs beginning early in 2021. In some way I want to say that Cezanne has fully developed the techniques he has been searching for over the past twenty years, and now he is free to concentrate on the realization of the painting. But I don’t want to separate his ‘technique’ from his ‘motif’: painting for Cezanne would remain a contemplative and unitive practice.
As we develop our consciousness and complexity, human beings face ever more challenge: firstly, our ability to hold ourselves in peace and respect when so many different value-systems exist at one time; and secondly, our ability to live sustainably.
It is noticeable that Cezanne more and more paints series of paintings – the card-players, the large bathers, a series of skulls, and of course Mont St Victoire. This series of paintings of Montagne Saint Victoire seen from des Lauves was among the last landscapes that Cezanne worked on before he passed away. The series speaks with an urgency and an anticipation, and of cosmic dynamism.
We have reached the stage in human development when we have the capacity to destroy the very ecosystem that maintains us, or the potential to co-create an ecosystem that is in balance, in integrity, and is wholesome.
This kind of development is not linear: at every paradigmatic stage there is a choice to move up and beyond: to include the goodness of the previous stage, to resolve any negativity, and transcend to a more complex stage. It does not happen by chance, randomly, nor without dissonance. In short, we have to work at it, with design, purpose and with commitment.
This is a short summary of the philosophical model that I will be using to examine Cezanne’s Oeuvre; it is usually referred to as ‘Integral Dynamics’ and developed out of ‘Spiral Dynamics’. One of its main advocates and exponents is Ken Wilber. I use this philosophical model because it works for me: I find that it provides me with a way of receiving experiences positively, enabling me to understand in an integrated way, and it provides an inclusive practice for developing myself and responding wholesomely to the challenges of our era. It also works well with regard to understanding Cezanne’s oeuvre because it allows for interpretation that is developmental; we can allocate meaning retrospectively with validity because we can situate historical events within the movement of the evolutionary process. We can see the big picture.
“The structure is more and more implied, and less and less apparent” (Lionello Venturi 1943, the first person to compile a complete catalogue of Cezanne’s work). One of the facets of Cezanne’s later work is the place of more ‘abstract’ paintings; these are unlike the Impressionists’ series – for instance, Monet’s series painted at different times of the day, in different light. To paint a series of paintings of the same motif in different light presupposes an intention, and that act of intention, of pre-disposition to do something, is not present in Cezanne’s paintings of the mountain. Each painting is free and spontaneous, unbounded and wild.
“The ultimate metaphysical secret, if we dare state it so simply, is that there are no boundaries in the universe. Boundaries are illusions, products not of reality but of the way we map and edit reality.” Ken Wilber
This ‘seeing the big picture’ is not simply a process of looking back into history, but also includes being aware of where the future is beckoning us to venture – the emergent future. This has traditionally been the task of artists, musicians, poets, witches, wise sages, prophets and visionaries; but now it is at once more and more becoming the realm and passion of ordinary people, and also the realm of cutting edge developmental theory (Otto Scharmer’s Theory U, for instance, or, Extinction Rebellion’s self-organizing groups). It holds the possibility of the re-unification in a new form yet to emerge of the Spiritual and Scientific Realms: between which stretches the chasm that is at the heart of the development and damage, the hegemony and dominance of the Western World based on Industrial Growth.
“I have one major rule: Everybody is right. More specifically, everybody — including me — has some important pieces of truth, and all of those pieces need to be honoured, cherished, and included in a more gracious, spacious, and compassionate embrace…… The truth will not necessarily set you free, but truth-fullness will” Ken Wilber.
Cezanne felt the rock formation on the mountain top has been made out of the fire of the earth’s living geology, and that even now millions of years later, the mountain top reaches up to attract the sun’s heat unto itself to renew our life-force ever anew.
And when
all the birds have flown up and gone
a lonely cloud floats leisurely by
we never tire of looking at each other
only the mountain and I-and-I
Li Po
701 to 762
Poet of the Tang Dynasty
(adapted)
I hope to begin blogs for Cezanne’s mature phase of painting in January 2021 – see you next year!