Portrait of Madame Cezanne FWN 475 1885/6 46cm x 38 private collection
One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began;
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice-
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world..
Mary Oliver
In the couple of years after Cezanne’s year of mental turmoil, he painted his wife Madame Hortense Fiquet Cezanne more than half a dozen times; and more than a dozen times within the four-year period before 1890. One day, in that short time, he finally knew what he had to do; and he began.
He would paint, not objects as they would appear in a photo: not a representation of a subject, nor the distinguishing features; not the emotions expressed in the face, nor the manner of the sitter; not the personality, nor the status of the one before him; not his wife nor the mother of his son; not his lover, nor his inspiration, nor a goddess. No! He would paint the moment: the changing and emerging moment of life’s unfolding, of which the artist, though unseen, is an integral part. Susan Sidlauskas in her book on Cezanne’s Other, describes it thus: “what is disclosed and concealed fluctuates in the act of perception, what is apparent and what is intuited never achieves balance”. The word ‘balance’ is a bit ambiguous. Like a pendulum, it can be ‘in balance’ when it is completely at rest, or when it is moving. Here, it is the movement of the painting, between what is apparent and what is intuited: it’s in the eyes!
There had been plenty voices around him, shouting their advice: from the general public’s reaction at the impressionist exhibitions to the art critics of the day. And now, even Zola, his life-long friend and companion, had lost hope in him: the artist with the temperament, but not the ability.
Cezanne was heading for fifty years of age; at thirty, he had imbued treasures of painting technique and personal growth from his self-professed mentor Pissarro as he grew to lighten both his palette and his soul; at forty, he had painted vividly and with joie de vivre, exhilarated in the open air and open spirit, standing alongside, shoulder to shoulder, with Renoir, Monet, Sisley, Morisot, Gauillaumin, Pissarro, Gauguin, Achille Emperaire – a whole new era, young and vibrant; and at forty-five, he had delighted in the shimmering effects of using little strokes of individual colour to construct the painting. And then, he had been broken by the criticism, the antagonism of family, and the end of companionship with Zola. Yet, he still had to paint.
It was not that Cezanne retired to Provence, and lived like a hermit; no, he did in fact continue to travel and often stay in Paris. We shall see how he painted quite a few landscapes to the east of Paris, along the Marne, after it leaves the Seine and loops round below the Bois de Boulogne in the district of Creteil, and he did go and visit his friend Chocquot in Hattenville, Normandy: but he did not ‘mix’ with the old crew. He never saw Zola, on the other side of Paris; and he had no wish to engage with the art world. Long gone were his old tricks – pushing three paintings in a wheelbarrow for acceptance in the Academy Beaux Arts. No, the desire to conquer Paris with an apple had passed; but the passion for a realization sur nature burned ever deeper.
He painted what he felt, and he felt deeply. We, Cezanne and ourselves, who are used to Western rational thought tend to think of feelings, or sensations, as something other than thought: it’s a dichotomy that has plagued us for a very long time. For Cezanne, what he did when he painted, did not allow this dichotomy to hold. We shall see how Cezanne strove for a ‘realization sur nature’ that was not an attempt to imitate nature, capture it or stabilize it, “but to participate with it in its coming to be”. It was, what we might now call, active contemplation.
“One minute
in the life of the world
is going by;
paint it as it is”.
Paul Cezanne