The mountain St Victoire viewed from the Bayeux Bridge at Meyreuil
FWN 228 1886-88 67.5cm x 91.5 Washington USA
There are different kinds of memory. One of the strongest kinds is memory which is stored by way of emotion. It seems that if we can remember the emotion of a place, then we can subsequently build a picture around that emotional memory – we can fill in the details, as it were, by somehow feeling if the details accord with the emotion. But we have to have had a memorable emotion while in that particular place and at that specific time.
“…the sky, the boundless things of nature attract me and give me the chance to look with pleasure” Cezanne wrote these words in a letter to his friend Victor Chocquet in May 1886. Cezanne has left behind the mental distress of the period from the summer of 1885 to the spring of 1886. He has gone through the dissonance of his personal life, and that of his dissatisfaction with Impressionism and his ‘constructivist phase’. How often does it take dissonance in life to create the potential for a change that is deep and transformative!
This painting is so light that it almost looks like a watercolour. Cezanne had always used sketch books through his life, but it was in this period of his development (after 1886) that his watercolours take on a significance, nearly equal to his oil paintings – indeed, he begins to realize that he can paint watercolours in the same way that he can paint with oils, ignoring traditional perspective and hierarchical ordering of the types of media used. Christopher Lloyd, in his book on Cezanne’s drawings and watercolours, quotes Roger Fry saying in 1917 that Cezanne “was always plastic before he was linear”: there’s always more, if we are willing to stretch beyond our boundaries. It’s good to recall Renoir’s words: “How does he do it? He can’t put two strokes of colour on a canvass without it already being very good!”
It’s so interesting, and so revealing, that so many people nowadays take more delight in Cezanne’s work in watercolours and ‘unfinished’ paintings. There is something that deeply resonates with us when presented with less rather than more, open rather than closed, spacious rather than confined, received as gift not imposed by dogma.
Cezanne was discovering that
if he follows his deepest intuition,
a boundlessness is unearthed,
which is lyrical, joyful and serene.
“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift,
and the rational mind is a faithful servant.
We have created a society that honours the servant,
and has forgotten the gift.”
Albert Einstein.