Pot of primroses and fruit FWN 812 1888/90 45 cm x 54 Courtauld
I love the colours and shapes, the intermingling, the oscillating, pulsating back and forth between pear and wall, performing a delightful dance. Small steps of tone and colour to enhance the range of neutral grey; finely circumscribed are the edges. The twirl of pears and leaves, the bestowing of a clarity and a precision in geometric form. The adorning of imperfect ellipses of the plate, which swirl in a clockwise spiral out and around; the embracing of the potted primrose.
This small still-life is anything but still: it pulsates back and forth, inviting our eyes to dance and swirl – it is so delightful, and, well, beyond clever!
Octave Maus, who was arranging a somewhat ‘avantgarde’ exhibition in Brussels wrote to Cezanne, and, in the ensuing correspondence, Cezanne is at pains to point out that he is not ‘disdainful of exhibitions’, but rather tries to stay far from them personally, because he feels he cannot respond adequately to critique; he doesn’t know how to explain what he’s doing: “I have resolved to work in silence,” he writes “until the day when I should feel capable of defending theoretically the results of my endeavours”. Cezanne did not know what he was doing! – or rather: he could not express in ink, what he was able to express in paint. Why was this?
Cezanne was a person who was very well educated; who could read, write and converse in classical Latin; he had studied Classical literature and Art; he had a phenomenal memory and could recite whole reams of poetry, and prose; he had completed a few years of a Law Degree; he read voraciously, of literature ancient and modern, poetry and prose, of newspapers and journals. His friends included professors of optics, evolutionary theory, engineering and science. It cannot convincingly be maintained that he lacked cognitive prowess: he was clever.
Richard Kendall provides an answer in his book “Cezanne: by himself”, in these words - “Paradoxically, Cezanne has found it necessary to depart from reality in order to be truthful to it, to accentuate, to suppress, to break down, and to re-assemble the complex experience of three-dimensional vision onto a two-dimensional canvass.” Here, the problem is seen as the difficult task of expressing something that is three-dimensional, onto a canvass, which is two-dimensional. The problem is seen as reducing the dimensions from three to two. So, Kendall supposes that the primary way of accomplishing this task is ‘to break down and re-assemble’. So, he explains how Cezanne makes the two front pears perfectly circular and splits the back of the table-top into three levels to give an impression of receding away into the distance, making our eyes focus back and forth on front pear and then back wall; and has the plate swirling in imperfect ellipses: clever techniques!
It is what the rational mind has been doing for a few centuries in the West, and doing it so efficiently, with such abundant success. It is a process of analysis, based on the belief that breaking something down into its constituent parts will reveal the ‘reality’, the truth.
Cezanne I believe is doing more: he is expressing a ‘reality’ that is beheld not simply as three dimensional, but rather as multi-dimensional. The process travels in the other direction, away from analysis and reductionism; towards an openness and synthesis that includes and transcends. This is a new way of seeing reality: it is something that is conceptually new: a new value-system or meme framework. This is why Cezanne has such trouble expressing it in words – because the conceptual framework did not yet exist in human consciousness.
Such new conceptual frameworks and value-systems are not beheld by cognitive prowess: they are not a function of intelligence, of being clever. That’s why one so clever as Cezanne, with such a range of artistically clever techniques, was still not able to “defend theoretically the results of his endeavours”.
May my mind come alive today
to the invisible geography
that invites me to new frontiers,
to break the dead shell of yesterdays,
to risk being disturbed and changed.
May I have the courage today
to live the life that I would love,
to postpone my dream no longer
but do at last what I came here for
and waste my heart on fear no more.
John O’Donohue