House and farm at the Jas de Bouffan FWN 238 1887 60 cm x 73 Prague
“Plasticity refers to the degree of dimensionality in an object, and the active interplay between positive volume and surrounding space. The term comes from the Greek word plassein, meaning “to mould.” (V. Palermo)
In his 1895 essay “Is Life Worth Living?” the American philosopher William James wrote, “Truly, all we know of good and duty, proceeds from nature… [which] is all plasticity and indifference – a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a universe”.
Back in 1895, it was extremely challenging to suggest the possibility of different Truths: so challenging it made people ask whether life was worth living if things were so chaotic! I think to myself it all started with the idea that the earth goes round the sun! A crazy idea – to suggest that we humans (men..?) are not the centre of attention and meaning in this universe! That we humans may not be the highest intelligence that there is, with a soul that can reach to the infinite. That all we see, and touch, and hear and smell, and taste, may not give us clues to discover the absolute truth of the universe, through the rationality of our mind. Crazy to suggest that Truth may not be absolute and unchanging, and that we do not see it as it is.
Crazy, and frightening, to suggest that the ‘universe’ is ‘in fact’ (whatever that means) a multiverse!
The Cezanne patriarch, Louis Auguste, Cezanne’s dad, bought the Jas de Bouffan in 1859, – or, rather, he accepted the dilapidated ruins as settlement of a debt to his fledgling bank - when Cezanne was twenty years old. Some thirty years on, and Cezanne had never painted a full-frontal painting with the house itself as the central motif (he painted one in 1875 where the upper half of the house sticks out of the trees and bushes of the garden) : yes, Cezanne had painted the alley of chestnut trees, and the pond, and the view across the fields, and yes, maybe with the farm buildings in the background – but never the house itself: till 1887, when he painted it twice (cf below, House with Red Roof) (probably, I think, he painted the two canvasses, though from different settings, at the same time). Cezanne paints the house of the ‘House and Farm’, with all the shutters and windows wide open, to blow away the cobwebs of the past, to allow the mistral to clear the space and tilt the volume, and to signal the end of an era: a fitting memory of his father who passed away in late 1886, and the symbol of a new era of plasticity, that stretches our notion of truth into multi-dimensional beauty.
Yea, life is worth living! This painting makes me smile: it’s initially the colours – brown ochre, reds, blues, greens; the fantastic assortment of colours in the garden wall! But when I settle myself into my smile, it becomes apparent that my smile has two sources: it’s as if the smile comes out towards me from within the main house; but then there’s a smile from within me directed towards the farm buildings. There’s some kind of ‘spacious openness’ coming from the main house, and a ‘tight complexity’ from the farm buildings. (the tight complexity of the farm building is created in the juxtaposed verticality of buildings, encircled by the garden wall and the hill behind). House, and Farm Buildings, create a kind of ‘push and pull’ effect, in the dimension of the depth perspective.
The dimension of the breadth of the vista is equally fascinating, dynamic and delightful. At first, you think that the foundation wall of the main building and the garden wall, form a continuous plane, extending right across the painting, left to right. But, then, the foundation wall at the very left, narrows, as it meets the bush; and the path bends round towards the side of the house. Now, our eye is directed right round the side of the house, up and over the roof; and so we’ve moved from the breadth, to the depth, in two little turns of the brush strokes. This is balanced on the far right of the garden wall: the wall grows wider, with parallel lines behind it, which give it depth – so again, we have been moved from breath to depth. Finally in this movement from breadth to depth, we see the ‘S’ shape that the foundation wall and the garden wall create across the painting, only broken by the funny little construction in the garden, which is both part of the garden and, though not within the farm buildings, is part of the farm buildings in its effect. The wall effect is softened by the bands of foliage green and earth brown.
Two American professors, Erle Loran and Pavel Machotka, published books which, by using photographs of the motif from different angles, included in-depth analysis of the ‘House and Farm’ painting; both wanted to show that Cezanne painted this motif as he actually saw it! I think both analyses rather miss the point: we don’t have to reduce Cezanne’s painting to the likeness of a photograph. It’s the old-school instinct of the scientific mind that attempts to get us to reduce things to the ‘basic facts’ in the belief that what is true resides there, and only there – in the flatlands of reductionism. (cf footnote for further info if you’re interested!)
The ‘House with the red roof’ (below) is so colourful, and delightfully designed with diagonal dashes of paint; if you can open the painting in full screen, you can delight in the interplay of colours bright and complementary, warm and dazzling. It’s a beautiful rendition of Cezanne’s Impressionist and Constructivist phase wrapped into one wonderful painting. The ‘House with the red roof’ below includes where Cezanne’s art has come from. The ‘House and Farm’ above goes beyond where he’s come from and indicates where he wants to go.
House with red roof FWN 241 1887 (-9) 73 cm x 92 Private, Germany
Braque and Picasso were able to behold where Cezanne wanted to go, in his search to transcend the boundaries of traditional art and open a multiverse of meaning and form through the application of colour on canvass. Here’s Braque’s ‘Glass on a table’, which is so reminiscent for me of the farm buildings in Cezanne’s ‘House and Farm’.
Braque Glass on a table 1909
A Poem of Many Dimensions
Pity the poor Flatlanders,
Squashed flat within the plane,
No height to see, just width and depth;
Their life oh so mundane.
Their shape is that of squares,
And Triangles, and others.
But, woe, a simple line
Forms their sisters and their mothers.
Yea, Flatland is a poor locale,
To that there's no dissentions.
And sad is he who spends his days
In the land of two dimensions.
But, knowing not their strife,
They enjoy it in their way,
And as they speak to one another,
They have been heard to say:
Pity the poor Linelanders,
Their world so long and thin.
And the only place they're going
Is the place where they have been.
The men are simple lines,
The women merely dots.
And all their lives they spend their time
In designated spots.
A speck is all that greets their eyes
When looking either way.
A more varied type of landscape
Is impossible, they say.
But, knowing not their strife,
They enjoy it in their way,
And as they speak to one another,
They have been heard to say:
Pity the poor Spacelander,
So proud of three dimensions.
He thinks that he is better than I;
A fool with his pretentions.
Pity the poor Pointlander,
In his world of no size.
No place to go, he sits alone
Thinking himself so wise.
For him, to move's impossible,
And nothing's there to see.
He is all, and all is him,
For all eternity.
David Stanke
(re-arranged)
Footnote:
Erle Loran, American painter and Art Historian (1905 – 1999), in his book on Cezanne’s Composition, includes an analysis of the forms and composition of this painting. He provides photos of the Jas de Bouffan from the position from which Cezanne set up his easel, and compares the photos to the painting, in order to analyse the changes that Cezanne made. There appear to be three big changes: in the photo, the main house actually appears to tilt slightly the other way! In the photo, the garden wall extends diagonally towards the artist, to the bottom right hand corner – Cezanne has pushed the garden wall back so that it appears horizontal across the painting. And thirdly, in the photo, the farm buildings appear as just one side of a building. Pavel Machotka, American Academic and Painter (1936 to 2019) in his book on Cezanne: Landscape into Art, does a similar analysis, and references Loran. Pavel reckons that where Erle went wrong was that the photo was taken standing up, where-as Cezanne was probably sitting down, in a bit of a dip too. Both professors want to prove that in fact, Cezanne painted the House and Farm buildings as he saw them. I think both analyses rather miss the point: we don’t have to reduce Cezanne’s painting to the likeness of a photograph. It’s the old attraction of the scientific mind to reduce things to the ‘basic facts’ in the belief that what is true resides there, and only there – in the flatlands of reductionism.