On my second visit to the Cezanne Exhibition at the Tate Modern, my heart danced with this ‘sculpture in paint’: it’s Cezanne’s manifesto, and he gave it to his soul mate Emile Zola, who kept it till he passed away.
Cezanne is not interested in the veneer of respectability where there is no sign of the paint itself, where there is no hint of a brushstroke, where the whole painting is delicately finished; where the quality of the painting derives purely from its likeness to an object; where the less one sees and the more that is hidden of the creativity of the painter applying the paint, the nearer it comes to the perfect ideal; where the finished effect is divorced from its causality. Cezanne paints avec couillarde!
The medium of a painting becomes an integral part of the painting, not hidden but acknowledged. Indeed, the modern artist enhances the intrinsic structure of the medium, so as to include it within the harmony that will develop. The artistic application of coloured pigment suspended in linseed oil onto the warp and weft of hemp stretched over a wooden frame is on view for all to engage with.
‘Painting’ for Cezanne is not the production of a representation of objects, but a dance of paint and painter, theme and viewer: it is an event!
‘Cezanne was perhaps the first person in history to realize the necessity for the manner in which the paint is handled…for the pictorial structure….1866 is the beginning of Modern Art’, Lawrence Gowling (1988)