“I shall be able to appreciate much better the dangers now threatening painting after seeing your attempts on its life!” – such were the words of the letter of self-invitation to Cezanne’s studio that Monsieur Gilbert, the Director of the Museum of Aix-en-Provence, sent to his former student Paul Cezanne, intrigued by the press coverage of the First Impressionist Exhibition of 1874. After all, this was the young man, who had, fifteen years ago in 1860 at the age of twenty-one, so faithfully copied Felix Nicholas Frillie ‘Kiss of the Muse’ that it was hard to distinguish the Master’s work and the young man’s copy. Monsieur Gilbert had proffered advice not to go to Paris, but his young student had not taken heed. It is not always easy for young people from the edge of the civilized world to express their truth; for, in the words of a philosopher: ‘…truth passes through three stages. First it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident’.
I stand before this ‘self-portrait, with a pink background’ in the Cezanne Exhibition of the Tate Modern in London; and I acknowledge the stage out of which Cezanne set brush to canvass!
Out of that ridicule, Cezanne painted this self-portrait in 1875. It is a strong, defiant act, done without deference or compromise, as was Cezanne’s way; but, maybe more importantly, with anger but without violence. Cezanne uses the power of his brush, oils and canvass to create something blunt and rough, cranium encased and chaotically coloured. When Rilke saw this portrait, he said he thought Cezanne hammered his own skull from the inside out onto the canvass, and that Cezanne portrays himself as honestly as one dog looking at another.
Standing side by side with the self-portrait, that defiance makes me stand a little taller, for I too have in my younger days tried to express my own truth defiantly.
“We are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth.” Greta Thunberg.
It is not always easy for young people from the edge of the civilized world to speak of truth defiantly.