Towpath by the Marne at Creteil FWN 251 1888 63 cm x 79 NSW, Sydney
There’s an awesome mystery that lies between simplicity and complexity; indeed, sometimes there seems to be no space between complexity and simplicity – they are somehow, one and the same: maybe that’s where the mystery abides: be - holding that space. You behold a tree and wonder at its simple beauty; and at the same time, your holding embraces the complexity of the natural world and the web of life, of which you are a part.
The story goes that someone was about to buy this painting from Cezanne’s first art dealer at an exhibition Vollard had organized in the mid 1890’s and was about to hand over four hundred-franc notes when an unnamed man interrupted the deal with the comment that Cezanne had painted this painting in the style of Guillaumin. The buyer withdrew his four hundred-franc notes, put them back in his wallet, and said he was no longer interested.
Who the ‘unnamed man’ was, we do not know – maybe Guillaumin himself? When Cezanne travelled up to Paris at this time, he rented a place in quai d’Anjou…where in the 1870’s he had lived next door to Guillaumin, as they were both ‘tutored’ as young artists by the older Pissarro. Cezanne and Guillaumin had studied art together, painted together, and were close friends. Nowadays twenty years on, Cezanne painted landscapes of the Marne at Creteil, in the big ox-bow of land, then countryside, below the Bois de Boulogne. Guillaumin remained an Impressionist all his long life; Cezanne in his own words ‘was an Impressionist painter, then’.
It is the kind of painting that can be overlooked: ‘Nothing in the landscape of earlier art…would have authorized a painter to place himself thus before such an assemblance of forms…one looks across to the other bank, which is parallel to the picture frame. This grassy bank is almost uniform and featureless. Behind, a tree divides the composition in half with the rigid vertical of its trunk, above which foliage forms an almost symmetrical pyramid, which is completed and amplified by the group of houses behind.’ says Roger Fry, the famous British artist and art critic, in a seminar of the mid 1920’s. His point is this: no artist worth his salt would ever have chosen such a simple and elementary motif in the first place! The artist would simply have passed by and looked for greater things!
‘And yet, there is nothing in the least naïve or ‘simplist’ about this, for all its simplicity. It’s vigorously constructed with notes of orange, red, and intense green’, Fry adds. It is so delightful to examine the construction of what is beheld by the application of colours, with slight modifications and minute variations of tone through-out: a colourful space held into a harmony. (Le Chemin de halage sur les bords de la Marne à Créteil, c.1888 (FWN 251) | Catalogue entry | The Paintings, Watercolors and Drawings of Paul Cezanne: An Online Catalogue Raisonné (cezannecatalogue.com) You can enlarge the painting, and fill your screen, to see the rich bands of colours forming the grassy banks; the architectural symmetry of the rooftops; the pyramid-shapes scattered all around; the green and blue of foliage…Fry concludes: ‘The audacious simplicity and directness of Cezanne’s approach to the motif surprises us by its complete and unexpected success’.
Vollard delights in rounding off his story by saying that six months later (in 1896), he was able to achieve seven hundred francs from the sale of this painting to Auguste Pellerin.
And yet, complete though it is, there are quite a few spaces where the weave of the canvass shows through. On a closer look at the house to the left of the central tree trunk for instance, we see that the space above the door, and the larger window are thinly painted; the roof itself is somewhat skew-wiff, and it’s hard to sort out exactly what is garden wall and what is house. This is indeed one of Cezanne’s techniques, attuned to perfection in his ‘constructive phase’ and then used when the inspiration took hold, in this, his mature phase. ‘It is a dynamic, not a static equilibrium’ comments our Roger Fry.
Fry finally hits the nail on the head: ‘the simplicity (of the painting) is the last term of a process of interpretation of the infinity of nature’. Fry is describing the process (of interpretation) which Cezanne goes through as he paints this painting. It is a process of drawing together the simple elements of the motif - the houses, the river, the riverbank, the tree, the boats – and presenting them as a whole: balanced and integrated. Both the process and the end result necessitate holding together, simplicity and complexity.
The new dynamic of creativity in Cezanne’s mature work lies in his ability and willingness to let the motif spontaneously arise in the act of painting: it is a union of beholding colour and holding space. In his mature phase, Cezanne has no pre-conceived idea of what he wants to achieve. Now when he paints, it is a participatory event which is self-organizing: it is emergent.
The last time someone tried to purchase this painting, it couldn’t be bought for 300,000 francs!
How happy is the little stone
that rambles in the road alone,
and doesn’t care about careers,
and exigencies never fears;
whose coat of elemental brown
a passing universe put on;
and independent as the sun,
associates or glows alone,
fulfilling absolute decree
in casual simplicity.
Emily Dickinson