Bibemus Quarry FWN 306 65cm x 80cm 1895 Folkwang, Essen
This is the second post of the mini-series of four posts focusing on three paintings by Cezanne, all with the same motif – Bibemus Quarry – and all painted in a two-year period 1895-7, in Cezanne’s ‘mature phase’, when he was just a few years shy of 60. The first post focused on Cezanne’s painting ‘Bibemus’ FWN 305, in the style of Impressionism. This second post focuses on the painting called ‘Bibemus Quarry’ FWN 306. For me, it is clear that these paintings represent Cezanne’s understanding of his own development; he now sees clearly the stages of his own growth, and expresses that development in the mode of communication in which he is most proficient – oil paint on canvass. The beauty of growth is that it is the expression of your deepest yearnings; the truth of growth is that it requires dissonance, pain and resolve; but the goodness of growth is that it lifts you beyond yourself to wider horizons. I hope you enjoy this mini-series.
In the early mornings, Cezanne, now in his late fifties, would clamber down from the old stone cabin where he often spent the night; down, down into the depths of the earth, amidst the shear rock face of the ochre molasse sandstone, hewn by ancestors long ago: cathedrals of rock. Indeed, the traditional interpretation of the geological layers of our earth, was that the biblical story of creation would be discovered, in six layers that matched the six days of creation. In their youthful expeditions for fossils, his old school friend Marion (by 1895, a Professor and the Director of Natural History at the University of Marseilles) had taught him a different story – a story of the development of all beings on earth. Marion had not just taught Cezanne: together they had extracted the fossil evidence on expedition, down into the depths of the earth, that proved the Theory of Evolution to be well grounded.
And here in the depth of this sandstone quarry and the solitude of the earth, Cezanne understood this new story of development as his own too: he saw it now, just as plainly and impressively as the rocks towering before him. He could now see how his development had thus far taken him through three stages: his initial youthful stage of rejecting the notion that art is respectable: “what bastards respectable people are”, he shouted, as he painted ‘avec couillard’. The Impressionist stage, as he admitted “It is true, I don’t conceal the fact. I was an Impressionist”. And what we now call his ‘Constructivist’ stage, where “I want to make of Impressionism, something solid and enduring’.
And here it is: Impressionism rendered solid and enduring.
The wonder of its solidity is that it is chaotic.
We now appreciate that rock is “Molecules vibrating with such intensity as to produce the illusion of solidity” Sophie Strand.
Cezanne inverts traditional perspective; he increases the size of stuff in the background (mass with axis at B), and decreases the size of stuff at the forefront (mass with axis at A), and then sets up all kinds of movements and countermovements, into depth and out of depth, gently held with serenity within the picture frame, by which its resonance becomes enduring.
“The interlocking and interpenetration of planes and volumes presents one of the most complex and perfectly integrated examples (of pictorial construction) in Cezanne’s work” Erle Loran: diagrams in Cezanne’s Composition.
This is how Cezanne expressed in paint on canvass the truth of the new and exciting, liberating and progressive era which we now call modernism.
“The discovery of his work (Cezanne’s) overturned everything. I wasn’t alone in suffering from shock. There was a battle to be fought against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire or love. In Cezanne’s work, we should not only see a new pictorial construction but also – too often forgot – a new moral intimation of space”
George Braque, 1882 to 1963