Signed and dated (FWN 704, 1865)

Bread and Eggs                  1865     FWN 704             59cm x 76

Cezanne could get pretty mad with himself – if he couldn’t ‘realize’ a painting he would throw it out of the window, slash it with a knife or ceremoniously burn it! But at the other end of the spectrum, he signed and dated only 7 of his paintings, and signed just 60 odd – out of a complete works reaching towards the 1000. As he got older, and I suppose more confident that his work was unique (though still never accepted by the art establishment till after he died) he signed fewer and fewer: he signed 10 of his paintings done in the 1860’s, 41 done in the 70’s (the Impressionist exhibition decade) , 7 done in the 80’s and just 3 done in after 1890. He signed them for authentication purposes when he was hoping they would be exhibited; this one is signed and dated because it’s likely to have been one of the 2 paintings he offered to the Salon in 1866. Both were rejected as usual – say no more! Otherwise, he seems to have signed them if they were a gift to a friend, or for some personal reason.                                                                                 Black is back – the poet Rainer Maria Rilke said of this painting: “black is treated completely like a colour, not the opposite, and is discernible in everything as a colour: in the cloth, over the white of which it spreads, engrained in the glass, moderating the white of the eggs and weighing down the yellow of the onions to antique gold.” Tintoretto is supposed to have replied that his favourite colour is black! The painting is painted as if the viewer/artist is sitting down at the table, just next to Cezanne’s signature in red: I like to imagine Cezanne, back from copying a Tintoretto in the Louvre, was about to have his homely Provencal fayre – fried onion omelette, baguette and glass of milk.

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace

and saw, within the moonlight in his room,

making it rich, and like a lily in bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:-

exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

and to the presence in the room he said,

‘What writest thou?’ the vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, ‘The names of those who love the Lord’.

‘And is mine one? Said Abou. ‘Nay, not so’,

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerily still; and said, ‘I pray thee, then,

Write me as one who loves his fellow men.’

The angel wrote and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem’s name led all the rest

Leigh Hunt

“A good artist is a fisher of archetypes” Primock and Abrams (FWN 49, 1867-9)

The fishers’ village of L’Estaque                  FWN 49                1867/9        42cm x 55

The style of this medium sized painting is pretty unusual for Cezanne at this time: the famous British Art critic Roger Fry who was entranced by the work of Cezanne describes it as melancholy and brooding (1927). Personally, it doesn’t strike me that way; I like the colours and the close-up, high angle and cluster of view-points (that Cezanne would so refine in his later work) – it makes me smile! But it is, maybe, the quiet before the storm, as Napoleon III led France into the disastrous war of 1870!                                                                                                                                                                     The 1860’s decade in France was a period of dissonance, which the twenty-one year old Paul Cezanne and his close friend Emile Zola felt acutely: they were at once exhilarated because the old dogmatic ways seemed to be collapsing, but troubled because they did not know the shape of the future. Zola wrote admiringly of the artist Manet, who shocked the art world in the 1860’s: “he could see with his own eyes, in each of his canvases he could give us a translation of nature in that original language that he found deep within himself”. Cezanne intuited that he had to go back in order to move forward: or rather, that he had to go deeper and trust that his intuition would move beyond the old formulas, and open up new horizons.

The mind must set itself up wherever it goes

And it would be most convenient to impose

Its old rooms –

Just tack them up like an interior tent.

Uh oh!

But the new holes aren’t

Where the windows went!

Kay Ryan

Bay of Marseilles (FWN 29, 1865)

Rocks at L’Estaque           FWN 29                1865                     21cm x 33

Actually, Cezanne was a fairly active guy: he enjoyed swimming and walking through-out his life; in the 1860’s, his family regularly rented a small cottage in the little fishing village across the bay from Marseilles called L’Estaque. Cezanne and his mates, especially Marion, would spend their days walking, swimming and exploring the geology and geography of the lovely sunny coast round as far as to Marseilles. Cezanne’s first painting of L’Estaque was in 1865, and his last was in 1885 – 20 years exactly, five paintings in the ‘60s, 13 in the 70’s and 11 in the 80’s.                                                                It was hard work to paint outdoors in those days – you had to grind the pigments down yourself, and mix them together; and then put the paint into pig’s bladders to transport around with you; and you had to do this each and every day! The quality of the paint thus varied each day, there was a lot of waste, and it was difficult to use, or thin (with turpentine).  But in 1840, an American Artist, John Rand, invented metal tubes – like toothpaste tubes, only using thin metal, with screw top and everything: how wonderful is that! Renoir is quoted as saying that, "Without paint in tubes there would have been nothing of what the journalists were later to call Impressionists."                                                                                               It was during these twenty years, that Cezanne gave his life to painting: “upon reflection,” he would muse later in life, “it was at L’Estaque that I finally understood Pissarro, a painter like me; he worked relentlessly. Insane love for work took over me.” Cezanne discovered that for him painting was not a hobby, or indeed a profession; it wasn’t something you could just do when you felt like it, or set aside for a week or two. Actually it was a calling, a vocation; it had a certain life of its own; it filled every aspect of his life; everything he did was referenced to it. And so, his act of painting, or rather, his living the life of a painter, was like the way he painted: progressing by painting all the canvass all at once. Cezanne’s life and work are one.

But yield who will to their separation,
my object in living is to unite
my avocation and my vocation
as my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
and the work is play for mortal stakes,
is the deed ever really done
for Heaven and the future's sakes.          

Robert Frost, Two tramps in mud time

What bastards respectable people are! (FWN 407, 1866-7)

Uncle Dominique in a turban, 1866/67    FWN 407 44cm x 37cm

Cezanne liked a bit of the old theatricals! One of his favourites was to dress as a Provencal peasant, and wheel three paintings in a wheelbarrow to present to the prestigious Paris Salon for admission to the annual Academie de Beaux Arts (1748 to 1890). The paintings were done in a style that he named “maniere couillarde” (style with balls!) They were consistently rejected in the harshest of terms.

By the 1860’s there were 100,000 miles of railway track through-out France, with 6 large railway companies funded by the State to the tune of 634m French francs, which brought an increase of investment of 500%, and profits of 11% annually. At the beginning of the 1800’s there were just about 700 paintings in the Salon; 60 years later there were over 5000. The new rich wanted to adorn their houses with vast historical canvasses, or confectionary nudes – of course, with the backing of the Academy, so as to ensure the value of their assets.

To challenge the Salon was to invite not just ridicule, but economic hardship as well!

Cezanne’s style was developed over four phases (roughly): firstly the 1860’s: his maniere couillarde; the 1870’s saw him develop a lighter palette painting in the open air under the guidance of Pissarro, usually referred to as his Impressionist style; in the 1880’s he developed what is known now as his ‘constructivist’ phase where he uses little brushstrokes, often of different colours, all moving in the same direction, giving a shimmering effect; and thereafter his final mature style from 1890 onwards.

Cezanne painted his Uncle Dominique about 10 times: no doubt a patient man, Dominique Aubert, his uncle on his mother’s side, was by profession, a bailiff. When you examine the painting, you can see why Cezanne described his own style as ballsy – you can see it as thick paint, smashed onto the canvass with a palette knife, dark, brooding and angry!

Actually, the method of painting required rather a lot of patience and deliberation, because it requires layers of paint which Cezanne applied with a palette knife; then he would have to let each layer dry in order to avoid cracking, before applying the next layer. It is not a method that lends itself to the impetuosity of anger, but something more deliberate. He was, I suspect, learning how to apply paint: he was discovering the sensuality and beauty of touching and manipulating the medium of his art.

Close as the petals of a tulip flower, face caressed

Strong as the flame in the candle hour, spirit blessed

Tenderness of touch conveys love so much, grace expressed

Be still, all is well; realized power, anger harnessed.

Human Form Genre (FWN 901, 1869)

Bather standing drying her hair                  FWN 901             1869     29cm x 13

(the figures do not tally accurately because some paintings have unconfirmed authenticity, or are dubiously dated. The figures obviously do not include paintings that are lost or destroyed, but nevertheless do give an overall impression of Cezanne’s workload through his developing artistic phases. Some human form paintings are hard to tell if they’re male or female!)

Cezanne only painted two paintings of the human form before he reached thirty. He was by all accounts fairly shy; he produced paintings with men and women in them – as part of historic or mythological type scenes; but only two, ‘human form’ paintings as such. This little painting is something of a cameo, and Cezanne often repeats the same pose in other paintings later in life.        

As you can see from the chart, Cezanne did have a bash at human figure painting in the 1870’s – the decade of his “impressionist” phase – and we’ll have a closer look at these later; then he almost gave up for ten years, but started again with a vengeance in the last years of his life, when he painted those large bather paintings that have become iconic.                                As we map human development more and more deeply, we discover that the human form holds all that we have been through-out our entire evolution, and so now, all that we are, and the potential for all that we can be.

when earth and the soul are in the mood to create beauty

what happens?   -

deep within the womb

in a stillness

in a place before darkness and light

in a place before knowing

in the space of being

in the grace of becoming

there emerges

as when the first glint of the dawn of eternity appeared

quarks become atoms

atoms become molecules

molecules become cells

then emerges the photosynthetic cycle

the organ systems

the neural net

the reptilian brain stem

the mammalian limbic system

the primate cortex

the complex neuro-cortex

and as many connections

as the stars in the universe:

when earth and souls are in the mood to create beauty

in all creation’s dust, divine beauty shines out clear.

Rumi, Qasem-E Anwar, Wilber

The Cezanne family (FWN 417/8, !866/67)

Portrait of Marie Cezanne, sister of the artist                       1866     FWN 418             53.5cm x 37

Portrait of the Elizabeth Aubert, mother                                 1870     FWN 426         53.5cm x 37

These paintings are rather interesting because they’re on opposite sides of the same canvass. For many years, the portrait of Marie, Cezanne’s sister, was thought to be the portrait of the canvass; but nigh on 100 years later, it was discovered that underneath the black coating of the reverse was a portrait of Cezanne’s mother, which are pretty few and far between. We do not know who blackened it out, or when – I don’t think it likely to have been the family member named Paul….

Paul Cezanne was born on 19th Jan 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, the son of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, a hatter, aged 40 and of Anne Elizabeth Honorine Aubert, aged 24, of Aix. The couple would have their second child, Marie in 1841, and the third, after somewhat of a gap, Rose, in 1854 (who rather strangely does not appear to have lived with the family for five years or so). Cezanne’s mother was the person who was always supportive of Paul; his father, and two sisters were pretty dismissive of his talent as an artist all through his life. His father, the archetypal self-made man, wanted Paul to be a lawyer, and made his son study law for a couple of years after his schooling. Probably with the help of the mother of the family, Louis-Auguste eventually realized that he couldn’t make his son be a good lawyer, and so provided him with a meagre monthly allowance to enable him to study art. “I’m here among my family” Cezanne wrote from Aix in letters to Pissarro and Zola in Paris, 1866, “the foulest people on earth …real crap! Let’s say no more about it.” “I’m feeling a bit down; as you know, I don’t know what causes it; it comes back every evening, when the sun goes down, and it rains. That brings on the gloom.”

I am not the things my family did

I am not the voices in my head

I am not the pieces of the brokenness inside

I am light,

I am light

Song by India Arie

Companions for change

Cezanne boasted that his paintings would send the art world up the wall, with rage and despair, but not before he felt their wrath first! Cezanne applied to be admitted as a student of the prestigious Beaux-Arts – twice, and was twice rejected, much to his anger at the time! But I think it gave him the impetus to be independent, and think outside the box. He ended up at the Academie Suisse, where in those formative years, he met some of his closest friends: Armand Guillaumin, Antoine Guillemet, Franscisco Oller, and the older and radically wild anarchist, Camille Pissarro. Here they are in this photo, Cezanne with arms folded, Pissarro looking like Abraham with a hat, off on a painting expedition. Pissarro’s influence on Cezanne was deep and far-reaching – in technique, in application, in work-rate, in vowing to change the world – in so many things; but fundamentally, I am sure, Pissarro beheld Cezanne’s soul; later, Cezanne would say: “As for old Pissarro, he was a father to me. He was a man you could turn to for advice; he was something like God”.

What happens when your soul begins

to awaken your eyes and your heart

and each cell of your body

to the great journey of love?

First, there is wonderful laughter

and probably precious tears;

and a thousand sweet promises

and those heroic vows

no-one can ever keep.

But still, God is delighted

and amused

that you once tried to be a saint!

What happens when your soul begins

to awake in this world

to our deep yearning

to love and follow the beloved?

Oh! – the beloved

simply sends you

one of her wonderful, wild companions!

Adapted from Hafiz.

Introduction (FWN 706, 1865-6)

I do hope that you find these blogs are a meditation on beauty; the oil paintings of Paul Cezanne are presented as nourishment for our spiritual journey into the next epoch of human life on this earth. With hindsight, we can appreciate how Cezanne was energized by the epoch change from a society based on industrial growth and materialism to one based on the struggle for a community of humanity. I will use the ideas of Spiral Dynamics Integral Theory as tools for putting Cezanne’s oeuvre in the context of human development, exploring how he came to terms with the sixth great wave of emerging consciousness, just as we ourselves are feeling the energy and turmoil of the subsequent waves of our day.

This is a journey, and like pilgrimages of old, requires time to allow our palette to savour the sweetness of the nourishment. The blogs are presented each week so that the pilgrim can gently but firmly move along in tranquillity. It is a pilgrimage of discovery, where the development of Cezanne’s art is intertwined with the moving tectonic plates of memetic paradigms.

It is a spiritual journey – in the fullest sense of the meaning and import of spirituality in the development of human history: that evolutionary energy which impels and draws us to experience the fullness of living on this earth, discovering personal freedom as part of a larger conscious whole, amongst wondrous diversity, in multiple dimensions, thirsting always for ever more integrated systems. Cezanne’s habit of gently but firmly clasping his hands together, fingers interlocked, aptly signifies this spiritual realization.

Each of the blogs will focus on a different facet, so that by the end of the journey we will have unfolded the four major stages of development of Cezanne’s art and the techniques he used and developed; the magic moments in Cezanne’s life when inspiration dawned; the major themes of his oeuvres; the life conditions of France at the time; and the major influences of his family, friends, and associates. In doing so, we will have the opportunity of exploring our understanding of what are the values by which we wish to live, and there-by enhancing our appreciation of the beauty and colour of our own lives.  The first twenty-six or so blogs will cover Cezanne’s early phase of artistic development, up until he was 30 years old, 1869.                                                                                                                                                       FWN refers to the online catalogue raisonne under the direction of Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jayne Warman, and David Nash: The paintings of Paul Cezanne, which in turn was based on the paper catalogue raisonne under the direction of John Rewald, who passed away just before publication.

I hope it will be fun

Mike Bold

click here for link to Catalogue Raisonne Paul Cezanne

What should you do when you wake up, discombobulated or raring to go?

Don’t start working!

Let the beauty you love, be what you do.

: Take down a musical instrument, be still, paint, whatever….

there are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.

Rumi c1250 (adapted)

Of things unknown but longed for still ~ Maya Angelou

Sugar bowl, pears and blue cup                  FWN 706             1865/6                 30cm x 41

Paul Cezanne was well pleased with this little painting– he gave it to his dear friend Emile Zola who kept it till the end of his life. Cezanne would reproduce it as the backdrop to one of the portraits of his father. It’s almost a sculpture using paint – “a sparkling rectangle of crusty paint with colours alone, renouncing lines altogether.” (Rewald)                                                                                                                     

Science marched on into the 1850’s: Bessemer pioneered mass production of iron and steel; Pasteur invented pasteurization; Lenoir, the internal combustion engine; Monier, reinforced concrete; Sholes, the Qwerty typewriter. In France, 183 financiers in banks, railways and metal firms controlled 20,000m French Francs capital. But something was not right  – Zola saw poverty in the urban sprawl of Paris, and Cezanne saw the stagnation of rural life in Provence, Marx saw alienation, Durkheim called it ‘anomie’ (normlessness), and Max Weber, the disenchantment of ordinary people. Here began ‘sociology’ itself.                                                                                      

In the history of human development, 1850 is cast as the date of the start of the sixth great wave of human development: the time when a new era of human values began to emerge in the human collective consciousness; a time when people began to realize that things needed to change. The values of the previous era were based on the amazing and continued success of scientific development, and culminated in industrialization, driven by opportunity for fame, fortune and prosperity; but those same values brought poverty, displacement and social disintegration. The challenge was to discover new values for the forthcoming era.

A free bird leaps on the back of the wind

and floats down stream until the current ends

and dips his wing in the orange sun rays

and dares to claim the sky.

But a bird that stalks down his narrow cage

can seldom see through his bars of rage

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

the caged bird sings with a fearful trill

of things unknown but longed for still

and his tune is heard on the distant hill

for a caged bird sings of freedom

the free bird thinks of another breeze

and the trade winds soft through the sighing trees

and the fat worms waiting on a dawn bright lawn

and he names the sky his own

but a caged bird stands on the grave of dreams

his shadow shouts on a nightmare scream

his wings are clipped and his feet are tied

so he opens his throat to sing

the caged bird sings with a fearful trill

of things unknown but longed for still

and his tune is heard on the distant hill

for the caged bird sings of freedom.

Maya Angelou