Different but equal (FWN 740, 1877)

The Plate of Apples                         FWN 740              1877                       45.8cm x 54.7

detail

I do believe that if you offer the opportunity for people to engage in something, they will! If you offer that invitation freely, without strings attached; honestly and openly, not with the threat of guilt or blame, they’ll say “yes, let’s give it a go!” or they’ll say: “sorry can’t help at the moment”, or whatever, “but thanks”. All other things being equal, as it were: people, in their natural and safe environment, are generous.

We can identify four elements that seem to inform all individual beings, all individual life-forms as we know it; they define the relationships that all beings seem to be endowed with: agency, the power to do stuff, to act, to fulfil your potential; communion, the attraction to engage with others, to be involved, to relate; eros, the drive to go beyond oneself, the creative energy to transcend, to move beyond the box that we’re in, to grow and develop; and agape, the instinct of empathy, our compassionate response, our willingness to help out.  In this blog, I want to focus on ‘communion’: we like to be involved!                            

One of the ways Cezanne involves us with his paintings is by the use of distortion. We always like to find the underlying structure of anything we see: we automatically estimate where the centre of gravity of things is, whether things are related to each other, whether things are in connection, whether there’s a push and pull between stuff. Take a closer look at the three central apples (the three in front of the very back smaller green apple, gathered in a triangle): The one on the back right (in front of the yellow golden delicious) seems to be being pushed upwards by the one to the back left, and pushed back by the front apple. The front apple seems, from a usual distance, to be rounded, but on closer inspection, it kind of merges into the back left apple; its edge is lost. Our mind beholds the push and pull of these three apples, centre stage, even before we become aware of it; and we’re happy to be engaged in this little drama. Our mind fills in the lost edge, coz that makes sense. Sometimes Cezanne plays with the lost and found edges – try following the edge of the plate all around, as it gets interrupted by the fruit.                         

In this particular painting, Cezanne uses a fairly limited palette of colours; the table cloth is a mix of the primary colours, blue ultramarine (and white), red vermillion and chrome yellow. Instead of using lighter and darker shades of the same colour, Cezanne uses different colours, next to each other; there are no light or dark values of the same colour; no conventional modelling. “Instead, there’s a harmonious surface in which the colours of the foreground and background form a continuous pattern of interrelated hues.” (Richard Shiff) What is important is not only the intensity of the colours, but their relationship, which is one of equality: they’re all out there, different but equal, fresh and spontaneous.                                                        

I’d like to suggest that the notion of “different but equal” is one of the defining characteristics of post-modernity; and that’s why we engage so wholeheartedly with Cezanne’s paintings. (I’m understanding ‘post-modernity’ as the period covering the last century, when a new value-system began to emerge in reaction to the values instilled by the Industrial Revolution). I went to the funeral of a friend’s mother some time ago, and the story was told of how, when she was 5 years old in the 1920’s, and ready for school, there were not enough classrooms for the number of 5 year olds. So the school authority decided that all left-handed children should be kept back for a year: she didn’t start school till she was six! Now, it seems just amazing - such a scenario, that someone could come up with such an idea. It’s kind of unthinkable……now, but it wasn’t then! Then segregation was the norm!

Integration and Communion are two sides of the same coin; they are fundamental to our being human. Indeed, our generation is being challenged to understand how they are fundamental to all life, on planet earth!

Of all the issues we’re concerned with at present, the most basic in my estimation is that of human-earth relations. We’re at the terminal phase of the Cenozoic Era – the last 65 million years. We’re not just passing into another historic period or another cultural modification; we’re changing the chemistry of the planet; we’re changing the bio-systems, we’re changing the eco-systems of the planet on the scale of millions of years. But more specifically, we’re terminating the last 65 million years of life development.

Where do we go from here?

To my mind we go from the terminal phase, if we survive, into a really sustainable world; we will pass from the Cenozoic Era to what I call the “Ecozoic’ Era. The primary principle of the Ecozoic Era is that the Universe, and in particular, planet Earth is a communion of subjects not a collection of objects.

Until the present era, all the beauty that we see about us came into existence without human consultation, from now on, the Universe will never function in that way again. The present urgency is to begin thinking within the context of the whole planet; the integral earth community, with all its human and other-than-human components.

Of one thing we can be sure: our own future is inseparable to the larger community that brought us into being, and which sustains us in every expression of our human quality of life; in our aesthetic and emotional sensitivities, our intellectual perceptions, and our sense of the divine; as well as our physical nourishment and our bodily healing. We see quite clearly that what happens to the non-human happens to the human; what happens to the outer world, happens to the inner world; without the soaring birds, without the great forests, the free-flowing steams, the sight of the clouds by day, and the stars by night, we become impoverished in all that makes us human.

Thomas Berry cp

Jas de Bouffan (FWN 90, 1876)

Chestnut trees and farm at Jas de Bouffan            FWN 90                   1876                     51cm x 65

Chestnut tree and farm at the Jas du Bouffan      FWN 202     1885/6         65.5cm x 81.3

We’re coming to the end of the blogs relating to Cezanne’s second phase of development – his Impressionist phase, of the 1870’s; and so I thought I’d spend some time in a few different blogs having a look at paintings with similar motifs from the second, third and final phase. (Impressionist, constructivist and mature phases respectively.) Here’s two of the same motif, but ten years apart. Cezanne didn’t paint any of the Jas de Bouffan in his mature phase, and in later blogs, we’ll begin to find out why. (Cezanne’s father received the Jas de Bouffan, a dilapidated manor house, farm buildings and vineyards, in 1859 as payment to settle a debt; and the family lived there for nigh on 40 years. Cezanne was happy to have his own room on the ground floor where he could keep all his paintings and equipment, and hide away, and very happy because of all the different motifs it provided him easy access to)

I love both these paintings – they both make me smile, individually; and yes – for different reasons. The pastoral colours of the 1876 one are what I first fell in love with in Cezanne’s oeuvre: I could just sit and stare, in their gentleness and stillness; the painting soothes my soul, as I remember the beauty of days enjoyed in the sun: it makes me smile. From Cezanne’s Impressionist phase, the 1876 one is a painting that delights me: the colours delight me but also I delight in seeing how Cezanne delights in finding new ways to paint delightfully. I love finding out how Cezanne brings his painting together: one trick is to repeat a colour in a series – so, the colour of the building in the centre of the painting is repeated at far left behind the wall of chestnut trees, and again in between the wall and single chestnut tree; and then on the right, behind the small tree, and at far right edge on the horizon. Unconsciously, we feel the breadth of this warm colour across the whole painting. Again, the grey-white colour of the garden wall to the right stretching horizontally, is repeated behind the small tree, and then again in a thin band of grey beyond. Unconsciously we feel the depth of this grey, leading our eye to the rolling green hill beyond. The immanency of the chestnut trees seek our attention first – the single tree and its rather agitated foliage, and the peculiar single wall of chestnut trucks; but they give way to the transcendent stillness of the farm buildings and Provençale countryside. The red signature signs its realization just as happily as hands brought together with interlocking fingers. There is something deeply delightful in our capacity to express ourselves joyfully.

Sometimes your joy is the source of your smile,
but sometimes your smile can be the source of your joy. 

Sometimes my joy can be the source of your smile

and sometimes your joy can be the source of my smile:

delightful.

enlarged, from Thich Nhat Hanh’ sometimes

The 1886 one is an invitation to partake of the vibrancy of life, from Cezanne’s constructivist phase. It is as if we are sitting amongst the chestnut trees; such is the intensity of the sharply defined darkness of tree trunks, and the full bright warmth of the sunlight shining through. 1885 was a year of turmoil for Cezanne; and sometimes, when things get so bad, you either go under or shake yourself down and ‘still I rise’. Cezanne managed the latter: 1886 was thereafter a turning point in Cezanne’s personal life: he realised that his relationship with Zola would develop no further; he acknowledged the truth of his fear of his father, just before his father passed away; and he publicly acknowledged his relationship with Hortense, and they married. He came to terms with all his deepest hidden fears, and grew into a man. It’s as if he’s sitting under the chestnut trees reading this poem:

I go among trees and sit still.
All my stirring becomes quiet
around me like circles on water.
My tasks lie in their places
where I left them, asleep like cattle.

Then what is afraid of me comes
and lives a while in my sight.
What it fears in me leaves me,
and the fear of me leaves it.
It sings, and I hear its song.

Then what I am afraid of comes.
I live for a while in its sight.
What I fear in it leaves it,
and the fear of it leaves me.
It sings, and I hear its song.

After days of labour,
mute in my consternations,
I hear my song at last,
and I sing it. As we sing,
the day turns, the trees move.

Wendell Berry

Am I a falcon? (FWN 914, 1877-8)

Male bather arms outstretched                  FWN 914             1877/8                 73cm x 60

The first Impressionist Exhibition opened on the 15th April 1874 at 35 Boulevard des Capucines, Paris with 30 artists displaying 165 works under the catchy title of the “Co-operative and Anonymous Society of Painters, Sculptors, Engravers, etc”. The press didn’t take any notice of that chosen name, and invented their own more descriptive ones like “The Intransigents”. The property was owned by Gaspard-Félix Tournachon, who seemed to have discovered ahead of his time the importance of catchy names, otherwise known as Nadar, the famous French photographer. He was part of the circle of young artists and innovators who gathered in the cafés of Montmartre. He had made his fortune through his photography, especially doing fine portraits of anybody who was anybody in Paris at the time. ‘35 Boulevard des Capucines’ was his former studios, which he allowed the Impressionists to use for their first exhibition free of charge.

In 1856, Jean Marie Le Bris became the first guy to “fly higher than his point of departure”, after being pulled with his ‘artificial albatross’ on a cart behind a horse charging along a beach in Normandy, and taking off from the cart into the air rising to a height of 100m for a distance of 200m. In 1868, this first ever flying machine and pilot was photographed by, you’ve guessed it, Nadar. Nadar loved all things flying - when Paris was under siege in the Franco-Prussian war, he dropped stuff off to the Communards from a balloon; he took the first aerial photograph from his own ‘giant’ balloon; and he formed an association with Jules Verne as Secretary, himself as President:  "The Society for the Encouragement of Aerial Locomotion by Means of Heavier than Air Machines" - they liked their catchy titles in those days!

This painting of the ‘Bather with outstretched arms’ is the last one of a series painted by Cezanne – not really a series, more like trial and error, till he ended his attempt to express whatever he wanted to express with this one. Cezanne’s application of the paint is by “finely graded tones applied in tiny parallel strokes” (Tate Exhibition 1896). The figure of the bather seems to stand out from the painting, giving it a colossal look, the large feet solidly anchored to the ground. But the guy seems to be in a dream, a world of his own. Many art historians and writers have presented many, many attempts to interpret what Cezanne was trying to express; and because he attempted so many sketches and paintings of the same stance over a number of years, he obviously had something in mind! But what?

I’d like to suggest that we look to those who were inspired by Cezanne’s work, and who in turn they inspired, and so on..

Rainer Maria Rilke fell in love with Cezanne’s work when he saw it in the retrospective of 1907, and produced some of his finest poetry to his wife describing how Cezanne’s work inspired him. Rilke wrote “Letters on Cezanne” to his wife as a commentary of what he experienced.

I live my life in widening circles
that reach out across the world.
I may not ever complete the last one,
but I give myself to it.  

I circle around God, that primordial tower.
I have been circling for thousands of years,
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?          

Rainer Maria Rilke, book of hours, translated by Joanna Macy.

Joanna Macy, an environmental activist, author, scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology, translated Rilke’s poems into English in 1996.

 “I felt a sense of release, as if I had been let out of a cage I had not known I was in. Rilke’s images lent some pattern, even meaning, to a life I thought had failed in its spiritual vocation. Once I had imagined that my journey would be like the Pilgrim’s Progress, where each adventure brings the hero closer to the heavenly city, but the Christian God with whom I had been intoxicated in my teenage years did not survive the theological studies I undertook to serve him (and it was a him). When I turned outward, angry and heartsick, to political affairs, I found that I was a failure as an atheist, too, for I could not cure myself of praying to a God I no longer believed in.

But gradually over time, as the mind relaxed, capacities bred by my earlier Christian experience resurfaced and infused my understanding of Buddhism. The presence that I became aware of, around and within me, is apprehended through an act of rapt, wordless attention, receptive and probing. And what the presence seems to be is the web (of life) itself, the thrumming relationality of all things.”

I know that for thousands of lifetimes,
we have been one,
and the distance between us is only a flash of thought.

For the deep blue sky,
the snow-capped mountains painted against the horizon,
and the shining red sun sing with joy

Thich Naht Hahn

Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk, teacher, author, poet and peace activist.

Leadership (FWN 626, 1873-4)

The Fishing Party              FWN 626             1873/4                 26.5cm x 34

Life was tough for Claude and Camille Monet when Claude bought this painting. Claude’s paintings were not selling, and he had but a few commissions. Yet they paid 50 Francs for this little painting by Cezanne, in exchange for one painted by Claude, and got 50 Francs cash. The cash would pay the rent, and provide them with food for the next few weeks; and the picture would provide inspiration and decorate their bedroom, till it would eventually be passed on to their son. Well, inspiration in good times, when Claude had the eye to see; but when Claude wasn’t seeing well, Camille would cover the Cezanne with a cloth before they retired for the night.

The small group of painters that became known as the Impressionists would change the course of Art History, and move art, locked in the Institutions of the past, into modern times. They had met at the art-colleges in Paris in the 1860’s, and followed their heroes of the generation before; and now this band of revolutionaries met together in the café’s and bars of Montmartre: those who’s paintings had been refused by the Art Establishment of the day. Monet and Bazille had thought of a ‘Salon des refugees’, in the late 1860’s, but then the Franco-Prussian war of 1870/71 had overtaken everything. The End of the French Empire, and the dawn of the Third Republic gave renewed hope to their vision of the future of art. The time was right, they thought, to exhibit the paintings of the Impressionists!

Monet became the leader of the group – he was a determined kind of guy; yes, prone to depression when things were going wrong – he attempted suicide in the late 1860’s; but, while bordering on the cavalier, he was an organizer. Cezanne would say of Monet’s art, and his personality: “Monet sticks to a single vision, and gets where he’s going and stays there!” and Monet had waited 10 years for the chance to unfold his vision of a new art inspired by nature and ordinary life. Pissarro was the father of the band – the old wise one, he even looked like Abraham; not saying much, but when he did, people listened. Morisot and Guillaumin covered what we might now call outreach – making contact with dealers and art officialdom respectively. Sisley, retaining his British passport, tried to extend the vision of the Impressionists into England. Renoir was site manager – responsible for hanging the paintings in the actual exhibitions. Cezanne didn’t have a task – it took the others all their time and patience to get him to provide some paintings in the first place!

This particular painting has a spontaneity and straight-forwardness of touch that seem to imply that it was painted outdoors; Cezanne was just beginning to paint outdoors, with the encouragement of Pissarro. Where ever Cezanne painted it from - a boat or across on the other side – he’s brought the ground upon which the party is sitting, up towards the viewer, so that we can only catch a glimpse of the house beyond; this has the effect of bringing us closer, and invites us to look at the focus of the painting – where everybody is looking: down towards the end of the fishing rod, which we can’t actually see coz it’s behind the woman’s dress! Meanwhile, over on the right rests a bottle of wine on the end of the boat, from which the sleeping guy above, by the large tree, seems to have a glass or two. A lazy Sunday afternoon…wouldn’t it be nice!

Developed a hundred years after the Impressionists, Tuckman’s model of group development suggests five stages – forming, storming, norming, performing and adjourning. And I’m sure you can guess how the stages apply to the Impressionist group: their forming began in the 1860’s when they all met in Art-college; their storming happened in the cafes and bars of Montmartre, their norming was discovered in the aftermath of war, and determination for the future (1872); their performing was in the middle years of the 1870’s when they produced some of the finest Impressionist work; and their adjourning followed at the end of the decade, when they went their separate ways. But in that short time, this small band of people had changed the parameters of the human search for the expression of artistic beauty.

Monet would be devastated by the death of his young wife Camille in 1879; and could not help himself but capture her passing and his torment; I am always reminded of the Scream by Munch of 1893.

Camille Monet on her death-bed               Claude Monet 1879

But he would re-marry, and with his paintings developing and selling, his large combined family would live happily in Giverny from 1880 for another 40 years, painting expansive water gardens, just as Cezanne was painting equally expansive bathers. As Cezanne would say: “Monet is just an eye; but, Oh my God, what an eye!”

 It would take 140 years before the wedge between science, in this case the social sciences, and spirituality was bridged. Tuckman’s model of group development seems pretty obvious now: it matches the process of how groups are born, live and pass away. But it’s rather linear; it’s a description of what happens – and fair enough, a true description, but a limited one. What it doesn’t take account of is the depth of what is going on; that inner shift in the way we understand stuff, that shift in consciousness that underpins the movement towards beauty, truth and goodness.

This inner shift, from fighting the old to sensing and presencing an emerging future possibility, is at the core of all deep leadership work today. It’s a shift that requires us to expand our thinking from the head to the heart. It is a shift from an ego-system awareness that cares about the well-being of oneself to an eco-system awareness that cares about the well-being of all, including oneself.

…the possibility of profound personal, societal, and global renewal has never been more real than it is today. It’s something we can feel in many places across the planet. It’s not just about firefighting and tinkering with the surface of structural change. It’s not just about replacing one mindset that no longer serves us with another. It’s a future that requires us to tap into a deeper level of our humanity, of who we really are and who we want to be as a society. It’s a future that we can sense, feel, and actualize by shifting the inner place from which we operate. It’s a future that, in these moments of disruption, begins to presence itself through us.

Otto Scharmer, Theory U: leading from the emerging future, 2016

Two Apples (FWN 723, 1875)

Two apples                         FWN 723             1875                     15cm x 24

“Blessed are they who see beautiful things in humble places where other people see nothing.” Pissarro

The famous quote above from Pissarro is echoed in the words Cezanne uses to describe his friend and mentor: “the humble and colossal Pissarro”. Even amongst all the rushed uproar that the Impressionist Exhibitions caused, the angry trill of the critics of the day, the arrogant dismissal that was the response of the Art Establishment, Pissarro and Cezanne seem to be grounded in the humble.        

I want to suggest that this shared grounding was not dependent on their success, or lack of it. Just after the first Impressionist Exhibition in 1874, the director of the Museum in Aix, Monsieur Granet, invited himself to see Cezanne at work in Aix, writing to Cezanne thus: “I shall be able to appreciate much better the dangers threatening Painting after seeing your attempts on its life”. The people of Provence knew how the people of Paris thought that all the world revolved around them: Monsieur Granet encouraged Cezanne to persevere. I suggest, not because Monsieur Granet beheld in Cezanne’s work, a classical excellence, but because he beheld a humble reverence before nature.

This painting - the size of a large post card - is more interesting because it shows us how Cezanne is developing his art: the colours he is using, and how he is wondering about how to introduce light into the painting. You can imagine Cezanne taking a rest from a larger work, and painting the two apples in his lunch hour.

Two apples and a glass                  FWN 725 TA                       1877                     20cm x 18

The second of these three little paintings, with nearly the same title as the first, was painted a couple of years after the first. It is given the dreaded designation in the Catalogue Raisonne of ‘TA’, Traditionally Attributed (to Cezanne). What’s even worse, it’s classified as ‘of unknown whereabouts’. All the paintings in the Catalogue Raisonne have been verified by inspection; where a particular painting has not been, it’s usually because it’s in a ‘Private Collection’. So with a TA and a whereabouts unknown, it’s probably still worth buying if you see it in a Charity Shop going cheap; just don’t assume you’ll be able to retire on it! I could not find a copy or anything of this painting, and that’s why the reproduction here is so bad. It doesn’t look like a Cezanne, but in real life – you never know about its authenticity!

Two and a half apples                     FWN 757             1879         16.5cm x 10

“The unifying continuous weft of slanting parallel brush strokes, counteracts only in part the breaks occasioned by faulty colour-relations in several areas of the painting. For example, in the apple in the foreground, the area of shadow appears disjointed from its adjacent colour-area; in the colour-relations between the two other pieces of fruit, the contrast between the dark red and the bright yellow tends towards a disturbing clash” wrote A. Barnes and V de Mazia.

To you and me, that means: the colours don’t look right!

In giving up on modelling (using darker and lighter shades of the same colour), Cezanne compensated in two ways: he painted stuff – in this case – apples, using little brush strokes of differently coloured paints. You can see clearly how he does this. But secondly, he then has to harmonize all the colours he sees and uses, into an overall integration; so that the painting as a whole looks good, integrates as a whole. And yea, the yellow apple looks a bit funny against the red one.

It’s ‘work in progress’. The above mentioned Dr Barnes, (of the Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia) was still willing to pay a handsome price for the little painting (2000 francs a 100 years ago) because, even though he thought it was not one of Cezanne’s best, he did not doubt its authenticity!

We come to understand that there are two ways that the word ‘authentic’ is being used: the most common indicates that the work of art was actually done by the famous artist; it’s not a fake.

The second meaning, more profound, is to indicate the ‘spirit’ of the work; the expression of the spirit may vary, indeed grow and develop. But the spirit subsists through-out that process of development: and for Pissarro and Cezanne, the spirit abides in humble reverence before nature.

“What you encounter, recognize or discover depends to a large degree on the quality of your approach. Many of the ancient cultures practiced careful rituals of approach. An encounter of depth and spirit was preceded by careful preparation.
When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.”
― John O'Donohue: Beauty, the invisible embrace

It’s such a good practice to start the day with reverence, and to end the day with gratitude; and if you can’t, then it’s ‘work in progress’. Wherever you find yourself: no blame, no shame, just developing!

Co-operatives (FWN 651, 1877)

The Harvest                       FWN 651             1877                     45.7cm x 55.2

In 1791, a law was passed, the “Chapelier law”, which forbad workers’ associations, including co-operatives and trade unions. During the revolutionary period in France, from 1848 and with the Commune in 1871 onwards, many co-operatives formed clandestinely. The state actively sought out these co-operatives; once found, they were destroyed ruthlessly by the police. On the 27th December 1873, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro, Sisley, Cezanne, Morisot and Degas, with several other artists founded the “Cooperative and Anonymous Association of Painters, Sculptors, and Engravers".  You can guess why they wanted to maintain some anonymity. It was not until 1878, that the new Republic repealed the Chapelier law and stopped the police from conducting the attacks.

This painting at first glance seems a gentle countryside scene, and it’s pleasant. I like the colours; there’s a certain balance to it with the trees one on each side, and the hill in the middle ground between the trees. Some commentators want to date it later because of the hashed brush-strokes, but hey, life is a developing kind of thing.

But yes, there is more to this painting than meets the eye!

It’s Cezanne’s version of one of the four seasons painted by Poussin from 1660 called “Summer”; Poussin depicts the Biblical scene, with corn fields, mountain and hill castle in the background, when the rich landowner, Boaz, meets the widowed Ruth, while the workers go about reaping the harvest. Boaz and Ruth go on to marry, and their great grandson is King David – a pretty impressive painting of the simple beginning to a legendary story. Cezanne swaps the white and brown stallions in Poussin’s painting for a donkey; he has the noble Boaz as the boy asleep on the floor; and swaps Ruth in her flowing blue dress as she beseeches Boaz with a peasant woman leaning against a tree with her back to us; and the distant mountain and hillside fortification becomes a Provencal hill village. It’s not that Cezanne wanted to belittle Poussin’s painting: Cezanne was a great admirer of Poussin’s paintings and technique, but he wanted to “bring Poussin back to life, by way of nature”.

Cezanne’s painting was bought by Gauguin, who loved it! He copied it onto a fan, and engraved it into a ceramic vase. When he left for Martinique, he left the painting with a guy called Portier, who lived in the same house as the Van Gogh brothers. Van Gogh later wrote to his brother: “instinctively these days, I keep remembering what I have seen of Cezanne’s work, because he rendered so forcibly, as in the Harvest that we saw at Portier’s, the harsh side of Provence”. The Van Gogh’s knew Provence well, having spent some time in Arles; and maybe Cezanne’s painting expressed a rather forlorn countryside scene - Van Gogh painted his own harvest in Provence in 1888.

After the revolution of 1871, the laws of the new Republic needed changing and modernizing to align with a Republic rather than an Empire. So the Viscount de Tocqueville, one Alexis Charles-Henri-Maurice Clérel de Tocqueville – yea, impressive name – was given the task of going to have a look at what was happening elsewhere in the world. His book “Democracy in America” is a classic, and is one of the founding works of the Social Sciences. As Tocqueville understood it, this rapidly democratizing society had a population devoted to "middling" values which wanted to amass vast fortunes through hard work. In Tocqueville's mind, this explained why the United States was so different from Europe. In Europe, he claimed, nobody cared about making money. The lower classes had no hope of gaining more than minimal wealth while the upper classes found it crass, vulgar and unbecoming of their sort to care about something as unseemly as money. At the same time in the United States, workers would see people fashioned in exquisite attire and merely proclaim that through hard work they too would soon possess the fortune necessary to enjoy such luxuries.

Such values about hard work are more and more threatened by the rise in inequality between the rich and the rest of us. There is much evidence these days, through the social sciences, that the greater the scale of inequality, the more divisive will a society become. Inequality itself does not seem to be the problem, but an extreme scale of inequality certainly is. The French economist Thomas Piketty presented a simple explanation for rising inequality. He argued that wealth generally grows faster than the economy, and it tended to become concentrated, as more wealth brings more opportunities to save and invest.

The early co-operative movement sought to be a vision of a "New World Order" of mutual help, social equality and brotherhood. It developed eight principles, which still hold true today:

Co-operatives are open to everyone

Co-operatives are run by their members

Co-operatives make economic decisions together

Co-operatives are independent

Co-operatives provide education and training

Co-operatives co-operate

Co-operatives support their local communities

Members help decide how profits are allocated. Suggestions might include using profits to develop the co-operative, to build up reserves, to reward members in proportion to their trade with the co-operative, or to support other activities approved by members (such as ethical projects).

The Impressionists certainly sought to situate themselves in the wind of change blowing throughout the world in the middle of the 19th Century.

“You may depend upon it that

there are as good hearts to serve communities

in cottages as in palaces.”

Robert Owen

(amended)

Your one wild and precious life (FWN 106, 1877)

L’Etang des Soeurs a Osny, pres de Pontoise       FWN 106             1877     60cm x 73.5

That summer day, Cezanne got off the train at Gare Saint-Lazare carrying the rolled up canvas of a wood that he had been painting. A young man stopped him, and asked to see the painting. Cezanne opened the canvas, and was able to prop it up against a wall, so as to avoid reflections. The stranger was in ecstasy, especially over the green of the trees: “you can smell the freshness!” “If you like my trees” replied Cezanne “you can have them”. “I can’t afford them”. Cezanne insisted, and the admirer went off in one direction happy with the canvas under his arm, and the artist in the other direction with nothing under his arm but happiness in his heart.

A few months later, they would meet again in the café bar of The Princess of Bohemia, where the young man, Cabaner, played the piano. His piano playing was rather unconventional: he stuck little pieces of coloured paper to the piano keys, insisting that he heard colour and saw sound. His own compositions were not always well received, even at such an eclectic jazzy café. He and Cezanne became good friends. They had something in common: their wild side was irrepressible.

Pissarro had a wild side too: by the time he met Cezanne, he had lived! – walked away from a good job in the sunshine of St. Thomas, taught himself how to paint, worked his way around the world and arrived penniless in Paris an anarchist and pacifist; then this black Caribbean Jewish guy goes and falls in love with a White Roman Catholic English girl.         

And here in the Princess of Bohemia, Pissarro, Cabaner and Cezanne would sit, discussing light and sound, harmony and dissonance, tones and gradations, music and painting….

This painting is rather unusual for this time in Cezanne’s life – he’s gone back to the old palette knife! The paint is applied in downward strokes of the palette knife; it’s clearest if you focus on the central diagonal line of greens, from top left, into the bend of the tree; you see that the top of the stroke has a flat edge, where the palette knife has started, dragging the paint downwards. When I look at this painting, I always think that this ‘brush’ work, with the shape of the main tree gives a certain wild look about the little wood around the pond at Osny. Cezanne and Pissarro painted this scene together, and it was Pissarro who had in the year before gone back to the palette knife: they must have been exploring something together.

Maybe, it was their wildness: that roar within, that shouts to heaven like a storm; that urgency of the soul to play its song; that precious gift of creativity to soar above. I am reminded of one of Rilke’s verses:

I circle around God, around the primordial tower.
I’ve been circling for thousands of years
and I still don’t know: am I a falcon,
a storm, or a great song?

Pissarro had helped organize the third exhibition in 1877; and changed the name from the Salon des Refuges to the Impressionists. Cezanne exhibited 14 paintings and 3 watercolours – by far the most he’d ever supplied; 241 pieces of Impressionist paintings were exhibited in total, amongst them Monet’s “Gare St Lazare”. But the response of officialdom, and the general public was just as painful as usual: so brutal in fact, against Cezanne especially, that he never exhibited again for 10 years. Within 5 years, Cezanne would be asking his Impressionist colleagues to contribute to pay for the funeral of the young man he met on the station of St Lazare. It was said of Cabaner and his music: “he was born fifty years too early”.

The Summer Day

Who made the world?

Who made the swan, and the black bear?

Who made the grasshopper?

This grasshopper, I mean-

the one who has flung herself out of the grass,

the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,

who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-

who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.

Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.

Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.

I don't know exactly what a prayer is.

I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down

into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,

how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,

which is what I have been doing all day.

Tell me, what else should I have done?

Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?

Tell me, what is it you plan to do

with your one wild and precious life?

—Mary Oliver

Who let the dogs out? (FWN 434, 1875)

Portrait of the Artist                        FWN 434             1875                     64cm x 53cm

This painting refers to Guillauman and Pissarro in equal measure – the painting behind Cezanne in this self-portrait is a copy of Guillauman’s ‘View of the Seine’, only painted backwards, as Cezanne was doing his self-portrait using a mirror; and Cezanne’s pose recalls that of Pissarro’s self-portrait of 1873.  The three of them were in fact working together in a studio at the Quai d’Anjou; they had exhibited together in the Impressionist Exhibitions in 1874 – let loose on the art-world of Paris, and making an impact, running wild!

When he saw this portrait, Rainer Maria Rilke said that Cezanne’s head seemed “sculpted by a hammering from within (and that Cezanne) reproduces himself with such humble objectivity, with the unquestioning matter-of-factness of a dog beholding another dog”. Yes, the dogs were in town!                                                                                                                                        

Cezanne had hardly done any self-portraits at all till this one – just one in 1864, from a photograph, which he took a few years to complete. Then, all of a sudden, we get five in the space of two years; In this one, “Cezanne builds up the paints, which he mixes and grinds with extraordinary ardour; going back over the thicknesses to nuance the tone; sometimes his touch follows the sense of the form, sometimes it is a long slash, but it always carries with it sombre, plentiful, pigment, sculpted with an energetic lightness.”- the words of the great interwar French Art Historian, Henri Focillon.

Believe it or not, Cezanne is happy at this time, with his mates in Paris, painting well, and only 35, he just needs a haircut!                                                      

People used to describe Cezanne as “touchy”, and in quite a literal sense – as if he had been ‘flayed’; and so over the years stories grew about how he did not like to be touched, how he did not like for people to get too close to him. He described himself as constantly avoiding the ‘grippin’: he so feared that people would get their grappling hooks into him, and haul him back; that he would be tethered down, domesticated, like a dog on a lead. You get a lot of criticism as an artist: even, your fellow artists could have a nasty bite. Van Gogh said of Cezanne’s wedding to Hortense “Cezanne is now precisely a man in a middle-class marriage just like the old Dutch masters; if he gets a hard-on in his work, it’s because he hasn’t wasted himself on his wedding night” – Van Gogh was a fervent admirer of Cezanne, and though they never met, Van Gogh knew what Cezanne was trying to achieve, and so, where to bite in the most vulnerable spot!

Cezanne and Hortense legalized their relationship in part to secure the inheritance of Cezanne’s father’s estate: Cezanne always worried that his youngest sister would leave the house to the Jesuits, who ran the local parish church that she loved to attend. And so he asked Zola for advice about making a will, and later divided his third of the inheritance equally in three parts between Hortense, their son Paul, and himself. With money, and with all of life, especially his art, Cezanne developed defence mechanisms – he let his hair grow to look wild and unapproachable, he disappeared in the Provencal countryside, he acted the part of a peasant, and, later in life, he let his son handle all his finances. 

                                                                                            Dog or no dog, Cezanne just wanted to paint, and paint he did, with deliberation: The paintings Pissarro, Guillaumin and Cezanne painted in that studio at the Quai d’Anjou and exhibited in the Impressionist Exhibitions were considered wild, and the people of Paris wondered who let the dogs out!

“On my first trip to the Modern I turned a corner,
rooted before the ridged linen of a Cèzanne. 

A still life. I thought how clean his brushes were! 
Across that distance light was my first lesson. 

“But what conviction was carried in a sketch,

and patchy impasto surfaces with dim drawing?

What authority granted the privilege

of blurring, dissolving, ignoring form, outlawing

detail of trees without Corot’s feathery grace?

Physics had analysed light into particles floating

and the Pointillist muse was science; all space

was a concentration of dots, picnickers boating

on the summer Seine, dogs, parasols. Their refusers

rejected this change of vision, of deities; theories

instead of faith; geometry, not God. Their accusers

saw them as shallow heretics, unorthodox painters

using wriggles for tree trunks, charred twigs for figures,

crooked horizons, shadows shrieked with purple;

they were the Academies outcasts, its n------,

from barbarous colonies, a contentious people.”                                 

Derek Walcott: Tiepolo’s hound (A magnificent, semi-autobiographical sequence from a Nobel Prize-winning poet and artist, in the steps of Pissarro)

This blog is a tribute to Derek Walcott who was, like Pissarro, of Jewish and West Indian background, a poet and an artist; he passed away in 2017.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qkuu0Lwb5EM

Of paradigm shifts and love (FWN 96,97, 1876, 1876-7)

The Sea at L’Estaque                      FWN 96                  1876                                 42cm x 59    

Bay of L’Estaque from the East  FWN 97                  1879                             55.5cm x 65.5

Back in the 1980’s, we were taught that there were three kinds of ‘change’: developmental, transitional, and transformational. You probably have some idea of what these kinds of ‘change’ imply: in the forty years from then to now, their meanings have soaked into our unconscious, or into the ‘knowledge-base’ of our society – our collective unconscious. Back then, the example often given was of ‘motor cars’: cars were ‘invented’ way before Carl Benz came up with his petrol powered single cylinder four-stroke engine automobile in 1885. Before then, cars looked a bit like locomotive train engines on wheels. Before Benz, this was the ‘developmental’ type of change – you were just improving what was already there. The Carl Benz car was the first ‘production car’, in the sense that he produced a number of exactly the same vehicles; this is the ‘transitional change’, when you implement a new course of action. And then, of course, the ‘transformational change’ was down to Henry Ford: with the introduction of the production line, and, more importantly, what it enabled – mass production for the masses – that’s us, halleluiah!

Wow, how it seems so strange now to mention car production and transformational change in the same sentence!

The two paintings of the same scene from above L’Estaque, on the other side of the Bay looking across to Marseilles, are just a few years apart in Cezanne’s development. What’s the difference? Well, one has no chimneys; in one the bushes and trees in the foreground are much nearer; the view of the opposite coast is different; one seems to be painted from higher up; the colours are similar but different….is it that these detailed differences make up how the two paintings appear to us? If we were to list every single detail of difference, does that explain how we see them differently?

There seems to be something that distinguishes ‘developmental and transitional’ change from ‘transformational’ change; they don’t somehow seem to be on the same level, as it were; the first type of change is  ‘linear’, but transformational change suggests something extra, some kind of step change, some move onto another level. This idea washed about in our collective unconscious until it was consciously expressed by Thomas Kuhn, and his theory of ‘paradigm shift’. Some kinds of change transform not just the detail within the picture, but the frame of reference that is the picture itself.

We have now become aware that our very understanding itself is contextual, always within a frame of reference; but for Cezanne’s time, this was something entirely new: in the sense that it ushered in a new ‘conceptual scheme’, a new way of thinking: it was a paradigm shift; it was a realization that we no longer need the comfort of believing in something absolute and unchanging: we can be happy and secure with change itself.  We understand stuff now, quite naturally, as if we’re looking through a particular ‘window’. Whatever window we’re using, we know, and accept its parameters, its conceptual framework. And it does feel ‘natural’ to us, in just the same way that it felt ‘unnatural’ to people of Cezanne’s time: that’s because we human beings have grown up a bit! We have continued our evolution, by collectively, going through a paradigm shift. (and if we dare to go, there are still more shifts awaiting us!)

I think the difference between the two paintings is that the first one is an ensemble of different images; it’s Cezanne’s attempt to paint how he sees the coast at L’Estaque. The later painting is the expression of Cezanne’s intention to be one with the place that is L’Estaque. It is this later one that is more balanced, more integrated – you just want to sit with it, in delight and feel the harmony -because the more paradigm shifts we go through in our lives, the more balanced an outlook we have, and the more integrated we ourselves will be!

Every person you see;

every object,

every situation you encounter,

has something to show you.

Everything points beyond its appearance

and nothing is as it appears to be.

What you are experiencing depends which “layer” you are looking from.

You can go from the surface layers of appearance to the core layers of knowing

by asking : ‘What would love do here?’ “

Michael Alperstein

In the throes of revolution (FWN 632, 1875)

Don Quichotte, front view            FWN 632             1875                     35cm x 24

Don Quichotte back view              FWN 633             1875                     22.5cm  x 16.5

I’ve never actually lived through a revolution; yea, sure, I’ve lived through governments that I haven’t liked or agreed with; and sometimes it’s been hard for me to understand how particular governments get elected! But I’ve never actually lived in a country where a situation has arisen where two persons, groups or parties each claim legitimate authority to govern, at the same time.

                                            After the capture of the self-proclaimed Emperor Napoleon by the Prussian forces in 1871, the communards of Paris declared the end of the Empire and the beginning of the Republic. They set up their own system of government, with democratically elected representatives to conduct the affairs of the emerging Third Republic. Away from Paris, public fervour against the Emperor led the people of Aix to declare their support for the Third Republic: they tore down the bust of the Emperor from the Council Chamber of the Aix Town Hall and declared the local chemist as acting Mayor, with the local doctor as their deputy. The Acting Town Council went on to elect Cezanne’s father on to the Finance Committee, and Cezanne on to the Supervisory Committee of the School of Drawing.                          

The publishing of the Three Musketeers in 1844 raised interest in its Spanish relative, published a century earlier, the stories of Don Quixotte: the wandering knight whose mission is to rescue people in distress (think batman) and so restore the Age of Chivalry. He’s supported in this mission by a farmer (think Robin) who’s a bit slow to comprehend the significance of it all, and tends to somewhat deflate the high ideals of his hero.

The parallels, and therefore the meanings, of these novels for Cezanne’s day are not quite as clear as you might think: the choices are many – Republic and Empire; Realism and Idealism; Individuals and society. While the Three Musketeers fought against the abuses of the Old Regime, Don Quixotte represented the lost Age of Chivalry. This feeling of sentimental reminiscence with regard to change (think – we didn’t have much in those days, but we were happy then!) is one that seems often to occur.

In developmental theory, it has been referred to as the “Gamma Trap”. There seem to be two facets to this type of reaction – it follows a sudden outburst of dramatic change, and it seems to be regressive. The first facet is like a pan of milk on the hob – nothing seems to be happening for a long while, and then all of a sudden it boils over. Whether it’s human development or indeed, the stock-market, the phenomena seems to be the same: all of a sudden, the ordinary people of Aix rose up, and took control of their town, casting aside the due process of law. Nowadays, it seems to be occurring in many countries, and even in many sectors of society. “There’s a powerful force at work in markets that helps explain why stocks seem to do nothing for long periods and then suddenly lurch into activity. Market players have noticed this force—known by some as a “gamma trap”—and have been devising tools to estimate its size and direction in order to predict how markets will move and to trade around it.” Wall Street Journal, 9th July 19.

The second facet is that the gamma trap goes in the opposite direction to the one you think you’re going in; it’s as if you somehow regress, rather than carry on in the forward direction you’ve been heading. You suddenly find yourself going the other way, and asking yourself in bewilderment: how did that happen? As reported again for July’19 in the financial markets: “traders can sometimes find themselves in a gamma trap when the hedging exacerbates losses as stocks drop dramatically.” The action they take to alleviate the problem in fact exacerbates it! “How did I end up on the supervisory committee of the Aix School of Drawing?” you can almost hear Cezanne murmuring, over his coffee and croissant!

“Gamma Traps” in developmental theory refer to times when people (in a period of such dramatic change that it causes great anger and insecurity), plump for an option that does not address the underlying need for change. In such circumstances the alleviation of insecurity seems to overpower the need for change; and they relapse into their old ways, or into new ways that are not sufficiently ‘revolutionary’. (think taking pain killers because you’re afraid of going to the dentist!). Sometimes ‘gamma traps’ can last a generation – in France, the period from the revolution of 1848 to 1871, with Napoleon as head of state and self-proclaimed ‘Emperor’ was indeed a ‘gamma trap”; in 1848, the people overwhelmingly voted for something that only exacerbated the underlying problem!

Both these paintings are now in private collections; there’s not much interest in them as great works of art. There’s not even much reference to them in any of the authoritative books: John Rewald’s Catalogue of Cezanne’s Works simply says of ‘Don Quixotte, front view’ : “cf comments for “Don Quixotte, back view”, and visa versa, adding “strangely fragmented”. Cezanne was an avid reader, and I’m sure he used the time he was painting these paintings to reflect on the meaning of the Don Quixotte novels; but he gives no clue as to what he thought: except maybe, that it’s all a bit fragmented!

“Love does not begin and end the way we think it does.

Love is a battle;

love is a war;

love is growing-up”

James Baldwin, American Writer and Activist

Awarded the Commander de la Legion of d’Honneur in 1986