The whites are blue, and the blues are white (FWN 780, 1879-80)

Still life with compotier                  FWN 780             1879/80               46 cm x 55

“Now here, without the slightest doubt, we’re in the presence of an unspoiled creature with the instincts of a wild beast: (for him) blood and sex have the edge over ambition.” So it is that Van Gogh describes his fellow artist, staying with him for the summer in Arles. The man in question, like so many men of a particular age, had seized the crisis moment of losing his well-paid job in high finance, to become a savage again, and expend his life painting.

He used to be a stockbroker, on the Paris Bourse, the Stock Exchange. It was a job he happened upon by fortune, connections within connections: his maternal grandmother was the mistress of an aristocratic family in Peru. While in positions of powerful leadership, the members of the family had lived a privileged life. But when he was just six, civil war ended the family’s fortunes; he and his mother fled to France. When he had completed his education, a close family friend secured him a job on the Paris Stock Exchange. And there he worked happily providing for his family; and with his six-figure salary, he was able to indulge in his favourite pastime – art. He was bowled over by one particular painting, by Paul Cezanne: still-life with compotier; so he bought it.

But then, crisis struck: the first ever stock market crash in the world happened when a major Regional bank, L’Union Generale, failed, and in 1882, the crash brought the Paris Bourse to its knees. The young man lost his job. After some months looking for work, he wrote to Pissarro saying “I have decided to make my living from painting, at whatever cost; and therefore I write to ask for your help, signed Eugene Henri Paul Gauguin”.

Everywhere he went, the young man took with him his prized painting by Cezanne: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white” Gauguin used to repeat this phrase to himself as he marveled at the painting: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white”. Later, when he would himself become more established as a painter, he would bring the Cezanne with him, and start his ‘lecture’ in the cafes of Montmartre to his young followers and admirers: “the whites are blue, and the blues are white. That which constitutes a work of art: it’s not the artist’s taste; it’s his willpower, his life; the life he puts into it. This effort must not be brought to bear solely on the totality of the painting, on the general arrangement, the game of brushstrokes, the distribution and so on, but on each part so that there is no place lost or unemployed by emotion. So that the rapport amongst all the parts, and between each part of the parts, must be the same: one, and exactly realized” (noted by Maurice Dennis).

“Woman in front of a still-life by Cezanne” was painted by Paul Gauguin in 1890.

Meanwhile, back in 1882, as Gauguin was with Pissarro and Cezanne in Auvers, Zola was down a coal mine in the mining area of northwest France researching his next book in the series portraying the effects of the Second Industrial Revolution on the fictional family Rougon Macquart. He was accompanied by a certain Emile Basly, who was a miner in Anzin, and the leader of the union of mine workers: the first job, hard, underground and dangerous, the second, underground and illegal, and just as dangerous. 10,000 miners had been on strike for two months: the mining company had introduced new working conditions that meant the miners could not achieve their payments by results, and there was no longer any work for older miners. The company sought to cut costs because the regional bank had called in its loans: the Union Generale was a Catholic Bank, which did not support the Republic. The bank’s shares had risen from 750 francs to 2000 francs in just 18 months, and in its newfound success, it had overreached its finances, made investments in Egypt and North Africa, a railway in Serbia, and utility companies at home. The bank folded, causing a run on shares, and the Paris Bourse crashed.

The mining company did not budge; the miners were eventually forced back down the mine; the Stock Exchange was rescued.

What was the meaning of the revolution? What did it mean to live now in a Republic of freedom, equality and fraternity? Zola gave his answer: he entitled his book: ‘Germinal’; and ended it with these determined words:

“Again, again, more and more distinctly, as if they had come close to the ground, the comrades were tapping. To the flaming rays of the star, on this morning of youth, it was from this seed that the campaign was growing. Men were pushing, a black, vengeful army, which germinated slowly in the furrows, growing up for the harvests of the future century, and whose germination would soon break through the earth.”

For the working class, and industrial poor, the stock market, the bourgeoisie, the Republic; the landed gentry, church and peasants; science, art and narrative too - it was a time of germination. The categories of traditional understandings – the whites are blue, and the blues are white - are like seeds which must be cracked open for new life and growth to begin.

The seeds planted then, would indeed break through in the next century.

And furnish for our millennium the decisive choice between a thriving earthly garden or an extractive global wasteland.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used

when we created them.”  Albert Einstein

The value of things (FWN 465, 1881-2)

The Artist’s son in a red armchair               FWN 465             1881/2                 34cm x 37.5

It seems pretty obvious to me that Cezanne painted this portrait of his son Paul for his tenth birthday, 4th Jan 1882. Cezanne was with Hortense and young Paul in the early months of the year, and the winter in L’Estaque was particularly bad that year. Renoir would join them in February, but catch pneumonia, and be out of action for a couple of weeks. It’s reminiscent of the portrait of Hortense, in the red armchair of 1877; that armchair was in Paris, a rather bigger one and fuller red, with tassels on the arms. This armchair was the one in L’Estaque, in the ‘holiday’ cottage where they hid away, still secret from Cezanne Louis-Auguste. Young Paul is now at school in nearby Gardanne. He looks more like his mother.

It’s a good gentle portrait, and Cezanne has I think been at pains to capture a close likeness of his son. For this painting, he has abandoned his ‘constructivist’ style, and is not experimenting; he’s not concentrating on developing his art - there are no little hatches of paint, and no building up of the painting. Rather, Cezanne uses thin washes of colours, the face of his son, lovingly moulded. The young Paul often helped his father with his drawings and paintings: splashing charcoal, watercolour, and oil-paint all over Cezanne’s efforts to be creatively disciplined.

Some ten years later, it was Ambroise Vollard who would not be too impressed by the lack of discipline applied in the Cezanne household. Vollard was the first professional art-dealer to realize the potential of the Impressionist and modern art movement for making money. In the late 1880’s, while studying law, he had paid for his studies by working as a clerk for an art-dealer in Paris. The 1880’s saw the birth and growth of the department store, and the emerging nouveau riche gloried in the national prestige of the great Parisian stores. Indeed, Zola set one of his novels  ‘Au Bonhear des Dames’ in the typical department store, as a symbol of the new technology that was both improving society, and devouring it!

What’s more, there was a new art-form on the block: poster art! Jules Cheret used his ‘three-stone lithographic process’ to be able to produce a wide spectrum of colours; and so, low-cost colour posters became a reality!

Vollard managed to buy all Cezanne’s works stored in Pere Tanguy’s art-supplies shop in Montmartre – some 150 paintings. (this was how Cezanne used to pay for oils and materials – leaving his paintings in exchange). Vollard understood not only the direction in which art was going, but also the direction in which commerce was too! His motto – buy low, sell high – would cash in on the newly found wealth of the booming middle class. Still, he bemoaned the fact that Cezanne had let his young son help him draw all over a few of the works!

Vollard made a mint on his motto; Cezanne was never in it for the money: whether he had very little, as in the early years, or an abundance, when he inherited a third of his father’s estate in 1886, he was always afraid that it would be a distraction from his painting. Cezanne worked hard at his painting – early start, six days of the week, late finish. He tried to keep himself to himself as much as possible, so he was emotionally detached from anything that would block his artistic expression. But with Hortence and young Paul, he could relax.

Cezanne cherished his son; and certainly, watching him grow, helped Cezanne mature: Cezanne painted his son’s portrait seven times and Hortence nigh on twenty times in the 1880s. In this decade, Cezanne would learn how to relate to his authoritarian father with equanimity rather than rage; he would learn how to accept Zola’s disappointment in him with reserve; and by the end of the decade Cezanne would be teaching his young son Paul how to deal with art dealers like Ambroise Vollard.  

In this, his fourth decade, Cezanne would learn the value of things.

How delightful it is to watch a son and his father grow together.

in that serene and blessed mood

in which the affections gently lead us on

until, the breath of this corporeal frame

and even the motion of our human blood is suspended

and we are laid asleep in body

and become a living soul:

while, with an eye made quiet by the power of harmony

and the deep power of joy

we see into the life of things.

Wordsworth, 1770 – 1850

“Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey”

Wordsworth has just returned from supporting the uprising of the French Revolution, and opens the poem with the famous lines:

“Five long years have past; five summers, with the length of five long winters, and again I hear these waters, rolling from their mountain springs…”

A different way of looking (FWN 258, 1888-90)

La Montagne Sainte Victoire        FWN 258             1889                     65 cm x 81         

La Montagne Sainte Victoire                       Renoir                  1889

I love the tapestry of interwoven colours in Cezanne’s painting of the famous mountain; it just calls me to stop and engage: an invitation to sit, don’t analyze, just be still with the mountain, be grounded on the undulating earth, and be whole. Have a cup of tea, chill out and let your spirit be free for a while, with the mountain.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves…

Okay; let’s try and see how Cezanne does it. Well, where is your focus of attention in Cezanne’s painting? Mine is straight down the middle, up to the top of the mountain. And Renoir’s? – maybe the guy with the crisp white shirt in the foreground left…..

Even though it’s late in the period of Cezanne’s constructivist phase, I thought I’d present this painting of Saint Victoire mountain because Renoir painted the same mountain from the same spot – indeed these two friends painted them together. Renoir visited Cezanne, but came down with pneumonia and was bed-bound for a couple of weeks. Cezanne nursed him back to health, and then out they went to paint together: and these two paintings are the results. They are particularly interesting because they display how Cezanne’s painting was diverging from the Impressionists. The Impressionists to be sure, painted with emotion and joie de vivre; they painted the simple things: the beauty and texture of nature shimmering in the sunshine of Provence or Paris, in bright vibrant colours. But they retained the formal organization of the mechanics of their art, they retained the methodology that they had been taught at school of how to do it! Cezanne wanted to retain the emotion, joie de vivre, shimmering colours, but create a solidity out of a new organizing method, without the use of traditional perspective.
Erle Loran, American Art Historian, lecturer and painter (RIP 1999), who lived in Cezanne’s studio while doing his research, uses the diagrams below to show the difference between Cezanne’s painting, and Renoir’s.

Drawing in perspective means that you adjust the objects painted to align with an imaginary line from two fixed points – the viewer, and a point on the horizon. Everything in between has to be in alignment with that line for it to look ‘right’ – for Renoir, the imaginary line runs from where he is standing to the end point on the horizon. It makes it look more distant. Cezanne does not paint with perspective; and has to find other means of presenting the scene – foreshortening the foreground, not fading the mountain but instead making it more defined and making it fill more picture space: it makes it look more solid.

The movement of Renoir’s rendition of the motif, using traditional perspective, seems to go off in the line of the two arrows in diagram II, below; where-as the movement in Cezanne’s rendition goes around the mountain and back, in the direction of the three arrows of the top diagram I.

Let’s return to Cezanne’s Mountain of Sainte Victoire: for me, its solidity is achieved because the movement of the painting is around and within the enclosed space of the picture box: it is complete unto itself.

It is an invitation into presence,

deeply simple,

inclusive, rounded and realized,

colourful, joyful and powerful,

simply deep presence.

Drink your tea slowly and reverently,
as if it is the axis
on which the world earth revolves
– slowly, evenly, without
rushing toward the future;
Live the actual moment.
Only this moment is life.

Thich Nhat Hanh

The evolution of Paul Cezanne (FWN 235, 1887)

La Montagne Sainte Victoire au grand pin              FWN 235             1887                60 x 90 cm

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

View of Louveciennes, d’apres Pissarro                  FWN 63               1872           73 x 92 cm    

Grand pin et terres rouges            FWN 274             1895                     72 x 91 cm

It was a time in-between. Cezanne had become more and more dissatisfied with Impressionism; it wasn’t just the constant hubble and bubble of the annual Impressionist Exhibitions, with the critics’ clamour of criticisms constantly culminating in crude and often just downright rude jibes at Cezanne personally. It wasn’t even because Cezanne did not enjoy the company of his fellow artists, though some were more tolerable than others! nor was it the entertainment of the café life of Montmartre – though he could only take so much! No, Cezanne had not achieved in his time as an Impressionist, what he wanted to; or rather, he had been an Impressionist artist, for sure – he rather reluctantly would admit to it later in life – but it had not satisfied him: it was not sufficient. Yes, maybe necessary, but not sufficient. And so, he journeyed into a space in-between.

In-between what? He knew not. For what he yearned for, had not yet ever existed.

It was to be a long time in-between – more than a decade. There would be ups and downs; good paintings, and a few so bad they would have to be ripped in two. Cezanne had already given up the methods and techniques of traditional, classic art. He must now venture into a space, in-between, of reaching into the unknown; of believing without seeing.

This is what the 1880’s was like for Paul Cezanne.

The classic response to such a “dark night” is that it is a necessary part of the journey: so you need to keep plodding on, with resolution, trying different techniques, going back again to where you felt the inspiration, withdrawing into your own world to sort out the acquired rubbish, hoping to cleanse yourself in preparation for the new dawn. These dozen years of Cezanne’s development acquired the name of his “constructivist phase”: he built up his paintings, brick by brick, slowly, methodically; trying all the while to reach that balance and clarity and beauty that he felt, but that so often slipped through his fingers. He wanted to make of Impressionism, something of more substance, something solid like the Old Masters: these were the words he would use, without knowing what they really meant.

Frustrating though it may be, he knew that he could not stop now; but, equally, he knew in his heart of hearts that his efforts alone would not be sufficient – inspiration is not a possession; neither is it something you can learn, and then grasp and hold on to: rather it is something that approaches us, something that invites us to forsake everything for the hidden treasure.

Living in-between is a risky business.

I’ve chosen one painting from each of Cezanne’s four phases to start off this session of blogs. I hope you enjoy them, and that they give you a sense of Cezanne’s development. I’ve chosen his ‘Sugar bowl, pears and blue cup’ from his initial, ballsy phase of the 1860’s because it’s so earthy and gross; the view of Louveciennes that he painted with and in the style of Pissarro from his Impressionist phase of the 1870’s; his colours are illuminated, and subtle. Then, one of the Montagne Sainte Victoire from this the constructivist phase that we’re just starting to look at in this collection of blogs (the 1880’s). And lastly ‘The Great Pine and Red Earth’ from his final phase, 1890 ish to 1906, for its integrated unity; one of my favourites and one of his best! – it’ll have a blog to itself later, I promise!

Further, I want to suggest that the socio-economic, cultural and institutional development of France in the 1880’s mirrored the same ‘time in-between’ as Cezanne’s development: France had glimpsed the glory of the Republic in the declaration of the values of freedom, fraternity and equality; after three brutal and bloody attempts, the declaration, the Republic, was here to stay, no going back. But the sandcastle of the vision of a new order, seemed to slip through the fingers. Something of more substance, something more solid, was required. We’ll see how this plays out in relation to Cezanne’s artistic and personal development.

And maybe, it’s not too far-fetched to suggest that we today might be in a time in-between: having a glimpse of what could be, but not yet able to make of it a solid foundation for a wholesome and sustainable future for our earth.

I hope you enjoy the journey of these blogs.

Through this veil there is a beautiful walk

the beloved beckons, for me to follow:

but in my mind, I think “Oh, crazy talk -

there can only ever be six ways to go:

either north, or south, or east, or go west,

you could go up and, if you wanted, go down -

these are surely the limits of any quest”.

Come, my love gestures, let us not delay.

“but surely we can’t go through this courtyard

running barefoot over cracks and thorns

I’ll never make it – it’s just too hard”.

Come, my beloved, I’ve escaped many times:

enter the garden of secluded roses.

alāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (Persian: جلال‌الدین محمد رومی‎) 1207 - 1273 (adapted by Mike B)

Roofs (FWN 105, 1876-7)

Roofs FWN 105 1876/77 50cm x 60

Here we have three paintings of roofs – one each from Cezanne’s Impressionist phase, his constructivist phase and his final mature phase. I hope you have some time to enjoy these three and compare them; I’m sure you’ll be able to find more comparisons and insights into Cezanne’s development to add to those in this blog. This is the last blog covering Cezanne’s second phase, his Impressionist phase; I hope you have enjoyed them. I’m going to take a few months off, and re-commence with Cezanne’s third phase, his constructivist phase, at the end of February 2020. And then complete these blogs with Cezanne’s final mature phase in 2021. See you in the New Year….

of beauty:

I think it’s really hard for us to realise just what a big thing it was for the Impressionists to paint as they did; and that’s partly because their contribution to the development of art and the unfolding of beauty has had such a great influence on recent generations, whether we realise it or not. I have this notion that before the Impressionists, Art was about moralizing; it had to have some higher purpose, because paintings were owned by the upper classes who saw their role in life as providing a stable society for everyone to live in. It was at best paternalistic, and at worst dictatorial.

The Impressionist came along and said: “hey, we’re just going to paint the stuff of ordinary life, because that’s where beauty lies. And we’re going to paint it in a way that offers an invitation for you to feel the rich atmosphere that we paint. We’re not interested in the precise detail of the motif; we’re not interested in attaining such a polished finish that you can’t see the paint. We want to be raw, honest and simple, rich and vibrant, joyful and inclusive.” Their higher purpose was indeed remembering that beauty is the beholding of the graciousness of ordinary life by the people.

Roofs of Paris FWN 178 1882 59.4cm x 72.4

of truth:

Gradually, Cezanne began to realize that beauty was not sufficient unto itself; and the way he expressed what he sensed was missing, was ‘solidity’. In his famous phrase, he “wants to give Impressionism the solidity of the Old Masters”. He tried to do this by retaining the beauty of the Impressionist phase, and adding a more rigorous ‘constructing’ of the painting. The paintings from his Contructivist phase are sharper, more dense and more intense; less raw and more thoughtful.

The more we humans develop, the more complex we become. It is not so much that the truth of previous generations is wrong, but that it becomes insufficient; it can no longer express the full complexity of the truth that we now live. We are drawn on by the energy of evolution to find new ways of expressing beauty and truth together, beauty of the ordinary and truth of the complexity of life.

It is this task that becomes Cezanne’s focus and dedication in his Constructivist phase; and it is this phase of Cezanne’s oeuvre that I will begin in the New Year of 2020.

Roofs FWN 326 1898 65.7cm x 81.6

of goodness:

It’s the most mysterious of paradoxes that beyond complexity lies simplicity. In his mature phase, Cezanne discovers this simplicity. I think (coz that’s where I find mystery) it’s like the great scientific discoveries – Pythagoras enabled mathematics, music, architecture and cosmology, by discovering a simple formula: the Square on the hypotenuse, and the hidden structural balance of proportions 3² + 4² = 5². Einstein changed the whole way we understand the universe, space and time itself,…simply based on E=MC².

This simplicity is open-ended and inclusive; we won’t get there if we stay firmly in our box. We have to look outside of our understandings; we have to be creative; we have to be able to receive all things and fear none: because we have come to realize that simplicity and complexity are one, unending; and there lies beauty, truth and goodness.

Cezanne used to sign his paintings: non finito….

Because of this love

my bowl has fallen from the roof.

Put down a ladder and collect the pieces, please.

People ask: but which is your roof?

I answer: wherever the soul came from

and wherever it goes at night,

my roof is in that direction.

From wherever spring arrives to warm the ground

from wherever searching rises in the human heart

my roof is in that direction

Be quiet now and wait.

It may be that the Ocean One

the one we desire so to move into and become

desires us out here on land a little longer

going our sundry roads to the shore.

جلال‌الدین محمد رومی

Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī

Living with purpose (FWN 602, 1869-70)

Paul Alexis reading to Emile Zola FWN 602 1870 130cm x 160

Henri Fantin-Latour Studio of the Batignolles 1870 204cm x 273.5 cm

Paris Rebellion March 1871

“Four days later, on the 18th March, the insurrection broke out…For two months, I lived on the streets, in the furnace: cannon fire day and night, and towards the end, shells flying over my head into the gardens at the back. Finally, on the 10th May, I was threatened with arrest as a hostage; with the help of a Prussian passport, I fled and went to Bonnieres to spend the worst days there!” So wrote Emile Zola to his close friend Paul Cezanne, as the Communards of Paris fought the now combined forces of the defeated Emperor’s army and the invading Prussian army. Zola is lucky to escape the final, bloody week of destruction of the communards, 21st to 28th May 1871. Cezanne was holed up somewhere in the countryside around L’Estaque, hiding from conscription, with his partner Hortense, who was just pregnant.

It was so different when they were at school, just 10 years before: Cezanne was the strong one, defending the small Zola from the school bully; now Zola was in the thick of it, while Cezanne was in hiding. Zola was living with determination: he would be a writer, and what’s more, he had a vision! Cezanne was living with uncertainty: he wanted to be an artist, and he borrowed the vision of the Impressionists! The 1870’s was the decade when Zola made it.

Henri Fantin-Latour painted the group of artists and writers who met in the Café Guerbois, of 11 Grande-rue des Batignolles. Manet, at the easel, is the elder leader of the Batignolles Group, Zola is the bearded one posing, standing above the guy sitting down (Astruc), and Renoir with the hat, facing to the left; Bazille is the tall guy in tartan trousers, and Monet behind him; strangely no Pissarro; not so strangely, no Cezanne. The press nicknamed the group, rather disparagingly: Jesus and his disciples. And Zola, who was rather aggressively anti-Catholic, continued Jesus’ prayer, in the letter to Cezanne: “A new Paris is being born – it’s our kingdom come!”

This large work of Cezanne depicts Paul Alexis reading to Zola; Cezanne uses pretty dark colours, and it’s obviously before Cezanne is tutored by Pissarro: it’s really from Cezanne’s first artistic phase of the 1860’s. The figure of Zola is unfinished, and represents just the first application of paint on canvass – it would appear that the Franco-Prussian invasion of Paris’ commune interrupted the work. Paul Alexis, from Aix himself, was a lifelong friend to both Cezanne and Zola. He moved to Paris to become a writer, and became the kind of secretary to the Impressionists. He it is who drafted their “constitution”, or maybe they thought of it more as a manifesto!: “the collective is not a sect, but an association; uniting interests, not systems, and soliciting the support of all the workers who aligned themselves with such a cause….as a matter of principle, we want no school…only those with some fire in their belly, and nature, in the open air.” These appear to be the ‘minutes’ of a discussion at the Café Guerbois.

Zola had already seen his vision, formulated in a philosophy (naturalism), and encapsulated in a series of books (his monumental 20-novel series charting the family fortunes of Les Rougon-Macquart): “I want to portray,” he writes: “at the outset of a century of liberty and truth, a family that cannot restrain itself to possess all the good things that progress is making available, and is derailed by its own momentum, the fatal convulsions that accompany the birth of a New World”. For Zola, his philosophy meant telling it as it is – no theory, no moralizing, no religious interpretation, no philosophizing! The raw, sordid, brutal, violent life history of one family, and what the Industrial Revolution and its New Age meant for them! These were the necessary pangs of the birth of a New Age; collateral damage, we might say.

Cezanne had no such philosophy, and no such vision; but there was something deep down, something not yet expressed, not yet formulated in words, ink or paint. So, encouraged by his school-mate, he joined the crew, and became an Impressionist artist. And for ten years, that’s what he did – learning what it was like to paint outdoors, free from the schools and their formulas, experiencing the brightness of the day, and the shimmering colours of the afternoon sun, and the full richness of the evening’s intensity.

Happy he was, mostly; but fulfilled? Not yet. He had not yet found a vision to live by….

“Make your intention clear:

- to be in service to life.

make it with humility

make it with honesty

about what you have to face.

coz actually, it’s a real joy

living with purpose.

Make your prayer;

and join us on the streets”

Gayle Bradbrook

Non-violent Direct Action.

Extinction Rebellion April 2019

events not things (FWN 737, 1877)

Still life with jar, cup and apples FWN 737 1877 60.6cm x 73.7

In the summer I can see the big top tent of the annual circus over in the park, and this painting reminds me of its opening ceremony: the ringmaster, the green vase, is introducing the first act: the teacup, who stands tall to take the applause, and his troop of apple acrobats, who line up on the right, to summersault over their cousins to the left, on the flying white carpet. This isn’t still life, this is a choreographed performance. The lip of the green vase, on the right side, bows slightly to the teacup, and further down it quivers, chest bulging, in the excitement of anticipation; the teacup acknowledges the ringmaster’s introduction - the dark coloured strip of paint running down the left hand side of the teacup. And then the imaginary diagonals zoom down from the top of the green vase, over the cup and down to the stage, as if spot lights searched the white cloth of the arena.

“Grappling directly with objects” as Cezanne put it later, became an essential part of his practice. “They buoy us up. A sugar bowl teaches us as much about ourselves and our art (as a famous Old Master). People think a teacup has no physiognomy, no soul. But that changes every day too, as with people. You have to know how to take them, coax them, those little fellows.” The sadly departed historian and biographer, Alex Danchev expressed it this way: For Cezanne, “Objects lived full lives. They were sentient, recalcitrant, and changeable.”

At the heart of the era which brought about the Industrial Revolution, there is a wedge; a wedge hammered between science and spirituality; this wedge re-appears over and over again : between soul and body, the spiritual and material, the mental and the physical, the human and the non-human. Kandinsky summed up Cezanne with these words: “Cezanne made a living thing out of a tea-cup; or rather, in a tea-cup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still-life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life of everything. His colour and form are alike suitable to the spiritual harmony. A man, a tree, an apple, all were used by Cezanne in the creation of something he called a ‘picture’, and which is a piece of true inward and artistic harmony.”

Nowadays we come slowly, and often somewhat reluctantly, to understand that the wedge between science and spirituality is both scientifically and spiritually inadequate for the way we now know things are. On the one hand, we know that stuff is made up of atoms which are all vibrating with energy; and on the other hand we think we experience stuff as fixed, out there, separate from us – a world made of objects. And again, on the one hand, we know that we ourselves are made of a little community: I am made not only of human DNA, but half of me is non-human DNA. And yet, I think I experience myself as human, an individual, more than simply a ‘thing’, I’m a human person!

And what we experience is not false; it’s all true; it’s just not all of the truth that there is!

We can think of the world as made up of ‘things’. Of ‘substances’. Of ‘entities’. Of something that ‘is’.

Or we can think of it as made up of ‘events’. Of ‘happenings’. Of ‘processes’. Of something that ‘occurs’. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time.

The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics, is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not the second.

It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.

Thinking of the world as a collection of events, of processes, is the way that allows us to better grasp, comprehend and describe it.

It is the only way that is compatible with relativity.

The world is not a collection of things, it is a collection of events.”

The Order Of Time, by Carlo Rovelli, theoretical physicist, Marseilles, France; published 2019

How delightful, and refreshing,

to sit and

discover myself anew

being an event!

A cottage in Auvers (FWN 81, 1873)

La Maison du Perdu - The House of the Hanged Man, Auvers-sur-Oise      FWN 81               1873     55cm x66

What a drama this painting is! – dancing, intense, energetic, focused, expansive: tactile. It’s like a knitted jumper! I remember when I saw it first, in the Museum D’Orsay in Paris, being struck by the intensity of the yellow bush, right bang in the centre, bursting out from the “V” of the roofs, with the swirl of the path and foliage drilling down at its unseen roots – the dazzlingly bright yellow bush, vibrant, pushing both cottages back, so that they lean back, lean back, lean back… I saw the painting again at the exhibition here in London at the Tate, and yea – it had the same effect!

Amazing!

If ever you’re in Paris, do go gaze, spend your days, in its haze!

Cezanne was happy with this painting (he signed it!); more than happy, he was proud of it, and more than proud of it! – if he didn’t do nothing else for the rest of his life, this would make up for it all!

It’s good on so many levels, and he knew it.

                                                                                                     We can identify four elements that seem to inform all individual beings, all individual life-forms as we know it; we’ve mentioned ‘communion’ in a previous blog; here I want to suggest another element: “agency” – it is that ability to do stuff; “ability” is too weak a word, coz it’s not something you learn in a classroom; it resides in your deep, deepest heart, soul, whatever you call that part of yourself that must express itself. By ‘Agency’ I mean doing stuff that expresses the real you, that fulfils your potential, and in doing so, it fulfils your destiny. It’s powerful – in the sense that it empowers you, because you suddenly see that you can act from within your own power, your own agency. Once you’ve done it, once you’ve acted from within your own power, then it stays with you for your whole life through: it’s your solid ground! Or better, it’s your expression of your solid ground.

(think: Rumi’s poem - Let the beauty we love, be what we do)                                                    

That’s why Cezanne chose this painting for the Impressionist Exhibition of 1874; that’s why he had it exhibited in exhibitions again and again, through-out his life. When the criticism of the press and public got too much, when even Zola would doubt the efficacy of his work, Cezanne could return to this painting, and re-engage with his own strength. And so could other painters too: a certain Count Camondo, expressing a rather understated hesitancy, was encouraged to buy this painting by Monet, and recalls –“Well, yes, I’ve bought this painting which isn’t accepted by everyone yet….But I’m covered! I have a signed letter from Claude Monet, who has given me his word of honour that this painting is destined to become famous…I keep the letter pinned to the back of the canvas… and show it to friends who think I’m soft in the head!”

Matisse, in an interview much later in 1925 said: “I am very surprised that anybody can wonder whether the lesson of the painter of ‘The House of the Hanged Man’ and ‘The Cardplayers’ is good or bad. If you only knew the moral strength, the encouragement that his remarkable example gave me all my life. In moments of doubt, when I was searching for myself, and sometimes frightened by my own discoveries, I thought: ‘If Cezanne is right, I am right. And I knew that Cezanne had made no mistake!” Cezanne became the artists’ artist.                                  

But, who’s the guy who was hanged in this house then? And was this why Cezanne painted his house? I think not! - I think we’ve been led down the garden path! Despite much research, there is no evidence or any reference anywhere to any hanging connected with this house, or Auvers for that matter! It is in this same year 1873, that Cezanne and Pissarro were painting together in the village of Auvers, that they were also working in Dr Gachet’s study, with Gauillaumin using the printing press there, and doing etchings (Pissarro produced political pamphlets – extinction rebellion kind of stuff). One of those etchings, done by Cezanne of Guillaumin, has in the top left hand corner, the figure of a hanged man, drawn like the game in English called “hangman”; in French called “Le Pendu”. I reckon, the three of them was playing “Le Pendu” in their coffee and croissant breaks! Hence, when it comes to the First Impressionist Exhibition, the painting gets the title “La Maison (de le = ) du Pendu”. Subsequently, critics and writers have waxed lyrical on how the painting conjures up the atmosphere of a hanged man; and the misinterpretation compounds even more when Zola writes a novel where the main character, an underachieving artist, hangs himself in despair! Suffice to say: Cezanne himself refers to this painting simply as “a cottage in Auvers”.      

I want to mention three other things arising from this painting:  about Cezanne’s use of colour – the paints he used; Cezanne’s ‘construction’ of the painting; and about ‘memetics’ – the study of the propagation of ideas (memes/information). I hope you don’t mind an extra long blog!

of Cezanne’s colours and its application                                 fantastic though it is when you achieve it, expressing your own potential, your own power, takes hard work and dedication! (no pain, no gain!) The ‘Cottage in Auvers’ has a dozen or so colours, all of them bright: cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, cerulean blue (pure and mixed with azurite) viridian, Verdigris, emerald green, yellow ochre (or Mars yellow), chrome yellow, and vermillian, and white. Over time, Cezanne would add to these: brilliant yellow, Naples Yellow, raw sienna, Indian red, burnt sienna, madder lake, carmine lake, burnt crimson lake, green earth, Prussian blue, peach black. Individual strokes of paint can often be a mix of five colours. It was not uncommon for Cezanne to take twenty minutes between each stroke of paint. Here in this painting, where possible, Cezanne uses the natural, organic oil-paint made from the object that he paints. He also uses the application of the paint in a ‘representational’ way; thus, the brushstrokes of the green verge are horizontal (like ‘bricks’ of paint), to express the breadth of the landscape; while the rising vertical greens of the trees, painted with long upward strokes, point to the sky, and to depth. Cezanne maintains the discipline of this brushwork though-out the painting.

of ‘construction’                               I’ve pointed out how Cezanne uses the actual brushstrokes to represent not just the objects in view, but their relationship to breadth and depth in this painting. We’ve also seen before (in the gift of self-worth blog) how Cezanne likes to stick a ‘V’ in the centre of his paintings. “I too” he would say later in life “was an Impressionist, I won’t hide it! Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. But I wanted to make of Impressionism something solid and enduring like the art of museums.” And he did it too: chiefly by ‘constructing’ the paintings so as to achieve the effect of solidity. His next phase is usually described as his ‘constructivist phase’.

of memetics                                       It is possible in this painting to identify the first three stages of human development by which we discover our understanding of how ‘meaning’ works. The first stage (think of child development) is the appreciation of an ‘image’ – the child gets to a stage where she can identify the family dog ‘Fido’ by looking at a photo of Fido. The second stage is when she can understand that the written word ‘F i d o’ indicates the family dog; we say that the written word ‘Fido’ is a symbol for the actual family dog, Fido. The third stage is when she understands that the word ‘dog’ signifies not just Fido, but all dogs. ‘Image-symbol-concept’ is a developmental emergence that we all go through, and it underpins our ability to understand how we assign meaning -the study of memetics. The emergence of the child’s understanding to the level of ‘concepts’ paves the way for the understanding of objects, and language, thence her own intentionality, and thereby begins the emergence of the independent person.

Cezanne uses natural pigments to signify the natural objects from which we get the pigments.(representation as an image); Cezanne uses the brick shaped brush strokes of the green verge and the dramatic curve of the road as a symbol of movement, cascading down into the village, in contrast with the still blue expanse of sky. (representation as a symbol). Thus it is, that we can understand the ‘concept’ of the painting as the unfolding emergence of a cottage in Auvers. (representation as a concept).

This is my summary of one of the main theses of Joyce Medina’s book: Cezanne and Modernism, the poetics and memetics, of painting; I bought it in 1995, and still haven’t got to the bottom of it yet – it’s dense!…but I find it fascinating, and so relevant in this Age of Information, and memes!

One last point, to bring us back to the painting – what are the two trees at the top left doing growing out of the roof of the cottage? Maybe covering up a game of hangman?

and, finally, some grounding

Remember the sky that you were born under,
know each of the star’s stories.
Remember the moon, know who she is.
Remember the sun’s birth at dawn, that is the
strongest point of time. Remember sundown
and the giving away to night.
Remember your birth, how your mother struggled
to give you form and breathe. You are evidence of
her life, and her mother’s, and hers.
Remember your father. He is your life, also.
Remember the earth whose skin you are:
red earth, black earth, yellow earth, white earth
brown earth, we are earth.
Remember the plants, trees, animal life who all have their
tribes, their families, their histories, too. Talk to them,
listen to them. They are alive poems.
Remember the wind. Remember her voice. She knows the
origin of this universe.
Remember you are all people and all people
are you.
Remember you are this universe and this
universe is you.
Remember all is in motion, is growing, is you.
Remember language comes from this.
Remember the dance language is, that life is.
Remember.

Joy Harjo

Apples, green, yellow and red (FWN 760, 1878)

Apples                     FWN 760             1878                     19cm x 26.7      

“For the love that he put into painting them and that made him sum up all his gifts in them, he is and remains the painter of apples – smooth, round, fresh, weighty bursting apples from which colour flows…with ravishing form. It is he who has given them shining dresses of red and yellow, who has made tiles of reflecting light on their skins, who has encompassed in a loving stroke, their rotundity, and has created from them a delicious, definitive image” - Thadee Natanson  describing Cezanne’s Apples in his review of  Vollard’s 1st exhibition of Cezanne’s work, in 1895.

Nigh on twenty years before, Cezanne had started painting apples. It is tempting to say that paintings such as this – where Cezanne paints only fruit, with no table, tablecloth or decorative features – were his way of finding out how best to paint them; a bit of trial and error, or to employ the metaphor used by Henri Loyrette of the Museum d’Orsay in his comment in the Tate Cezanne Exhibition of 1996: “in short, …visual exercises in which he practised his tonal scales, carefully gauging the effects produced by the juxtapositions of greens, yellows and reds.”

And yet, not everyone in 1895 was impressed in the same way: , apparently, one member of Persian nobility commented: “this gentleman, Cezanne as you call him, has the mind of a greengrocer!” But, as so often, other artists and avant-garde critics felt that Cezanne was onto something, even if they could not quite find the most flattering explanation: “apples that are brutal, rugged, built up with a trowel, and then abruptly subdued with a thumb”, says the critic, Huysmans. And then Degas was seduced by “the charm of this refined savage”. Degas was a bit miffed after failing to buy Cezanne’s portrait of Victor Chocquet – “ha,” he snarled “one madman’s portrait painted by another madman”. Degas thought his pirouetting dancers far more refined than Cezanne’s static apples! Nonetheless he was willing to pay 200 francs for this little still-life of Apples, and, display it in his own museum, and, baptize it ‘Apples, green, yellow, red’, and finally, retain it till his own demise.

The little painting of ‘Apples, green, yellow and red’ came on to the market after Degas’ demise, in between World War 1 and the Second World War, when the Economist John Maynard Keynes and the Director of the National Gallery in London went to Paris to engage in what we might now call: ‘Quantitive Easing’. JMK hadn’t yet formulated his famous formula relating a country’s capital, to its yield, its investment, and crucially the economic activity of its government, (fiscal stuff, and spending-power): C=Y+I+G. Their clandestine, economically charitable, task was to spend a whole heap of money in France and so enable the UK to expand its Capital Assets, and help the war-ravaged French to obtain some strong Sterling Pounds. The Director of the National Gallery went in disguise, as he presumably thought the French would not understand that their purchase of a whole heap of French Art, at low exchange rates, was purely from an economically mutually advantageous motivation. Strangely enough, the director of the National Gallery refused to buy any Cezanne’s; and so the poor economist was left having to buy his own Cezanne: Apples, green, yellow and red’. The painting thus did not enter the National Gallery collection, but remained part of the Keynes collection and now lives in the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge.

Back in Provence in 1878, the Cezanne’s son Paul, now six, had typhoid; Hortence nursed him through-out the first half of the year. It was a hard year for the Cezanne family. Cezanne needed desperately to find extra cash to support his family: he already owed Pere Tanguy in Montmartre the sum of 2175 Francs for paints and canvasses; so he had to borrow the sum of 60 francs, five times through-out the year from his school mate Zola. Fortunately Zola had made it big in Paris with his first book, and could afford to help his struggling artist friend.

I like to think that by the end of the summer of 1878, Paul and Paul junior painted some apples together, thanking Hortense for nursing young Paul back to health, and Zola for the quantitive easing.

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear and disappear,
Stem end and blossom end,
And every fleck of russet showing dear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
Of apple-picking: I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired.
There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
Went surely to the cider-apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

Robert Frost

Thus must it be, when willingly you strive
throughout a long and uncomplaining life,
committed to one goal: to give yourself
and silently to grow and to bear fruit.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Murmurations of colour (FWN 443, 1877)

Madame Cezanne in a Red Armchair        FWN 443             1877                     72.5cm x 56

What is the best symbol of the Industrial Revolution? Nuts and bolts? The steam engine? The motor car? I want to suggest it is: the ‘mechanical device to aid the art of sewing’ – which we, now rather miserably, call the ‘sewing machine’! In the period from 1850 to 1900, the sewing machine had the same kind of effect as the mobile phone for us. You just got the latest model – fixed arm and tension system, and foot pedal- and then the following year, they invented a new model with the rotary hook instead of the shuttle; then six months later, another model that could do button-holes; and then, three months later, one that could do the chain stitch…..

By the end of the century, every home had to have one! You could knock up a dress or a shirt in an hour – a tenth of the time it had taken. Singer (after some dispute!) finally won the patent in 1885 for the Singer Vibrating Shuttle Sewing Machine, and millions were produced and sold. It’s a good symbol for the Industrial Revolution because, just as the mobile phone can symbolize the start of a New Age of Information Technology, so the sewing machine can symbolize the start of a revolution in women’s working week, and thus the start of a redefinition of the roles and status of women in society.

‘In virtually all known societies to date, power between the sexes has been asymmetrical: all known societies can be arranged along a continuum running from ‘equalitarian’, where males and females share power in the public sphere roughly on an equal basis, to male-dominant, where males alone govern in the public sphere. But never the other way round – where there is female dominance of the public sphere alone.’ (Ken Wilber, Brave New World chapter). There seem to be two defining factors, which place a particular society along this continuum: sexism and the means of production. This was about to change, for the first time in human history: because the means of production would no longer be based on biological factors; and so the justification for male dominance is lost.

Here, Hortense sits not just in a red armchair, but in her own power; she’s a modern woman ready for Paris. She looks at us, not with any deference nor any challenge, but with the confident dignity of an assured twenty seven year old woman. It’s a powerful and a remarkable painting; it’s powerful because it’s both monumental and graceful; the red armchair, reshaped by generations of women, is still solid and mighty; Hortense holds the circle of life within the orbit of her arms and shoulders. It’s remarkable for its contrasting colours, its lack of modelling, and its formal construction. All the colours are contained within clearly delineated areas, a constructive method that Gaugin would later exploit. The lack of modelling gives the painting an immediacy: not an urgency, for there is no sense of rush; not a confrontation, for there is no sense of aggression; simply a “I am who I am”.

Rainer Maria Rilke was so taken with this painting that on the last day of the exhibition of 1907 (to celebrate the death of Cezanne) he said he tried to focus intently so that he would imprint a memory on his brain, colour by colour, digit by digit: “even though I stood in front of it, day after day, transfixed and unflinching” he had as much chance of remembering the “splendid colour cohesion” as remembering a gigantic “string of numbers”. Rilke’s description makes me think of murmurations of colours:

“It seems that each part knows all of the other parts. It is a red armchair because it binds up with itself an aggregate of experienced colours…everything has become a matter of the colours amongst themselves; one colour draws itself back in the presence of the other, then intrudes itself, and falls into self-contemplation. The essence of the painting hovers in this back and forth of reciprocal and varied influences, rises and falls back into itself without coming to rest.”

Rainer Maria Rilke.

Madame Cezanne was a seamstress, and this style of dress came into fashion in 1876. Most women would have made their own clothing to fit the measurements of their own families. High fashion usually dictated the style of clothing made; and it was usual for women to alter their clothing to make them more modern, as Mde Cezanne has done here: adding the bow.

The value of a thing, and its means of production were a keen debating point among the thinkers of the time; Marx maintained that traditionally, the value of an object was simply the number of hours taken to produce it. Work in factories lessened the value of objects and alienated the worker producing the goods by removing them from the ownership of their own labour. As we know, the factory system enabled by the Industrial Revolution ushered in unfettered exploitation and dreadful working conditions; but it also lay the ground for the liberation of women. I suspect Marx was thinking more about the relationship of proletariat and bourgeoisie, than that of men and women; but his sense that something big was beginning to happen was spot on.

“All fixed, fast-frozen relations are swept away

with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions;

all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify.

All that is solid melts into air,

all that is holy is profaned,

and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses

his real conditions of life, and his relations to his kind”.

Karl Marx

(my underlining)

“Providing women and young girls with equal access

to education, health care, decent work and representation

in political and economic decision-making processes

will fuel sustainable economies and benefit humanity at large.”

United Nations Goal 5.

The UN Goal 5  

“…is one of the most powerful levers of avoiding harmful emissions.”

Project Drawdown.