Portraits of the family (FWN 464, 1881-2)

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Self-portrait wearing a white hat               FWN 464             1881/82               55.5 cm x 46

Easter Sunday was late that year – in fact it was the latest it could ever be – 25th April 1886. Weddings could not take place before Easter, in the Catholic season of Lent, when fasting and penance was the order of the day. That’s why the wedding of Paul Cezanne, painter artist, and Marie-Hortense Fiquet, seamstress, had to take place on Wednesday, 28th April. The civil service took place in the Town Hall of Aix-en-Provence; the church service took place the day after, on the Thursday, in the cathedral church of St Jean-Baptiste. The whole Cezanne family attended, mother, father and two sisters. How things had moved on in the last year: Hortense and young Paul now formally acknowledged as part of the Cezanne family!

This self-portrait dates from a few years before the wedding. Cezanne has taken great care to develop the face, using browns, ochres and crimsons applying the paint layer upon layer till it reaches realization. The rest of the painting is left simply as a wash of paint, with the canvass showing through at the lower edge. Joseph J Rishel, in The Tate Catalogue, describes the portrait as a ‘profoundly neutral gaze’, and yes, I can see what he means. It’s kind of so profound that you’re not too bothered about the strange hat, or is it a napkin? At this point, all the academic authorities indicate how, in the self-portrait of the artist Chardin, who Cezanne studied and called a ‘crafty painter’, he is wearing a similar white napkin: well, I’m not convinced that’s the meaning of the white hat.

From beret to bowler, monk’s hat to lawyer’s wig, straw hat to turban, soft bonnet to casquette: hats were all the rage. Cezanne painted Louis-Auguste in hats, his uncle Dominique in a variety of hats, most of the Card-players in hats, himself in hats many times. In this portrait, Cezanne portrays himself in a plasterer’s hat – a manual worker, whose job it is to flatten space.

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Portrait of Louis-Auguste Cezanne, father of the artist     FWN 398    1865      167.6 cm x 114.3

The father of the family, Louis-Auguste Cezanne was more accustomed to the Town Hall than the Cathedral. In the uprising and revolutionary fervour of 1870, when the Communards had blockaded the streets of Paris and declared France a republic, he had been chosen by the people of Aix as their leader. He was a man from the people; he came to Aix with a skill, but no work; so he made his own business. He bought pelts from the local farmers and made hats for the townsfolk all around Provence. And when times were hard, he arranged deferred payments for the local farmers; and when the only bank in Aix collapsed, he found a partner Cabassol and together they bought and thereby rescued the bank for Aix. He’d bought the old dilapidated Manor House, and refurbished it, and helped keep the local economy going through the harsh early years of the Republic and the blight of the vine Aphid of the 1880’s. He earned people’s respect; his inner self-respect lay in knowing that he had worked hard, taken risks and opportunities in equal measure. He had no time for Town Hall meetings, nor for God nor for the self-proclaimed Emperor: meetings never got things done, God was a sentimental irrelevance, and the self-proclaimed Emperor Napoloen III was an old-fashioned tyrant!

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Portrait of Elisabeth Aubert Cezanne, mother of the artist    FWN 426    1870        53.5 cm x 37

The mother of the family, Elisabeth Aubert, Madame Cezanne, was more accustomed to the Cathedral; she attended church, with all her children every Sunday, and as often as she could, she persuaded Louis-Auguste along too; though more often than not he remained outside. She was a strong woman; she seems to have had recourse to some money independently of her husband, or certainly she had access to their joint wealth. The little cottage in L’Estaque – so useful for hiding away from the harshness of the Manor House’s patriarch – was indeed her cottage, and she used it frequently for herself and her children. She let Cezanne stay there with partner and child, hidden away from the ire of Louis-Auguste. She subscribed to the popular review ‘L’Artiste’, and had collected a whole series of ‘Magasin Pittoresque’. It was Elisabeth who arranged the schooling of her children, Paul, Marie and Rose; the new republic had not yet had time to disentangle education from the church. Louis-Auguste used to jibe: “Paul will be eaten up by painting; Marie, by the Jesuits”. But for Elisabeth, her inner self-respect lay in belonging and fostering a community and a family: God was her way of living in Aix.

Paul Cezanne steered away from officialdom but was accustomed to the Cathedral. He would often just like to sit quietly in the pews and listen, not to the pious platitudes or righteous recriminations preached by the Jesuits, but to the organist: he enjoyed music, it soothed his soul; except when played badly; then it did the opposite. He and his sisters went to Catholic schools, which later were run by the Jesuits. He received a classical education, and could write and speak Latin. For Paul, religion was an irrelevance where-as the Jesuits were a threat (he made his will early because he feared his sister Marie would leave the Jas de Bouffan to the Jesuits). “if I had to choose who could protect me best: the Emperor or the Pope, I’d probably choose the Pope”: for Paul, God was an insurance policy….

and yet…….the abundant breadth of the horizon, the fullness of the colours, and the solidity of earth: that experience, Cezanne often had no words to express, so he would say: ‘pater omnipotens deus’, ‘father all-powerful God’, as he would behold the landscape spread before him: it was a sacred space with which he communed through painting.

Our idea of a ‘higher power’ does indeed seem to vary according to the set of values that we ascribe to; or maybe, our idea varies according to the set of values that most fits our circumstances. Nowadays, we can look back and describe those circumstances historically, and I like to consider that there were three different sets of values from three different historical eras, all now ‘on-line’ in the Cezanne family; a microcosm of what we now call ‘culture wars’. The Traditional set of values that Elisabeth manifests in the way she lives: with its central value of belonging, and belonging in an ordered community. The Modernist set of values, that Louis-Auguste manifests in his life, based on the value of pragmatism and rationality, and the ingenuity of the individual. The Post-Modernist set of values that Cezanne is beginning to express in his art, but which he cannot yet express in words: it has not yet been born among humanity; it’s not yet ‘on-line’. But, now we know, it will be based on the value of diversity, beholding and including different viewpoints.

Nowadays, when they exist in the same historical era in the hearts of different people, we are used to describing such sets of values (cultural memes) as ‘culture wars’. But differences do not have to manifest as ‘war’: certainly, Paul Cezanne and his mother Elisabeth existed in different memes, but respected each other’s space. And by 1886, with Paul aged 47, and Louis-Auguste aged 87, it had taken a while, but they had eventually learned the value of respectful mutual co-existence.

Of other people attending the wedding, witnesses, uncles and relatives, and any of the celebrations, we have little knowledge. It’s likely that notice of the wedding and such forth was published in the national newspapers. We know that Van Gogh, who moved to Paris in March of that year, commented on the wedding, rather disparagingly: Van Gogh suggested that marriage would tame Cezanne, domesticating his art. We’ll be able to judge ourselves when we look at Cezanne’s work in his final phase from 1886 to 1906. But for me, rather paradoxically, what marriage does, is to allow Cezanne to be is more free, and more able to focus on his art. The public acknowledgement of his relationship with Hortense helps him to ‘grow up’; he can now concentrate on ‘waking up’ – to the call of the evolutionary consciousness that drove his determination to paint in a way that represented what was yet to come.


I do not trust the god you have given us

I know not which god to pray to

I’ve left in search of a new god

Donez Smith

Rewilding (FWN 180, 1882)

“It is a strange and wonderful fact to be here, walking around in a body, to have a whole world within you and a world at your fingertips outside you. It is an immense privilege, and it is incredible that humans manage to forget the miracle of being here. Rilke said, ‘Being here is so much,’ and it is uncanny how social reality can deaden and numb us so that the mystical wonder of our lives goes totally unnoticed. We are here. We are wildly and dangerously free.”    John O'Donohue

Not directly facing the house as he had done in Medan, not so as to look down the rows of apple trees in the orchards as he had done with the chestnut trees of the Jas de Bouffan, not focused on the buildings through the trees – no - Cezanne chose on this day to situate his easel within the wild copse of windswept trees, their limbs and branches gazing at the rough cloudy blue sky.

On this day, he needed re-wilding.

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The Orchard (Hattenville)                             FWN 180             1882           60 cm x 49.5

‘Brandade de Morue’, his mother had cooked for Renoir – “a dish to die for”: milk-soaked salt fish, potatoes, bay, garlic, peppercorns, fennel, lemon, gently cooked down and then thickened with cream and served with a little nutmeg, glug of olive oil, sliced truffle and sliced toasted baguette – bon appetit! Renoir had written to Victor Chocquet that he had been taken ill in Aix: “I can’t tell you how kind Cezanne has been to me. He was keen to lay everything at my disposal;…and this brandade de morue – nectar of the Gods!” Now, Cezanne, Hortense and young Paul had come by invitation to stay for the whole summer with Victor and Marie Chocquet; Marie’s mother had sadly passed away, leaving the Chocquets a large inheritance, and this farmhouse in Hattenville, just north of Le Harve, Normandy. Marie and Hortense got on very well together, and Hortense would be good company for Marie in her bereavement. Victor, now retired by some years and just turned seventy and Cezanne, merely a young man, just turned forty – got on like a house on fire; Victor could quietly watch Cezanne paint for hours – a privilege not adorned on many! And they loved to talk about art. Renoir was convalescing in the Midi, otherwise he might have joined them. Victor had commissioned a portrait of Marie in 1875 from Renoir, and it hung in the dining room. Here in Normandy, on the kitchen table, it was ‘Tarte aux poires’ – the sweetened rich pastry, a layer of crème Anglaise, sliced apples, and a glaze of Calvados – the apples of Normandy taste like soft and ripe pears!

On this day, Cezanne needed to paint a domesticated impressionist motif in the morning, and then, with the glaze in his eyes, take a siesta in the afternoon.

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Farm in Normandy (Hattenville)                                FWN 181             1882           64 cm x 80

Shin-Rin-Yoku                    Forest Bathing

On this day,

you stand beneath this canopy of trees,
surrender will, hold still.   You close your eyes
and listen as the rustling of the leaves
and lapping breeze-blown waters tranquilize.
Inhaling deeply, you can breathe the smell
of dew-damp soil, the scent of pungent pine,
organic emanations.  All is well,
you’re in the zone in nature’s forest shrine.
Permit your eyes to open, now you see
the beauty of extraordinary things:
moss-covered rocks in shades of verdigris,
sun-dappled flapping of some insect wings.
Immerse yourself in all your senses, feel
the peace of this retreat restore and heal.    (Betsy Hughes)

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The Enclosure, Normand (Hattenville)                     FWN 182             1882           50 cm x 65

On this day, Cezanne is invited by what the oil on canvass unfolds, under the arch of branches gently swaying, forgetting to finish those half altered saplings, leaving it all slightly out of focus, stooping underneath the foliage  - his heart is drawn towards the wild of thicket and undergrowth.

This is the day, of the year 1882, when Cezanne discovers the wildness of undergrowth:  sous-bois. Sous-bois will gradually become a favourite motif, colourful, entangled and wild.

Rewilding is the large-scale restoration of ecosystems where nature can take care of itself.

It seeks to reinstate natural processes and, where appropriate, missing species – allowing them to shape the landscape and the habitats within.

Rewilding encourages a balance between people and the rest of nature where each can thrive.

It provides opportunities for communities to diversify and create nature-based economies;

for living systems to provide the ecological functions on which we all depend;

and for people to re-connect with wild nature.

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Farm in Normandy in the summer (Hattenville)    FWN 183             1882           49.5 cm x 66

(the titles of the Hattenville paintings are somewhat arbitrary, and have been adjusted a number of times over the years – Cezanne did not entitle his landscape paintings except when they were to go in an exhibition; and even then, he often left it to the exhibition organizers. In this case he did not entitle these because they were a gift for the Chocquets).

habitats (FWN 190, 1883-4)

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Saint-Henri and the Gulf of Marseille           FWN 190                        1883/4                 65 cm x 81

It is said that the Greeks brought the Bourboulenc grape some 2000 years ago; the earth provided the clay; the Algerians provided the skill; the sun provided the heat in this, the Val d'Enfer, Valley of Hell; the peasant farmers provided the backbreaking labour; the hills provided the gentle slopes; the mountains provided the rain; and the wind provided the mistral. A habitat of clay, vines, sun, wind, water and people.

For some reason habitats have always held a fascination for me: I remember in my teens discovering that the multicoloured marbles of all sizes that we played with, were the by-product of the glass manufacturing industry and, then discovering, with some pride, why my hometown was built on glass: beneath the top layer of soil of the twenty miles of land in from the shore in that part of the north-west of England, just north of Liverpool, was sand. The sand was excavated to make glass; and the second chemical by-product provided a pharmaceutical company. And farming of sheep and vegetables (carrots as straight as a dye!). While this habitat provided livelihoods for all the townsfolk, there was a dark side to my discoveries, tempering my pride – the link with the slave triangle of old, Liverpool, Africa and the Americas.

But now, as Cezanne paints, he knows it’s a rough and rugged scape this place, Saint-Henri, a rural habitat no longer. The vines of the grape for the local white wine that terraced the hillsides around what was once the little village of Saint Henri are gone. ‘Clay-hollows’ litter the once-smooth landscape – left-over from the excavation of the clay of the earth that had allowed the skilled potters to shape the amphora, the tall two-handled jugs to store and carry the wine. But the vines had been ravaged by the aphid phylloxera, and never recovered. Their restoration through-out France was to take thirty years, and small vignerons never survived. Amphoras gave way to bricks and tiles. The large chimney is the clue to the ‘Hoffman Kiln’ – kilns the size of rooms, surrounding a central source of heat requiring a very tall chimney. By now, there were well over 150 tile and brick factories. The crypt of the Cathedral of Notre Dame de la Garde ( to the left of the large chimney) had only just been finished last year; and it was to be crowned next year by a ‘bourdon’, an 8000 kilos bell named La Marie-Josephine – the symbol of the new industrial habitat.

Cezanne paints Saint Henri as the rough and rugged place it is. A few miles west along the shore sits L’Estaque, the paintings of which in comparison are beautifully finished and lovely, chimneys included! In this painting of Saint Henri, there are large areas of canvass left untouched, especially in the mountain range on the horizon; the row of houses traverse the middle of the painting like a barrier; the trees and foliage at near right foreground block out almost a quarter of the painting, rather than enhancing the view. It’s all a bit higgledy piggledy , and not at all like the constructive balance of colour and richness that we’re used to in Cezanne’s L’Estaque paintings!

A five-hour journey north, passed Aix, on the new Marseille to Paris train, the farmers of the Jura were starting to organize themselves. This was where Cezanne’s partner Hortense’s family lived; her parents had moved to Paris with the whole family when she was eighteen, but it hadn’t worked out for them. The family had returned to the Jura, but she had stayed in Paris. The news from the Jura was of the efforts of the peasant farmers to sustain their livelihoods: realizing that the restoration of the vineyards of France meant the death of the small vignerons, as in Saint Henri, they decided to act collectively. As a result of the coal miners’ strike in the north east of France at Anzin, ( about which Zola wrote his book Germinal), the French government in 1884 enabled the Right of Association; and so the farmers of Poligny formed the Societe de Credit Agricole, the first co-operative bank, as a mechanism to assist the peasant farmers to resist the encroachment of the industrial habitat.

Cezanne painted in the L’Estaque area for nigh on twenty years: from the mid 1860’s to 1885, with a short break in the mid to late 1870’s. It was as if he had a treasure to find: “I had resolved to work in silence, until that day when I should feel able to defend theoretically the results of my efforts”. One generation later, Braque and Picasso would go to L’Estaque in search of that same treasure.

Four generations later still, Credit Agricole would at last acknowledge that certain treasure is best left in the earth: Credit Agricole is one of the first banks to agree a strategy to protect the global habitat:

“It has taken Crédit Agricole a few years to evolve its approach to coal and get it in line with the demands of the Paris Agreement, but this is an important step which the bank has taken today and introduces some urgently needed coal realism into the commercial banking sector.

“Too many banks are still unwilling to decouple themselves from the industry which is the number one biggest threat to the climate globally and which is now on economic life support. Crédit Agricole is to be congratulated for no longer messing about, and the stipulation that its coal clients must spell out how they intend to actually close their operations is crucial here.” (June 2019).

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Georges Braque                The Harbour at L’Estaque             1906

The poetry of painting (FWN 448, 1879-80)

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Portrait of Louis Guillaume                          FWN 448             1880                     56 cm x 47

“The whole Renaissance tradition is antiseptic to me. The hard-and-fast rules of perspective which it succeeded in imposing on art were a ghastly mistake which it has taken four centuries to redress; Cezanne and after him Picasso and myself can take a lot of credit for this. Scientific perspective forces the objects in a picture to disappear away from the beholder instead of bringing them within his reach as painting should.” Georges Braque

Scientific perspective gives you a ‘formula’ for painting: when you look at a motif as an arrangement of objects, scientific perspective provides the artist with a formula for relating all the objects together within the space of the frame. It provides the artist with a way of faithfully representing the objects in view. But we do not experience only what we see: we experience a motif with our other senses besides the sense of seeing, we experience a motif from within our personal history, we experience a motif within the context of our culture, and so on. Indeed we can look at how we react to things from each of the many developmental lines that have been identified: cognitive, emotional, interpersonal, intrapersonal, moral, spiritual, intentionality and somatic. Scientific perspective is not untrue, but it is not the whole truth. There is another space; or rather, there are more dimensions to the space we experience.

This is a painting of Cezanne’s son’s best friend, painted at the same time as Cezanne painted the portrait of his son for his tenth birthday. The Guillaume family ran a cobbler’s shop in the same apartment block in Paris that Cezanne rented; the two boys were the same age, and probably at some time went to the same school. It would appear that the Guillaume family knew the family of the Fiquet’s too, Hortense family, back in Saligney, in the Jura. In Paris, the two families were very friendly, socializing and dining together often; the Cezanne’s would often leave their door keys with the Guillaumes. Listed in the provenance, the first owners of this painting were the Guillaume’s: it wouldn’t surprise me if Cezanne had not painted it for Louis’ tenth birthday too.

The painting reminds me of the so-called ‘card-player’ series that Cezanne was to do in the 1890’s: I think the tenth birthdays of his son and best friend were the occasion of a rediscovery of his interest in portrait painting. He began to realize that the ‘volumes’ required in portrait painting, posed him with the same problem or opportunity that he faced in painting landscapes: space, perspective, and relationships within space. At this time he was still experimenting with the hatched brushstrokes in landscapes. In a sense, I think Cezanne’s use of hatched brushstrokes in landscapes, and his developing use of volumes in portrait painting had their origin in one and the same thing – the rejection of scientific perspective.

Braque again: “What greatly attracted me - and it was the main line of advance of Cubism - was how to give material expression to this new space of which I had an inkling. So I began to paint chiefly still lifes, because in nature there is a tactile, I would almost say a manual space... that was the earliest Cubist painting - the quest for space……. I have made a great discovery. I no longer believe in any thing. I do not believe in things. I believe in relationships. Objects don't exist for me except in so far as a rapport exists between them and myself. When one attains this harmony, one reaches a sort of intellectual non-existence, what I can only describe as a sense of peace, which makes everything possible and right. Life then becomes a perpetual revelation. That is true poetry.”

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow; and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either.

If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact, nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. So we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look, we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way, we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper, (this canvass), cannot exist.

Looking even more deeply, we can see we are in it too. 

Thich Nhat Hanh

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Portrait after Cezanne                    Juan Gris              1887 – 1927       Cubist painter

Chateau de Medan (FWN 149, 1880)

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Le Chateau de Medan                    FWN 149                            1880                     59 cm x 72

There is something so rich and so full in these colours that is beyond words, or rather pre-dates words. They intimate experiences we had before words existed. Their richness awakens for me not just something in our deepest selves but something of the geology of our earth. Lapis lazuli from the mountains of Afghanistan for ultramarine; Sindoor of India and cinnabar from China for vermillion; Ochre of iron, clay and sand, the color of our earth; green photosynthesis of plants and trees. Somewhere deep within us there is a remembering of what we had forgotten: of a time when we humans first began to significantly interact with the ground of our being, mother earth.

Please receive a blessing poem from John O’Donohue:

may a flock of colours,
indigo, red, green,
and azure blue
come to awaken in you
a meadow of delight.

Zola was able to buy a house in Medan in 1879: not the Chateau, here with the blue roof, but actually just out of the painting to the right. He would gradually re-fit it and extend it; but was keen right from the start to invite friends and associates to share his home and conversation, ideas and passions. Zola still wanted to change the world, as he and Cezanne had agreed they would do, when they were boyz2men. Cezanne eventually responded and was hoping to visit in the middle of July; but Zola’s house was already full. Undeterred, Cezanne tried to find accommodation in the small village nearby; but as it was the July 14 celebrations, everywhere was full. Eventually, he found a small place to stay, and sent Zola a note to check if it was ok for him to borrow Zola’s little rowing boat, Nana, for the few days of his visit. So he set himself up, day after day, quite content, and painted this painting from Nana, moored in the middle of the river.

And what a lovely job he’s done too. It’s one of my favourites (how many favourites can I have?) I like to approach a painting in a bit of a ceremonious way; I might even say with a touch of reverence. First I bring myself and the painting together: me and how I am; and the painting, and how it is. And then I try to just sit with the painting, trying not to think or analyse; but just to be in each other’s presence. If I get distracted, and notice something, then I simply accept it with thanks and return to quiet presence. For this painting, our presence together is one of the smile of the colours of our earth-home.

When it feels right, I will move on to noticing how the painting is put together. The immediacy of the parallel planes is here what awakens my joy – I see the flowing water, the clay sand of the bank, the dance formations of the sapling trees, the intermingling of the angular roofs, the green band of shimmering leaves, and the blue cloudy sky. And I think – hey, I have a feast awaiting, each plane to explore.                                                                                                                                                                      I look at the horizontal brushstrokes of the water, rippling towards me; and I see how the bank lifts up away from the river, with diagonal, if not nearly vertical strokes and the fluffy bushes dangling in mid-air above the cool of the water.                                                                                                                       And I smile, as I climb the bank and go among trees. I go in between the two most prominent saplings in the centre; and my gaze gets drawn down through the avenue between the houses; those on the right facing square on, and those on the left at a diagonal so as to invite me in. But I wait and come back between the two saplings: I want to have a look at the line of trees before moving on.              There’s four tall trees on the right that reach to the top of the sky: one at the far right of the painting and a second some way in to allow a full view of the chateau, gorgeous in blue, yellow and red (which, surrounded by the yellow, turns into orange). Then two tall trees standing close behind two shorter trees reaching for the horizon, the four standing to attention next to the chateau. Then the next trees form an arch over a small cottage, with the roofs of the buildings behind forming a sequenced climb up the hill, that give a sense of an ascent.

Now for the left-hand side: counterposed to the ascending buildings on the right, the four immediate cottages on the middle left stacked as they are like dominoes give a sense of depth. I go through the four saplings on the left and look over another bank of earth beyond which rise the village buildings with towers, which I understand as the centre of rural industry, maybe granary and winery.

I return to the centre, as if standing among the trees; again, I am drawn towards the cottage in between the two central saplings, with the face of the house turned towards me – not full face, like those on the right, but more towards me than those on the left. And I wonder, how are left and right-hand side brought into harmony as one?

The opening on the first floor of the central cottage – maybe a door and hoist, as it seems too big for a window – is at the very centre of the painting; adjacent on the right is a repeated opening in the sloping roof of the nearest building to us, and another at far left underneath one of the turrets, and a half opening at right, underneath the shutters of the chateau. These knit the vertical lines of the painting together.

But I must step back into the boat to find the harmony of the whole. Now I notice that intersecting the five horizontal planes that I’ve looked at, there are five vertical avenues, embraced in the arc of the movement starting from the rural buildings on the left, up and along the long orangey fluff of a cloud, over the top of the village behind the saplings, down over the little green bush on the horizon, gliding over the green field, the blue roof of the chateau, the green shrubs and the ochre sand of the riverbank, and back to Nana.

And there I recline, my journey complete but not finished, water gently lapping, hazy sunshine, and colours shimmering

and I pray

We are so fortunate to have lived

in this time, in this place, on this earth;

for twelve thousand years

humanity has enjoyed

an ecological and biodiverse earth

that has been in the main

balanced

and in harmony

with our survival

and our thriving.

May this painting of Medan by Paul Cezanne,

now in the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, Glasgow, UK,

help inspire the COP26 countries to commit to maintain that balance.

(postponed till 2021)

The importance of small things (FWN 750, 1877-9)

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Still life with open drawer            FWN 750             1877-79               33 cm x 41

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Male and female bathers              FWN 946             1890                     22.6 cm x 32.4

There’s a certain synchronicity sometimes in the affairs of humanity; maybe it’s there all the time and we just don’t notice. The Egyptians, ancient Greeks and Chinese all had thoughts about ‘the method of exhaustion’, whereby you divide an irregular shape up into ever smaller and smaller little squares – and then you can add them all up. It is as the name implies – pretty exhausting! Different ideas, often in different disciplines, seem to ferment independently for a while, and then, some bright spark thinks of putting them together, and wham - all of a sudden, their potential is realized: their time has come! Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibnitz both discovered ‘the calculus of the infinitesimal’ at the same time, independently. While the boys were both claiming the glory, (in fact they both worked on different facets of Calculus), the person to bring the two facets together was Maria Gaetana Agnesi.

As far as I can tell, it developed naturally – Cezanne found that by applying the paint in short ‘hache’ of paint, short brush strokes of paint, like commas, he could better describe what he saw. ‘hache’ of course means cut up in little bits – like mince. It was particularly expressive for foliage, adding a shimmering effect. And of course, wonderful with apples: Cezanne is able to use different colours next to each other, as an alternative to the receding colour of traditional perspective, to augment the animation of the fruit: making it come alive!

In 1885, Paul Nipkow, a German inventor, invented the Nipkow disk – a rotating disk, with a formatted system of small square holes arranged in a spiral; and because it’s rotating, it comes alive: you get the picture – shine a light onto the spinning disk, add a lens and projector and you’re half way to a TV. Pointillism would develop in art before the end of the century; but it would take another fifty years before ‘pixels’ sank into our psyche.

I’ve said up to now that Cezanne’s constructivist phase covered most of the 1880’s: but I think that’s a bit of an overstatement. After searching in detail through the online catalogue raisonne, these paintings above are the first and last time Cezanne uses his constructivist style through-out the painting. We might therefore date this phase from the late 1870’s to 1890 – but I think we’d be wrong. I don’t think the date assigned to the bathers painting is correct: I think it should be 1885. Other than this bathers’ painting, there is no other one painted fully in this constructivist style after 1886. That would mean the phase went from 1877 to 1885 (in fact April 1886). I do believe that Cezanne reached an all-time emotional and mental low, that stayed with him from summer 1885 to April 1886; he never thereafter painted using his constructivist style through-out the painting. (cf ‘Spinning’ blog, later)

I quite like the ‘still life with open drawer’: it’s my kind of colours, and I always love Cezanne’s apples. It’s unusual not only because it’s among the first he painted in this constructivist style, but also because he never drew another open drawer. I guess he thought it became a bit of a barrier between the painting and the beholder; he often uses a knife, or a piece of cloth, sticking out over the edge of the table; and that works better to bring the beholder into the painting; whereas the drawer acts like a fence! The other thing to note is that the mirror has no reflection: it reminds me of the clock he painted in his couillarde phase of the 1860’s with no hands (FWN 708). It adds a timeless, dreamlike effect to what is a gentle domestic scene.

I think the bathers painting is wrongly dated for the reason I’ve suggested above – namely that it doesn’t fit in with Cezanne’s artistic development. It was originally dated 1890 by Venturi (who produced one of the first catalogues of Cezanne’s works), but he subsequently changed his dating to 1885. Rewald – who produced the latest catalogue, and on whose work the online catalogue, FWN, is based – puts the date back to 1890, but I’m not sure why. He has no commentary on this painting in the two-volume bound catalogue. From the provenance of the painting, it seems that it remained amongst Cezanne’s possessions at home, and when he passed away, all the paintings at home were passed on to his dealer, Vollard, by Hortense and son Paul. Vollard was at this time in partnership with the brothers and gallerie Bernheim-Jeune. They in turn began a partnership with a Prince of Wagram (Alexander Berthier): he it is who is marked down as the first owner of this bathers painting (1906). The partnership broke up in some disarray, reputably because the Prince did not pay his bills. Where the date of 1890 came from, seems a bit of a mystery – and to me, a bit dubious.

While the style of small brush strokes works well for foliage – trees, bushes – and even the grass of the earth, and clouds, (landscape painting that is), it’s not as effective for the human form. By the late 1880’s, Cezanne has not ceased to make use of the hached brushstrokes, but uses them more sparingly; they remain a valuable tool in his box of tricks, but he acquires more and more tools, and learns to use them as and when required. By the time he reaches his mature phase from the 1890’s onwards, the last fifteen years of his life, he has acquired a full toolbox, and can work creatively and give fullest expression, without having to find new ways of applying the paint.

It is a strange and wonderful thing that the de-construction of the application of paint into small commas of different coloured paint enabled the next generation of artists to behold objects, not simply as objects but as relationships within a context. And it is the discovery of the importance of beholding ‘things within a context’ that sets the scene for the introduction of the next phase in the evolutionary development of humanity. From now on, there is no longer any absolute truth, beyond; there is ‘my truth within my context’, and ‘yours’, and ‘yours’. In this phase, our calling is to accept each other’s truth, in the belief that, if we allow our deepest truth to shine through without fear or aggression, this will not bring conflict, but growth, and thence fulfilment to each and every one.

For great things do not just happen by impulse but are a succession of small things linked together.

Vincent Van Gogh            1853-1890

You've got to think about big things while you're doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction.

Alvin Toffler                       1928 - 2016

a new rhythm (FWN 147, 1880)

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The Oise Valley                 FWN 147             1882                     72 cm x 91

In out of the way places of the heart
where your thoughts never think to wander
this beginning has been quietly forming
waiting until you were ready to emerge.

For a long time it has watched your desire
feeling the emptiness grow inside you
noticing how you willed yourself on
still unable to leave what you had outgrown.

It watched you play with the seduction of safety
and the grey promises that sameness whispered
heard the waves of turmoil rise and relent
wondered would you always live like this.

Then the delight, when, your courage kindled,
and out you stepped onto new ground,
your eyes young again with energy and dream
a path of plenitude opening before you.

Though your destination is not clear
you can trust the promise of this opening;
unfurl yourself into the grace of beginning
that is one with your life’s desire.

Awaken your spirit to adventure
hold nothing back, learn to find ease in risk
soon you will be home in a new rhythm
for your soul senses the world that awaits you.

Clouds, farm-buildings, grasses, saplings and

all are formed by a new rhythm of

short adjacent animated vertical brushstrokes

that provide for us

a warm and enriching fidelity

that is at once so tactile and true

yet so fresh and unpretentious

each and

every

single

vertical

colour of oil-paint

applied stroke in

a new rhythm

a symbolic gesture

fulfilling several purposes of

space receding

patterns proceeding

shapes describing of

earth’s spirit thriving

             wow

Be a bud sitting quietly in the foliage

Be a smile, one part of wondrous existence

Stand here

There is no need to depart

 

let your soul sense the world that awaits you

stand up for what you stand on

When a few years later, Pissarro and Gauguin met Paul Signac, and he described to them his idea for the future of his artistic expression, they remembered the paintings that together they had painted with Cezanne. They rushed Signac off to Pere Tanguy’s art shop in Montmartre to show him this painting of The ‘Oise Valley’ by Cezanne. Signac was dumb-founded. He persuaded his recently widowed mother to buy it for him, and he began to let his soul sense what awaits

(poems by John O’Donogue, Joseph J. Rishel, Thich Nhat Hanh adapted by MB)

Pissarro Oise.jpg

Pissarro                              Les Carrieres du chou                     1882

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Gauguin                              Chou quarries                   1882

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Paul Signac                        Notre Dame de la Garde               1905/6

Grapes of wrath (FWN 774, 1879-80)

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Peaches, Pears and Grapes                          FWN 774             1879/80               37 cm x 44

One of the tricks that Cezanne uses is to scatter the colours through-out the painting: so the blue of the plate appears at middle far left of the bench top, the peach of the peach reflects on the apple next to it and on the rim of the plate, the green of the pear appears on the apple, and so on. We know how slowly and intentionally Cezanne worked, so the word “scatter” is probably not a good description of what he was doing, nor of how he did it. When I look at such a painting, I imagine Cezanne coming into the kitchen after a day’s painting of, maybe, a landscape, and suddenly seeing a plate of fruit on a bench – and he just has to appreciate its simplicity and beauty in the best way he knows - behold it in paint. It’s fresh and there, distinct and yet connected, firm and fleshy, solid and light. It don’t matter bout nothing else – it holds his full attention; he doesn’t want to know about the bench or is it a table, the chair leg in front, the wallpaper, the pair of shoes are they? at bottom right, the floor covering…It’s the plate of fruit which has offered him a greeting, bursting with life; he accepts the greeting, and in the beholding in paint, he receives the gift. What a way to live!

The first steamship had been launched in the 1860’s; but the trouble was that you had to have so much coal aboard to stoke the engine that there was no room for carrying any cargo. By 1870, the problem had been solved by the use of new and more efficient engines, and so transatlantic crossings could become profitable and productive: the steamship was the driver of global trade. One unpaying and unexpected guest could now survive the journey of this global trade from America to France: the Aphid, the phylloxera aphid is the name it acquired. It systematically decimated the ancient vineyards of France: the Midi in the 1870’s, Burgundy and the Loire in the 80’s, Champagne in the 1890’s. Between 1875 and 1889, the quantity of wine produced by the vineyards of France reduced from 84.5m hectolitres to 23.4m. The French government offered a reward for anyone who could come up with a cure – 320,000 Francs.

What happened was part of a process of re-alignment of French society, quietly subsumed under the overt crisis of the aphid. It was to be the death of the small farmer. They tried everything to cure the precious vines – chemical fertilizer, sulphur, even toads (you don’t wanna know!). To try to hold back the spread of the infection, they burned all the vines which showed any symptoms. Still, it spread. Small vignerons were wiped out, never to return. At the same time, the advent of the railways had made the possibility of intensive farming practical and profitable. The use of chemical fertilizer increased fourfold, hybrid grains were introduced, increasing grain yields by 30%. British and French cattle were scientifically crossbred, and meat consumption rose by 50%. Refrigerated rail-wagons signalled 73,000 farmers to enjoin in a co-operative in the Charentes; from which the modern dairy emerged. Commercial farming and industrial chemical monoculture replaced local produce and producers.

The Jas de Bouffan, which Cezanne’s father acquired in lieu of payment of a debt in 1859, was dilapidated and rundown: it took some ten years for Louis-Auguste Cezanne to repair it to a habitable state. The manor house itself was south-facing and set apart from the farm buildings by the local road – Chemin de Valcros. On the south side of the road, stretched out vineyards, towards the new railway line. To the west of the manor house, rows and rows of vineyards stretched as far as the eye could see, bordered to the North by the Route de Gallice – the main road to Aix-en-Provence. Cezanne painted many many paintings at the Jas de Bouffan, but none with any vineyards; maybe the vines had all been left to rot, or been overrun by aphids. He would paint many of the local peasant workers in the 1890’s, but never were they working.

After Cezanne’s father died in 1886, and Cezanne’s mother in 1897, the family decided to sell the manor house (against Cezanne’s wishes) so as to be able to divide the money between Cezanne and his two sisters. In 1899, the Jas was finally sold to a M. Louis Granel, described as at once an engineer and a vine-grower.

A new aphid-resistant stock, imported from America taken from the original French vines that had been taken to America in the first place, had to be grafted on to all the old French vines. The French government did not pay out the reward to the American scientist who nurtured the resistant vine because they argued that he had not cured their vines but merely prevented the disease’s occurrence.

The restoration of French Vines was completed in 1899; but not the restoration of the small local vignerons, nor traditional, permaculture farming: the industrial and commercial chemical monoculture agricultural system was here to stay – well, maybe just for 151 years!

(https://www.soilassociation.org/media/18074/iddri-study-tyfa.pdf)

… if you’re going to have sustainable agriculture, it has to be adapted locally. Local adaptation means that you observe in the economic landscape the same processes that you find in healthy natural landscapes: You must have diversity. You must have both plants and animals. You must waste nothing. You must obey the law of return — that is, you must return to the ground all the nutrients that you take from it. You must protect the soil from erosion at all times. You must make maximum use of sunlight. In those circumstances, you may leave the crops and animals pretty much to fend for themselves against diseases. The farm will have some disease, but it won’t have epidemics. If you look at a healthy forest, for instance, you see some prematurely dead trees, but not massive numbers of them. … It’s the diametric opposite of reductive science, and industrial agriculture is based on reductive science.

Wendell Berry

The bridge (FWN 143, 1879-80)

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Le Pont de Maincy                          FWN 143                     1879/80                      58.5 x 72.5 cm



Wow – dense and intense, strong and sturdy, deep and lush, balanced and reflective, shimmering and glimmering, up close and afar, … this is fantastic! If ever you’re in Paris, do, do go see it in the MO. I first saw it there, and then again when it was exhibited in the Tate here in London in 1996, and I scribbled some notes on the catalogue – “Trees in foreground + (connecting with them) the bridge, to the left, in high definition – gives depth. Stillness of water adds depth vertically”.      

One of the most important aspects of beauty is harmony or balance; and boy does this painting ooze balance in every direction that there is. Just take a moment to notice what balances with what – horizontal, vertical, into depth, and out…The lines of the trees (two intertwined saplings really) in the left foreground are so strong and defined – in high definition, literally out-standing in layer on layer of paint – so that they can hold their own, in balance with the whole clump of trees at right background; the arches of the little bridge are displayed at middle left and middle right, linked by the sturdy wooden beam supporting the central motif bridge; the river itself runs middle right foreground to middle left, and into the distance, still and deep. The mill building on the far side of the river, with its own foliage bending over the bridge to intermingle in the middle above the bridge with the foliage coming from the other side at background right. The balance of colours distributed through-out is equally delightful.

It’s lovely; and all the more amazingly so because you don’t apprehend the deep fracture in the whole – hidden behind the sapling in the foreground! All the aspect of the painting to the right of the sapling is seen from the river bank directly opposite the vertical support of the arch on the right bank; while the aspect of the painting to the left of the sapling is from further down the viewer/painter’s left along the bank, beyond the sapling itself. The lower horizontal line of the supporting wooden beam of the bridge does not match up left and right, and this is hidden behind the sapling. Left and right aspects are fused together in the riotous intermingling of the foliage in the centre, above the bridge. This acts as a counterbalance to the stillness of the river below, but also as a distraction from the fracture of the two view-points: indeed, the riotousness of the foliage above the bridge plays a major part in realizing the harmony, balance and integration of the whole.

Theodore Reff (the distinguished American French Art Scholar, now heading for 100 years of age!) was equally taken with this painting, noting especially the hatched brushstrokes of the foliage, and the balance of the painting on the two sides of the bridge; he it was who first coined the description “Constructivist” to describe this phase of Cezanne’s work (Cezanne’s Constructive Stroke, 1962).  Reff concluded that what was significant about this constructivist phase of Cezanne was that Cezanne built his painting up in an orderly fashion, he ‘constructed’ his paintings, with little concern for the scene itself. What was most important to Cezanne was to express his feelings, rather than the motif. (“It is as if he (Cezanne) strove to incorporate these hidden feelings into the domain of constructive …activity”, writes Reff; Alex Danchev interprets Reff’s meaning rather more bluntly – The constructive stroke was a means of self-control).

Fortunately, others since then have tracked the bridge itself; not as easy a task as you might think: Cezanne’s son said it was painted at “Mennacy” , not far from “Maincy” (both places, near Melun, a couple of hours cart-ride South East of Paris) – maybe it was his Provencal accent, but it got called firstly the bridge at Mennacy. But, with hindsight, not unexpectedly, nobody could find the aforementioned bridge at Mennacy. So it was renamed the bridge at Maincy! Then, 50 years later, up comes the emeritus professor of psychology and art, who wants to find the actual location of the motif, and psycho-analyse the painting in comparison with the scene itself! He it was, Pavel Machotka, who found and photographed the actual bridge (in 2011 – good holiday adventure!): not at Maincy either – actually just outside Melun, at Trois Moulins, on the river Almont (book published in 2014). He concluded using his photograph, in opposition to Reff, that Cezanne was more interested in the scene itself, and that any adjustments made to the scene itself by Cezanne were necessary simply to translate the ‘scene itself’ (three dimensional) onto the canvass (two dimensional), not because Cezanne was more interested in his own feelings. (I know, it’s a bit contrary, coming from a psychology professor!)

And so arose this rather dry, but heated debate about whether Cezanne was wanting to faithfully represent the motif or whether he was more interested in representing his own emotional response to the motif: what he saw or what he felt. I’ll be suggesting that the debate itself presupposes a picture of reality that is made up of objects and emotions, as separate ‘things’; that this picture of reality does not do justice either to ‘things’ nor to ‘emotions’; and that the genius of Cezanne is that he uncovers a new paradigm that enables him to transcend that dichotomy.

My point at this stage is that Cezanne was effectively painting two motifs on the same canvass into one painting, left and right of the sapling, and merging them into the one whole scene; or if you prefer, one motif from two completely different stand-points, fused together.

But in real life, where does one ‘motif’ begin, and another end? Cezanne’s answer, as we shall see later, lies beyond our first impression, formed as it is through our patterning mind, and somewhere in a oneness of spirit. And that’s what I think Cezanne was trying to express when he said he painted what he ‘felt’ (“I dare to paint as I feel!”): he felt, and realized, (sometimes!) a deeper, undivided oneness, beyond the first impression of object and subject, a space where the motif and the motive are one.

Sometimes when I sit under the cheese plant tree

the distant horizon draws close to me

my safe pace

one second per second

evaporates….

and spirit energy of the big bang

and the trees and rivers of heaven

are here

in the joy-filled

timefullness

of being

one

with no second.

Mike B

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Les Begonias (FWN 783, 1879-80)

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Begonia is the symbol of harmony and good connection between people.

BLM.jpg


The best time to plant was many decades ago;

The second-best time is now.

If you haven’t engaged in anti-racism work in the past, start now.

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Resources for white parents to raise anti-racist children:

Articles to read:

Videos to watch:

Podcasts to subscribe to:

Books to read:

Films and TV series to watch:

  • 13th (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix

  • American Son (Kenny Leon) — Netflix

  • Black Power Mixtape: 1967-1975 — Available to rent

  • Blindspotting (Carlos López Estrada) — Hulu with Cinemax or available to rent

  • Clemency (Chinonye Chukwu) — Available to rent

  • Dear White People (Justin Simien) — Netflix

  • Fruitvale Station (Ryan Coogler) — Available to rent

  • I Am Not Your Negro (James Baldwin doc) — Available to rent or on Kanopy

  • If Beale Street Could Talk (Barry Jenkins) — Hulu

  • Just Mercy (Destin Daniel Cretton) — Available to rent for free in June in the U.S.

  • King In The Wilderness  — HBO

  • See You Yesterday (Stefon Bristol) — Netflix

  • Selma (Ava DuVernay) — Available to rent

  • The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution — Available to rent

  • The Hate U Give (George Tillman Jr.) — Hulu with Cinemax

  • When They See Us (Ava DuVernay) — Netflix

Organizations to follow on social media:

More anti-racism resources to check out:

Document compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker, Alyssa Klein in May 2020.