PaulCezanne365

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Some time in the early 1980’s a friend dragged me along to the Courtauld Gallery here in London.  And I was immediately drawn to Cezanne’s painting of Montagne Saint-Victoire – I think it was the expanse and richness of the colours that created in me the feeling of being on holiday in France. And that was it – I’ve been a fan of Cezanne ever since. What surprised me was the emotional response of delight that I felt: I played football, and went to the pub with my mates – not to the Courtauld Gallery to look at arty paintings. I knew that the English football league was started in 1888; and that the same year saw the first fish and chip shop open; also in the 1880’s, clothe caps and bicycles became cheap enough for all working men to buy. It fascinated me that the late 1880’s were marked by the birth of the symbols of the working class in England, at the same time as Cezanne was painting such paintings. How was it that both Cezanne and working class culture seemed to have such an influence on me? This question seemed to stay with me for the next few decades: How does this all hang together? The reproduction hung on the wall of my bedroom for many decades, next to the Liverpool FC scarf….

Since then I’ve been to see as many Cezanne’s as I can – though mainly in Europe, through exhibitions. I visited the Musee D’Orsay soon after it opened (in 1986, I think), and the Tate had an exhibition of Cezanne in 1996. The Courtauld had an exhibition devoted to the Card Players; and now the National Portrait Gallery has an exhibition of Cezanne’s Portraits.

The NPG exhibition is on till early 2018, and I hope to do a blog each week on my visit. My long term aim is to write a book by choosing 365 paintings of Cezanne that will focus on a different facet, so that I’ll have described the four major stages of development of Cezanne’s art and the techniques he used and developed; the magic moments in Cezanne’s life when inspiration dawned; the major themes of his oeuvres; and the major influences of his family, friends, and associates; and, of course, the life conditions of France at the time.

I believe that Cezanne, and his close friends, were caught up in the energy of transition from one epoch to the next.  I will use the ideas of Spiral Dynamics Integral Theory (SDi) as tools for putting Cezanne’s oeuvre in the context of human development, exploring how he came to express in his paintings the values and symbolic forms of the epoch that would come after his death. Indeed, it is the one we in the West live in now.

My project here is in the first instance to write a blog on each of the portraits from the National Gallery exhibition and to follow that up with a book. 

Please do take time to read my blog.