Standing in
front of Cezanne canvas is confronting reality in the most clear-cut way. A
Cezanne is stark, solid and well defined to the maximum extent possible. In a
world where communicating the artistic
intent in a roundabout way is treated as clever and sublime, Cezanne
chose to dig art by conveying presence through solidity. He agonizes ‘to
realize his sensations’. His sensation is not a fleeting stimulus but a
weighted optical whole that has a concrete richness with tangible attributes
that challenge the artist to realize them on canvas. Cezanne feels almost a
moral imperative to scrupulously realize that presence.
Like his art,
Cezanne is a solid presence. There is very little in modern art after him that
has not reckoned with him. Cubism may be most open about its debt to Cezanne
but Cezanne was ‘father of it all’ as famously stated by Matisse. When Lucien
Freud struggled to bring lardy nakedness out of his portraits, he was facing
the same moral imperative of solidity as Cezanne. Even Andy Warhol, in his
choice of presentation over representation was echoing Cezanne. It is common knowledge that his so-called
‘geometric works’ fed into Cubism. However, it was his meditation on presence
that attracted Cubists who, in turn, were also obsessed with bringing out all
facets of reality. It is documented that
Picasso bought a lithograph of ‘Large Bather’ when he was working on ‘Les
Demoiselles d’ Avignon.’ He was not referring to the ‘geometrical works’ when
he said “it is Cezanne’s anxiety that is most interesting.” More on this later.
Braque was more detailed in his assessment of Cezanne’s influence on the
movement that he co-founded. Braque said “The discovery of his work overturned
everything….I had to rethink everything. There was a battle to be fought
against much of what we knew, what we had tended to respect, admire, or love.
In Cézanne’s works we should see not only a new pictorial construction but also
– too often forgotten – a new moral suggestion of space.” Pithiness of this observation lies in
capturing the moral dimension of Cezanne’s obsession.

Coming back to
Cezanne’s anxiety, this anxiety is a critical part of the moral dimension. In
an oft-quoted remark to his son six weeks before his death, Cezanne said “I
must tell you that I am becoming, as a painter, more lucid in the presence of
nature, but with me, to realize my sensations is always painful. I cannot
achieve the intensity that manifests itself to my senses; I do not have the
magnificent richness of coloration that animates nature.” Cezanne’s anxiety-
his desperation for expression or a yawning gap between feeling and realization
was defined by critic Robert Hughes as ‘ the scrupulousness of a genius without
facility’ and was elevated to the level of ‘the touchstone of the modern
consciousness.’ Hughes too detects the
moral dimension in Cezanne’s struggle. He writes “his painting was a moral
struggle in which the search for identity fused with desire to make the
strongest possible images of the other – nature- under the continuous
inspiration and abomination of an art tradition that he revered.”

Development of Cezanne’s
art makes for a fascinating reading. His origins had very little art. In Aix-en-Provence,
where he was born in 1839 it was as non artistic as was possible in the France
of the day. His father was a laborer turned hatter and, eventually, a banker. He (the
father) was convinced that his son was not a fool and was surprisingly
supportive of his son’s artistic plans. From 1852 to 1858 young Cezanne studied
humanities at the College Bourbon in Aix, where he met his lifetime friend,
Zola the writer. Ironically in college, Cezanne used to win all literary awards
and Zola was winner in the arts competitions. After that he studied law for a
while, but under Zola's constant encouragement he turned to painting. By 1861
both young men were in Paris.
His fascination with
‘presence’ found its natural expression in his genius as portraitist. Starting
with 1869-70 portrait of his painter friend Achille Emperaire he went on to
become one of the best portrait artists of all time. His self portraits ‘invite
comparison with those of Rembrandt, and the best of them justify it’. Like
everything Cezanne, his portraits assert their pictorial distinctiveness with
every fiber of their being. Subjects of the portrait emerge as ‘fully formed’
to take their space and cut out any confusion that can lead to dilution of
clarity of structures. ‘Realization of sensation’ is foregrounding of the
syntax of presence. Hughes nails Cezanne’s
pursuit of chiseling out the reality of his local mountain- Mont Ste-
Victoire. I will reproduce this biggish paragraph so as not to dilute the
astute observations of the critic. “Each
painting attacks the mountain and its distance as a fresh problem. The bulk
runs from a mere vibration of watercolor on the horizon, its translucent,
wriggling profile echoing the pale green and lavender gestures of the
foreground trees, to the vast solidarity of the Philadelphia version of Mont
Ste.-Victoire, 1902-06. There, all is displacement. Instead of an object in an
imaginary box, surrounded by transparency, every part of the surface is a
continuum, a field of resistant form. Patches of gray, blue and lavender that
jostle in the sky are as thoroughly articulated as those that constitute the
flank of the mountain. Nothing is empty in late Cézanne — not even the bits of
untouched canvas. …. His goal was presence, not illusion, and he pursued it
with an unremitting gravity. The fruit in the great still lifes of the period,
like Apples and Oranges, 1895-1900, are so weighted with pictorial decision —
their rosy surfaces filled, as it were, with thought — that they seem about
twice as solid as real fruit could be. … The light in his watercolors (perhaps
the most radiant exercises in that medium since Turner) is not just the
transcendent energy, the "supernatural beauty" of abstraction; it is
also the harsh, verifiable flicker of sun on Provençal hillsides. To his
anguish and fulfillment, Cézanne was embedded in the real world, and he returns
us to it, whenever his pictures are seen.” It is this struggle of realizing those
sensations on canvas that makes Cezanne so enduring.
Durability of
Cezanne’s appeal is also due to comprehensive nature of success. He is
relatively rare in achieving maturity of multiple aspects of his artistic genius.
When his influence on later artists is talked about, mostly the reference is to
some particular aspect which was picked by the artists and taken to new heights.
In Cezanne we find realization of many aspects- coloration, form, drawing,
texture, modeling and expression. His monkish dedication to his art and ability
to avoid self-destructive impulses, so common to his era, led to a certain
ripeness and heft to his output. This ripeness lent sufficient complexity to
his work that enabled later artist to pick and choose from a masterly weave of
fully realized fields. Softly dazzling aura of his watercolors, stoic
weightiness of his still life or unmistakable ‘presence’ of his portraits is
grand enough to be a foundation of separate schools. Here too, his achievement
was embedded in a moral dimension as noted by Meyer Schapiro “he was capable of
an astonishing variety. This variety rests on the openness of his sensitive
spirit. He admitted to the canvas a great span of perception and mood, greater
than that of his Impressionist friends. This is evident from the range of
themes alone; but it is clear in the painterly qualities as well. He draws or
colors; he composes or follows his immediate sensation of nature; he paints
with a virile brush solidly, or in the most delicate sparse watercolor, and is
equally sure in both. He possessed a firm faith in spontaneous sensibility, in
the resources of the sincere self. He can be passionate and cool, grave and
light; he is always honest.” Cezanne was always direct and agonizingly moral.
‘Frankness of his means’ coupled with his dedicated search of the pure form
took him to a pedestal which is reserved for the epoch-makers.


Robert Hughes
has written “it may be that Cezanne was reaching for a kind of expression in
painting that did not exist in his time and still does not in ours.” His desperation for expression and ‘sensitive spirit’ was looking
for a new sensibility. Despite ripeness of his output that search remained
unfulfilled. This unfulfilled search for a new sensibility is what that makes
him ‘Patriarch of Modernism’. His sensibility was beyond his facility as
bemoaned in his last letter to his son while describing the pain of realizing
the sensations. He kept his agony from turning self destructive and that
allowed him to practice his craft at a level which was heroic enough to open
the floodgates of modern art. True
modernism is a search, not a point, in art history. The fact that Cezanne remained unfulfilled is
a testimony of his humanity and his greatness.
-Dhiraj Singh
Nice description of Cezanne's role in modern art, which is often difficult to assess. You mention his friendship with Emile Zola. Their is certain sadness that Cezanne thought that Zola's novel, The Masterpiece, was written about Cezanne. After that point Cezanne felt betrayal and would never speak to his childhood friend. When I read the novel many years ago, I personally did not connect the artist of The Masterpiece with Cezanne. It would be interesting to hear how others view whether or not the book is really about Cezanne.
ReplyDeleteThanks for visiting Julie.
DeleteI have not read the book. But it is thrilling to know that two such talented people remained friend for so long. It is not often that such associations last that long.
Thank you for this very comprehensive look at Cézanne. I especially enjoyed the discussion of value, Cézanne's struggle to bring a fullness of being to the canvas, what some philosophers term as "qualia," sensations distinguished from the properties of objects that cannot be communicated or apprehended by any other means than direct experience, i.e. phenomena that generate an intensity of feeling and emanate an aura of ineffability.
ReplyDeleteThank You so much. I will look up 'qualia'. It sounds so near to what I felt about the 'concreteness' of his art.
DeleteHi Dhiraj, I really enjoy your blogs. Especially the ones about musicians - would you be able to do one on Led Zeppelin? I think they can't be discounted in terms of influence.
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