Now Cezanne takes your hand
(And leads you to the riviera....)
I know you won't care but my paternal grandfather would have been 137 on the day I snapped this picture with my iPhone out of a train window on my way from Nice to Marseilles. What's more (I won't be long), my paternal grandfather would have been 21 when Paul Cezanne died (and 49 when Leonard Cohen was born).....
And what's that got to do with the price of fish? I suspect you demand....
Well, exactly a month to the day after my grandad's birthday I visited Cezanne at the Tate Modern and was struck by how close I had been to his preferred hideaways on the Med. This is one of his views of the bay of l'Estaque - ok it's a bit beyond Marseilles from where I was, but it's close enough.....
And this is another:
And, despite my wonderings (in an earlier piece), about the value of art, I feel uplifted. My photograph is a mere zilch compared with the way these two pictures have been composed and worked on. I still have my reservations, but there is something about this man's lifelong pursuit of vision.
Cezanne visited this coastal place many times over fifteen years from 1870, and painted more than 40 pictures of the village and its surroundings. In a letter to Pissarro he described the views as being like a playing card. Red roofs against the blue sea.
As Meyer Schapiro commented on the first of the views above: Without paths or human figures, the world is spread out before his eyes, a theme for pure looking; it invites no action, only discernment..... A marvellous peace and strength emanate from this work - the true feeling of the Mediterranean, the joy of an ancient nature which man has known how to sustain through the simplicity of his own construction.
I'll second that. I found the pictures brought me a sense of peace. There is something focused and intense in Cezanne's investigations and experiments. He worked on countless variations of the genre of still life painting, sometimes using the same objects again and again.
These objects are posed against a background of folded fabric - produced in Provence near where he lived - which connects the fruit with the table and the jug and bowl. These are not naturalistic arrangements - Cezanne has carefully composed a balanced variation of a common unbalance (Meyer Schapiro). We are invited to stop and study his work, from various angles....
And then we move on, to gaze at a different take on similar objects. Cezanne is a poet with a brush, constructing images which charm us with their individual accounts of aspects of our lives.....
Cezanne inherited his father's estate, Jas de Bouffan, in Aix-en-Provence in 1886, and from the grounds he could paint Mont Sainte-Victoire, which he did repeatedly from this and other nearby viewpoints - it figures in more than 80 of his later paintings and watercolours. The notes accompanying this exhibition tell that Cezanne learnt about the geography and geology of the mountain ridge from his childhood friend, naturalist Antoine-Fortuné Marion, and that with this knowledge, combined with methodical observation, Cezanne was able to create a new sort of landscape that deeply engaged with the terrain of his homeland.
And, as he progressed, his views became freer. As Meyer Schapiro observes, he creates a stormy rhapsody in which earth, mountain, and sky are united in a common paean, an upsurge of colour, of rich tones on a vast scale....
And then, towards the end of his life he washed away some of the complexities. He suffered from diabetes and became frail. He worked in his custom-built studio at Les Lauves, and produced some pared back images of Mont Sainte-Victoire.
I find that I love Cezanne. Knowing precious little about him before this exhibition, I came away with a feeling of illumination. I generally find art galleries exhausting - there is too much to take in, too many people, too many ideas:
And then I came out into the Turbine Hall and was confronted by someone else's installation:
And I thought to myself, No, not today. I am full of Cezanne,
And I want to travel with him
And I want to travel blind
And I think maybe I'll trust him......
Paul Cezanne. Leonard Cohen. My grandad. All very different people, but I want to thank them. They have made my paltry life a little richer.....
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