Cezanne

I don’t normally review painting shows, although of course there is a lot to learn from them. Cezanne is of interest due to his approach to colour: “There is no model, there is only colour” (sensationalcolour.com). The artist takes the opposite approach to me in my essay on colour for the Documentary model, where I challenged if it really exists at all.

Perhaps the reality of colour does not matter in that it is an impression the artist is seeking to make, built up of short parallel brush strokes of pigment – hence (as I understand it) his role as a link between late 19th century impressionism and early 20th century cubism. Nevertheless the Tate exhibition questions the understanding of Cezanne as an impressionist landscape painter, including many of his still life pictures. From close by the viewer can see how the image is built up – interesting not just from an artistic technique but since it speaks of all images as constructions. As you step back the scene materialises within its frame. In this way the viewer experiences “the medium and image simultaneously, yet distinctly from one another (Borchardt-Hume, 2002:47). It is a modernist approach that brings the decisions of the painter to the attention of the viewer (painting becomes a subject of the painting). This is perhaps most dramatically shown in the almost photographic approach to the Paris rooftops, where half the view is blocked by slates that a painterly freedom would normally have seen through.

Lucas Arruda addresses this in an essay on “Cezanne’s unreal nature”: “In Cezanne’s paintings there seems to be an exchange between two different realities: one that deals with the materiality of the painting, and another that deals with the world that is being observed but never quite conquered” (Arruda, 2022). Hence Arruda feels that we are not offered a window onto a real world; instead we are seeing how Cezanne “comes to terms with the two-dimensional nature of painting” (Arruda, 2022). And yet of course the canvas is not completely flat, since Cezanne layered it quite thickly with the gestures of his brush.

In the catalogue essay this is “observation translated into representation” (Borchardt-Hume:2022,17) and I note that photography is perhaps the opposite. Similarly, Cezanne’s unreal nature can perhaps also be viewed in the mirror for my purpose, to reveal the constructed reality of a nature reserve.

Cezanne was rejected by the Salon 14 times, giving him an almost rebel status that perhaps in turn to reject the norms of the art establishment. Nevertheless he was heavily collected by his fellow artists, who saw something raw and magical in his work even as they struggled to come to terms with it.

As pointed out in several essays Cezanne had a reputation as an artist that did not finish his works, although this is misleading. His approach was one that aimed at his sensation of the scene before him, so that in a sense he was always reaching for something he would never achieve – the task would always be incomplete. But there is another more interesting aspect to those blank areas of the canvas in that for me they reference the way the eye focuses on the scene, leaving other parts of the view as obscure, unnoticed. A good example of this is Landscape: Road with Trees in Rocky Mountains. An unusual picture – the dark blank black background to the top left of the green trees suggests an almost impossible floodlit night scene, countered by the directional light producing shadows on the path from the tree trunks. Yet this landscape has a punctum for me as it reminds me very strongly of a walk in the hills above Deià earlier this year – a strange, still, darkness in the shadows between the trees and in contrast the dramatic light stone face of the mountain that the path gradually climbed around. As the catalogue suggests, Cezanne’s painting “demands that we be on guard for the gaps that our minds, forever chasing visual resolution, fill in” (Borchardt-Hume, 2022,21).

The use of contrast presents The Avenue at the Jas de Bouffan almost as the camera would see it, with strips of deep shade set against bright sunlit areas. The solution found in this picture from 1874-5 is very different to the later Forest Floor (Sous-Bois) of 1894, where the chaos of light falling through a tangle of leaves is presented far more selectively. This is one example of how Cezanne is not wedded too a particular method, rather experimenting to try and best relay his reaction to the subject.

Cezanne took this further, sometimes combining different stylistic elements into a whole within the frame. Perhaps the ultimate expression of this is Cezanne’s nude woman which is combined with a still life of apples in the top left corner. It appears even Cezanne was uncertain about this combination since he cut the still life out, only to recombine the two at a later date.

This collage approach was reinforced by the low continuity of Cezanne’s construction process, which was one of simplification – reducing the resolution to the point where the brush strokes (or sometimes lack of them in the blanker areas) take on the roles of signs. This modernist approach also has a sense of facture – the process of making is clear to see, and these marks will in turn be reassembled in the process of viewing. There is also, however, a subtlety to this process – for example form can be created from these colour brushstrokes since shadows have colour which depends on adjacencies.

Copying is recognised as a photographic facet, but Cezanne used other artists paintings as subjects, as well as his own and sometimes photographs – for example he borrows some of the structure of an image of the melting snow at Fontainbleau but his work essentialises the elements in the scene and he colours the work according to his sensation, bringing a cold blue tone to his painted version. Cezanne was not aiming for an exact copy – as well as painting from life he used other images to seed his artistic process and to experiment. This is particularly clear when looking at his copies of his own paintings, such as Madame Cezanne en Robe Rouge.

The overlaps with photography interested and surprised me. Cezanne was pushing boundaries in his time, although there is the understanding that painters can arrange elements in the frame according to their own design. Photography more usually works from the scene that is given, although artistic choices are of course possible. However montage is also a photographic technique, and with the advent of digital and sophisticated post processing this can be done pretty much seamlessly. Perhaps a relevant question is that given the expectation that photographs are taken from life (which I think still largely holds despite the fact it does not have to), when the seams show and the photographs is clearly constructed from component elements then this will often jar with the viewer. Perhaps there is an element of the uncanny valley here – either it needs to be imperfect enough (e.g. physical collage) or invisible…

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Arruda, L. (2022) Lucas Arruda on Cezanne’s Unreal Nature. At: https://www.tate.org.uk/tate-etc/issue-56-autumn-2022/lucas-arruda-on-cezannes-unreal-nature (Accessed 1.12.2022)
2. Borchardt-Hume, A. (2022) Cezanne. London: Tate
3. Cezanne Catalogue At: https://www.cezannecatalogue.com/catalogue/index.php (Accessed 6.12.2022)