PARALLEL HARMONY, BEAUTIFUL SYNTHESIS

PAUL CEZANNE, MONT SAINTE-VICTOIRE, ca.1894-1900

(Cleveland Museum of Art)

I cannot write about Cézanne. No one can. The man and his work are so complex and contradictory that for almost any statement made about them, the opposite might also be true. He is a revolutionary; he is a conservative. He is a modernist; he is a traditionalist. He is multi-faceted; he is single-minded. He is violently passionate; he is gentle and highly sensitive. And so on and so forth, as philosophers like to say. If I cannot write about Cézanne, I will write toward him. I will write around him, approaching his work the way he approaches a jar or a mountain, looking at it from different directions and hoping that multiple views will give a sense of the whole. This then, appearances aside, is not an essay about a Cézanne; it is a series of notes toward a Cézanne. It is an attempt to climb his mountain.

When I stand in front of a great late Cézanne like the one I’m looking at right now, the Cleveland version of Mont Sainte-Victoire, I think of him as the artist with whom modern painting comes of age. Modernism is born in the 1860's with Manet’s Luncheon on the Grass and Olympia, the first major works in any medium to exhibit the extreme artistic self-consciousness and ironic use of traditional motifs that we associate with the much later literary Modernism of Joyce, Eliot and Pound. The Impressionist 1870's and Post-Impressionist 1880's and 90's are modern painting’s rebellious adolescence. And Cézanne, working far from Paris in the relative isolation of Aix-en-Provence, brings the movement to maturity in the final decade of his own life. Cézanne gives painters license to ask the most basic questions about the nature of their art, to go to the roots of painting and revolutionize it. And he does this, it sometimes seems, almost unintentionally. He opens painting to radical questioning not by writing manifestoes and initiating disciples (although there were disciples (self-appointed) and aesthetic statements (published posthumously)), but by leaving his own works radically open–open to everything, every contradictory tendency in his art. As John Berger noted years ago in his book on Picasso, Cézanne is the great dialectician of painting, combining his theses and antitheses into some of art’s most beautiful works of synthesis. Even this Mont Sainte-Victoire that looks so pleasant, lovely and mild can be seen as a complex web of contradictions raised to a seemingly impossible harmony. Far and near, warm and cool, open and closed, finished and unfinished, nature and art–all are brought together in this painting in a series of dialectical syntheses that combine both terms while cancelling neither. The essential qualities of both opposing tendencies are combined in the never-to-be-completed, never-to-be-fully-comprehended beauty of the work.

NEAR AND FAR. How can something be both close to us and far away? We know that mountains are much larger than trees, so that this mountain dwarfed by a tree must (by the rules of perspective) lie far in the background of painted space. We understand and accept this, even as we notice the strategies by which Cézanne brings the mountain nearer to us. Most obviously, he chooses a point of view that conceals the landscape’s middle ground, minimizing our sense of the distance between trees and mountain. He locks the form of the dark tree at right into the mountain ridge behind it that echoes its shape and even seems to share its contour on the left side. At the top of the painting, the spreading tree branches rise parallel to the mountain slope, as if the two forms are close enough to influence one another. The branches above the mountaintop even echo the concave summit in a rhyme that seems to bring tree and mountain into the same plane. If he so desires, Cézanne could pull the mountain directly up to the picture plane and destroy any illusion of distance, but this might also destroy one of the principal effects of his image: the mountain’s beautiful otherness, its separateness, its lovely, peaceful sublimity. Cézanne’s is a dialectical synthesis, and one doesn’t synthesize near and far simply by obliterating one of the terms. Pictorial space must be respected, even as it is being undermined. Accordingly, while Cézanne brings the mountain to the front, he simultaneously separates the viewer from the foreground. The light-brownish cliffs in front of the trees are a barrier preventing our entry into the painting. The land falls off vertically and we have literally no ground to stand on. We are distanced from the foreground even as the background is brought near. Neither term of the opposition is lost, and the painting approaches a single plane (like the plane of the canvas) that is as close as the cliffs and yet as distant, as disconnected from the viewer, as the mountain.

WARM AND COOL. One might say that the dominant cool blues of the upper painting balance the warmer colors of its lower half, but this would be an extreme oversimplification. Cézanne doesn’t divide his canvas in half; he brings it together by a finely nuanced interpenetration of warm and cool colors. In the midst of the foreground’s bright warmth, for example, just left of the bottom center, he places a large patch of sky blue that both counters the surrounding reddish-browns and tends to draw the foreground back, away from the viewer, toward the plane of sky and mountain. Other darker touches of bluish-gray are scattered in the shadows around the right-hand tree. And this tree itself, the darkest form in the right half of the painting, has a cooling effect that must be countered by placing warm strokes of foreground color on the ridge that surrounds it. The cool blues of the mountain are kept from iciness by the judicious application of large patches of warmer colors, and even the blue sky contains areas of green. But this painting is not merely a complex game of chromatic tit-for-tat. The warmer touches on the mountain and sky may also make the blues appear cooler by contrast, just as the blue accents around the warmest passage in the foreground probably increase its warmth. We can begin to appreciate the difficulties Cézanne sets for himself when we consider that every stroke of color on the canvas must be carefully and deliberately laid on so as not to unduly weaken or strengthen the surrounding colors. The goal is not loud, blow-your-eyes-out Fauvism (though this is, of course, where it leads); the goal is a subtle harmony in which all colors retain their power.

OPEN AND CLOSED. The composition of Mont Sainte-Victoire brings to mind that old standby of art historians, Japanese prints. Surely Hokusai’s Great Wave or his other views of Mt. Fuji are lurking somewhere behind this painting (Cézanne even chooses a view that emphasizes the Fuji-like shape of the mountain). But for our purposes it’s more important to understand how the composition can be both carefully closed and radically open. The mass of the mountain is enclosed on three sides by the U-shaped frame of trees, but the right side remains open, allowing the mountain’s contour to meander down and off the right edge of the canvas. A composition that’s open on one side and closed on the other would tend to make a painting unstable, even schizophrenic, but neither of these adjectives describes Mont Sainte-Victoire. Something else is going on. If we pay attention to what actually happens to our eye as we allow it to play across the painting, we find that instead of wandering off the right side, our vision follows an axis that connects the branches at the top center to the top of the mountain and then descends along the steep right slope. When we come to the ridge, though, our eye is caught by that dark tree, a form so solid and self-contained that it almost rivals the mountain. The shape of the tree, along with the patches of color that fan out from it in a circular rhythm, lead us down and toward the left, back into the painting. Thus is closure achieved in the context of powerful openness. And if we now look again at the left side of the composition, we see that exactly the opposite occurs. The large, solid tree that stops our gaze at the left edge is as radically cropped as any figure on the edge of a Degas painting. We must surely sense its bulk continuing over the top and beyond the left side of the canvas. What seems to be closure is also carefully constructed openness. The entire painting is both as open as the sky and as closed as the dark tree on the right.

FINISHED AND UNFINISHED. Looked at from another angle, this painting is neither closed nor brought to closure. Like most late Cézannes it is, by traditional standards, ‘unfinished.’ But Cézanne never had much use for traditional standards. As early as 1874 he wrote disparagingly of "...the finish that arouses the admiration of fools. This finish which is so much appreciated by the vulgar is only a matter of handwork and renders any picture resulting from it inartistic and common."¹ Although this canvas is more complete than many late works, it still contains noticeable passages of unpainted white ground–probably the sort of thing that led the uncomprehending Douanier Rousseau to offer to finish Cézanne’s paintings for him. The spots of bare canvas, though, are not so much a slap at Salon tradition as a necessary part of Cézanne’s overall structure. Consider the large unpainted patches at the lower right edge. These light, mellow whites make the nearby colors seem darker by contrast and allow this side of the canvas to balance the large, dark tree on the opposite side while not diminishing the impact of the nearer right-hand tree. (These are the kinds of calculations Cézanne must make when applying paint (or not) to every inch of this canvas. With each brushstroke he must ask himself: what will this darken? what lighten? what balance? what counteract?) The many unpainted spots in the warm foreground have a more equivocal effect: while making the warm tones slightly darker and cooler by contrast, they might also function as flecks of white heat in this warmth. Higher up, the tiny spot of bare canvas at the top of the mountain both draws our eye to the summit and is yet another flattening strategy, pulling the mountain into the same plane as the larger unpainted patch in the tree above. Every bare passage, like every painted one, is another note in the incredibly complex harmony to which Cézanne brings the work, a fragile harmony that a single additional touch of paint might disrupt. Unfinished is as finished as can be.

MATERIALS AND REPRESENTATION. From Constable and Turner to Leon Kossoff and Lucian Freud, the history of the last 200 years of western painting might be written as a tale of various attempts to synthesize the painted image with the realities of paint and canvas. Abstraction and photographic realism are the opposite ends of this game, the poles between which syntheses are achieved. Standing before Mont Sainte-Victoire, we never cease to be conscious of the fact that this is a flat surface of paint. Cézanne does more than fail to suspend our disbelief; he actively provokes it. From the patches of color brushed flatly over the canvas in the foreground to the broken and doubled contour lines of the tree at right, Cézanne constantly shows his hand, puts the materials and work of painting immediately before our eyes. We see his paint, his brushstrokes, and at the same time we see the images they construct. And we appreciate that the interest and beauty of the representation, of the mountain and the trees, is entirely dependent upon this brushwork that takes these forms to the point of dissolution. Cézanne takes us to an almost unprecedented place where our consciousness of the flat field of paint before our eyes may actually reinforce our sense of the image. We see both paint and mountain, and the impact of neither is diminished.

NATURE AND ART. By far the most complex synthesis Cézanne attempts–one that may include all the others–is between the demands of nature and those of art. "Art is a harmony parallel to nature,"² Cézanne once wrote. Art is neither an imitation of nature nor a complete divergence from it; it is a similar but separate thing. One can see how easily this concept of separation, independence of art from nature, might overshadow the need for similarity and take us into abstraction–but that’s Kandinsky’s road, not Cézanne’s. The more conservative Frenchman tries to stick to his straight and narrow parallel course. When he goes to the Bibemus quarry and sets up his easel in a spot with a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne sets out to create a separate aesthetic harmony that is true to the motif, a synthesis of the vision of nature before his eyes and some vague pictorial idea in his mind. The idea must be vague or even inexpressible at the beginning, because the act of painting is the process that brings this harmony into being. Only when the final brushstroke is applied can the harmony be recognized. Cézanne doesn’t know his goal until he attains it.

The other side of this synthesis, the natural world, presents problems that are even more complex–particularly for someone as supersensitive to color and form as Cézanne. First, the motif is in constant flux: tree branches move with the slightest breeze, clouds cross the sky, shadows shift, colors subtly change with every alteration in the direction and intensity of sunlight. But these problems have always beset plein-air painters, and since Cézanne is creating a parallel, not an imitation, they do not present insuperable difficulties. More specifically Cézannean is the problem of perception. When the artist steps to the right or left, or even moves his head a bit, his view of the motif changes slightly. The position of a tree may seem to shift in relation to the background; the contour of the mountain may seem to waver as another face comes into view. Even if nature’s constant motion could be magically paused like a DVD, this problem of perception would remain. How can Cézanne paint with a solid, sure line a form of which he is so uncertain? How can he achieve a parallel with nature when nature’s course seems to shift every time he moves? The artist’s solution to this problem may be the most original achievement of his late works.

For Cézanne is painting’s poet of epistemological doubt. He is our great visual poet of the limitations of human knowledge, of uncertainty about what we can know. If different views show different things, he incorporates both views into his work. (This is the Cézannean ‘both-and’ that the Cubists will exploit.) Hence the uncertain, broken lines that define the mountain ridges to the left of this painting’s center. Hence the strange doubled contours–like an image from a blurred photograph–on the tree trunk at right. Hence the break in the heavy line that delineates the mountain’s summit and the presence of the thinner line that defines the summit slightly above. Hence the double contour on the upper right slope of the mountain. For centuries, artists recorded such uncertainties in their sketchbooks but always smoothed them out in their final paintings. Cézanne does away with this falsehood. It’s time to face the mountain and face the facts of what we can and cannot know. We must appreciate the relativity of perception, that the apparent shape and location of an object can change with the position of its observer. We must realize that even something as unchanging and familiar as a mountain we have known all our lives can be an uncertain thing. And if we can’t be sure of something as solid as a mountain, what can we know? Cézanne’s late paintings are monuments to this uncertainty, and if we think long about them we eventually arrive at a point where the structure of all our knowledge seems built on shifting sand.

And Cézanne leaves us there. His work is done.

During his last decade Cézanne paints himself into a new world, a place where the old certainties no longer apply. Charles Le Brun, the paragon of seventeenth-century French academicism, didn’t suffer Cézanne’s doubts. Le Brun knew exactly what painting was for (to provide idealized images for King, Court and Church) and he knew how to achieve perfection (through careful application of time-honored rules). For Cézanne, all these things are dead or dying. And he is left with the painting, the mountain, and the questions that come between them. He questions perception, he questions knowledge, he questions painting, and he finds, at an end that ends nothing, not a conclusion but a balance, not an answer but an achieved harmony that keeps everything in question. His painting is a dialectical synthesis that raises contradictions into art without destroying them, without granting one term precedence over the other, any more than the sky and mountain in Mont Sainte-Victoire have precedence over the trees and cliffs. All contradictions remain visible, all questions are kept open–like paths to be followed into the future of art. Toiling away in Provençal obscurity, Cézanne brings modern painting into the twentieth century and opens the way to styles he could never have imagined.

NOTES

1. Venturi, Cezanne, 33.

2. Doran, ed., Conversations, 196.

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