|
Portrait of an experimental innovator:
Paul Cézanne in his last days
It was the end of summer, 1906. Change was afoot.
New Yorkers marveled at the city’s first skyscraper, the 22-story Flatiron Building. San Francisco was starting to rebuild from the spring’s great earthquake. Frank Lloyd Wright was rewriting the ground rules for architects. In the nation’s capital, President Theodore Roosevelt was preparing a trip to inspect construction of the Panama Canal. In Russia, the government was in disarray -- Czar Nicholas had dissolved the legislature and abandoned attempts at reform. In England, the still-powerful British navy boasted of its latest launch – the turbine-powered battleship Dreadnaught, bristling with 12-inch guns. In Paris, in response to public petitions, a full-size bronze cast of Rodin’s The Thinker went on outdoor display for the first time. Nobel Prize-winner Marie Curie began work as the first female physics professor at the Faculty of Sciences. The latest Parisian art movement, the Fauves, fascinated the art world.
In his studio in the woods of southern France, painter Paul Cézanne was frustrated and close to death. At age 67, he was struggling with his art, though long ago he could have set down his brushes and reflected contentedly on his career. He had no money worries. He was controversial. Young painters came to him for advice. Dealers courted him. His paintings hung on museum walls in Paris. But he wasn’t satisfied. He thought he was close to achieving his longtime goal of applying paint to canvas in a way that depicted the world exactly as it should be painted – an achievement that he would know when he saw it, but couldn’t quite put into words.
“I seek in painting,” Cézanne told a friend.
What he sought was to meet the challenge of depicting the natural world – its light, its colors, and its nearly geometric forms – in paintings that were both harmonious and true to the patterns his mind and his eye saw before him. To try to get it right, he painted still lifes dozens of times. As he had done for decades, he arranged fruits and vases and pitchers on his studio table. Apples and oranges. A vase of tulips. A basket of apples next to a water pitcher. A scattering of objects from a collection he had assembled – a ginger jar, a peppermint bottle, some skulls, a piece of faded blue fabric, a rum bottle, a green-and-violet tablecloth with red flowers. Then he painted and repainted.
“I have made some progress,” he wrote to an artist friend. “Why so late and with such difficulty?”
Mornings he often devoted to still lifes, afternoons to landscapes. Up the hill from his studio, the wooded slope opened on views of Mount Sainte-Victoire, the peak that dominates the terrain east of Aix-en-Provence. On many days, a carriage driver gave him a lift up the road to a clearing where so he could paint that scene again and again. On other days, he walked to the site carrying his easel, his canvas and his heavy box of paints -- cobalt blue, ultramarine, Prussian blue, emerald green, viridian, terre verte, vermilion, red ochre, burnt siena, rose madder, carmine lake, burnt lake, brilliant yellow, Naples yellow, chrome yellow, yellow ochre, raw Siena, silver white, peach-black.
Over the years, he painted Mount Sainte-Victoire dozens of times, each time trying once more to get it right, each time frustrated that he again hadn’t yet succeeded. He painted it from Bellevue. From Bibemus. From Les Lauves. From Beauregard. From Montbriands. From a distance. Up close. Looming over the plain. Behind a tree.
“I progress very slowly,” he wrote, “for nature reveals herself to me in very complex ways; and the progress needed is endless.”
He had been living and painting mostly in and around his hometown of Aix-en-Provence since returning from Paris at age 46. He had rented an apartment on Rue Boulegin and then built the studio in the hills of Les Lauves, within walking distance of home. Now he wrote to younger painter Emile Bernard, “Will I ever attain the end for which I have striven so much and so long? I hope so, but as long as it is not attained a vague state of uneasiness persists which will not disappear until I have reached port, that is until I have realized something which develops better than in the past. ... I am always studying after nature and it seems to me that I make slow progress. … But I am old, ill, and I have sworn to myself to die painting.”
Autumn arrived, and with it came rain. Cézanne fired the carriage driver in a dispute over the fare.
“The weather is stormy and very changeable,” he wrote to his son. “My nervous system much enfeebled, only work in oils can sustain me.” For the time being, he used watercolors instead of oils -- they were lighter, so he could lug them to the clearing in a knapsack. “I have difficulty in carrying on with my work, but in spite of that it’s something. It’s important, I believe. The sensation which composes the basis of my work I believe to be impenetrable.”
He wrote that he
|
|
Paul Cézanne – the career of an old master
Auction prices for Cézanne paintings show that buyers value most highly the works he did in his 40s and late in life. (Horizontal axis is age. Vertical axis is a weighted measure of auction prices. Source: Painting Outside the Lines)
|
|
|
|
|
wanted “a little moral satisfaction — but nothing can give me that except work.” On Oct. 15, a storm caught him on his way to the clearing. He collapsed along the roadside and lay there until a laundry-cart driver found him. Cézanne was barely conscious when the cart delivered him back home. It took two men to get him upstairs to bed. The next morning he awoke, eager to paint some more. He went up to the studio to work under the lime trees, sketching a portrait of the gardener until he collapsed again. He died six days later.
In the days just before his death, Cézanne was still frustrated, uneasy about his skills, unsure of his accomplishments, endlessly seeking to inch his way toward an impenetrable goal. If you paid attention only to Cézanne’s evaluations of his own progress, you wouldn’t guess that his work was an inspiration to other painters, especially the paintings he made in the last decades of his life, from about age 50 to his death at 67. In those years, he did his most innovative and successful work, branching off from the style of Impressionist masters such as Monet. His brush strokes broke down the landscape into cubes and cylinders, depicting something quite different from what appears to the naked eye. With those late paintings, he helped change the face of modern art.
Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso, two competing giants of early 20th-century French painting, both studied Cézanne’s techniques with fascination. Picasso focused on how Cézanne used geometric shapes in “Mount Sainte-Victoire from Bibemus Quarry,” a painting he made at about age 60. Matisse was intrigued by the way Cézanne applied unrealistic techniques to human figures in the “Bathers” series that he created in his 60s. Matisse and Picasso disagreed about most things, but not about Cézanne.
“In modern art, it is undoubtedly to Cézanne that I owe the most,” Matisse said. “Cézanne, you see, is a sort of God of painting.”
Picasso called Cézanne, “My one and only master. … Cézanne was like the father of us all.”
xxx
See also: Basics about experimental and conceptual innovators
See also: When experimental innovators make bad mid-life decisions.
See also chart: Comparing experimental and conceptual painters
|
