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Cézanne: Landscape Into Art Pavel Machotka

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Cézanne: Landscape Into Art Pavel Machotka REVISED EDITION 7 CÉZANNE: LANDSCAPE INTO ART PAVEL MACHOTKA TABLE OF 1 PREFACE TO INTRODUCTION: NARRATION THE REVISED THE TENACIOUS AND VISION EDITION PRESENCE IN CÉZANNE’S 6F 17 OF THE MOTIF WORK 18F25 26F33 5 6 7 ACHIEVEMENT LANDSCAPES THE LATE OF A CONSISTENT OF MATURITY: LANDSCAPES: TOUCH: 1885 '1894 1895 '1906 1875 '1884 10 6F 153 15 4F 207 74F 105 Concept & text © Pavel Machotka, 2014 Photo © Émile Bernard, Didier Bonfort, Christian Crès, Erle Loran, Pavel Machotka, Gertrude Osthaus, John Rewald, Ker-Xavier Roussel, 2014 Graphic design © Belavenir, 2014 © Arbor vitae, 2014 ISBN 978-80-7467-049-7 CONTENTS 2 3 4 PERCEIVING RECONSTRUCTING EARLY OBJECTS THE MOTIF LANDSCAPES: AND LOOKING ON CANVAS 1865 '1874 AT PAINTINGS 40F 51 52F 73 34F 39 LIST OF BIBLIOGRAPHY INDEX PAINTINGS 21 4F 218 22 0F223 20 8F 213 6 PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION Cézanne outside his studio Photo Gertrude Osthaus, April 13, 1906 CÉZANNE: LANDSCAPE INTO ART 7 PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION 8 PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION The young painter Émile Bernard visited Cézanne in 1904 and 1905, occasionally went to the motif with him, and witnessed both his oil and his watercolor techniques. At present, we know no better candidate for the authorship of the photograph. Fig. 1a La Route tournante en haut du chemin des Lauves Probable photo Émile Bernard, 1904 CÉZANNE: LANDSCAPE INTO ART 9 A photograph of the subject of a well-known landscape painting will preserved, the light at the same time of day, the scene framed as unavoidably reshape the way we see it. It will break open its sealed, Cézanne had done – and the whole photographed in color. Without timeless world, and take us momentarily into the place and the moment color, the photograph will admittedly reveal the solid forms, the in which it first came to exist. It will inevitably remind us that before the palpable textures, the identities of things, and the painter’s touch. But painting was completed and began its progress toward enshrinement a color record will also reveal the local hues and the color relationships on a museum wall, it was a work in progress: the artist was faced with that give the painting balance and emotional life; it will document the choices, chose well or badly, made corrections, and eventually (perhaps resonances between things that connect with each wherever they may even reluctantly) declared the work done. In painting a landscape happen to be on the canvas. And it will reveal the paradox that the he might have chosen to attend to its texture and color, or instead paintings by themselves are incapable of suggesting: that Cézanne’s to emphasize space, clarify structure, and balance the composition; originality, complexity, oneness of form and color, and rigorous unity of he might have even attempted to achieve some workable equilibrium canvas surface, were all deeply connected to the process of seeing itself. of all these intentions. When the photograph succeeds in showing us The very first photograph taken of a Cézanne site fulfilled all this, it connects us with the painting’s origins, it raises questions that all the conditions save that of color, and if we miss the color, we can at we might not have asked, and it nurtures in us the hope that we might least be assured of the photograph’s absolute authenticity. It was taken better understand the painter’s purpose, vision, and craft. by someone who stood essentially in Cézanne’s footsteps. Everything Not all photographs of landscape sites fulfill the hope, in the photograph is as the painter had seen it: the recession of the however. The style of some painters is so close to the photographic road, the profile of the crest, the houses just slipping behind the hill, image that the creative process remains hidden; the canvas and the the relation of the trees to the background, the direction of light. photograph appear only as alternative visual records. We will have Whether the photographer snapped the shutter over Cézanne’s proof of the artist’s commitment to his subject, of course, but little shoulder or came back later is immaterial; Cézanne’s exact standpoint evidence of the painting as a process of selection, of emphasis, would have been familiar to anyone who had gone with him to his site. of incorporation into the painter’s way of seeing. Our admiration We can be sure that the painter returned to the site several times, for the painting will not be affected; we will still note its balance because the painting’s complexity and elaborate integration required or complexity, color consonance, or the mastery of representation. considerable time – and because he took the trouble to paint a large, But we will have learned little that we could not see in the painting equally complex watercolor from the spot as well. alone. 1 With other painters, the canvas and the photograph are too The photographer was probably the young painter Émile distant – perhaps just close enough for us to recognize the site – and Bernard, who visited Cézanne in 1904, and the photograph certainly we then fail to see how the one depended on the other. The site looks carries a kind of authority that later photographs can only approxi - only as a pretext for painting, not as an invitation or an incitement. mate. Many sites were well preserved thirty, forty, and even ninety The painting continues to exist as an independent thing, not as the years after Cézanne had seen them, but no photographer working fruit of close observation and analytical thought. 2 later had seen him paint. With Bernard’s impeccable evidence, we Photographs of Cézanne’s sites, however, occupy a space in can immediately see the attraction of the motif: it offers the painter a between; they are pregnant with suggestions of the painterly process naturally concentrated composition, with a focus in the partly hidden, at work. They are most revealing, of course, when they reproduce bright house, and with lines radiating from it to the right and then as much as possible what the painter had seen: with the site well downward. 10 PREFACE TO THE REVISED EDITION These movements offer a kind of invitation to paint, and the the other. Each is in an obvious way convincing as a representation invitation seems all the more irresistible as the composition is already of the site, yet each is also a reconstruction in a different system, one balanced; two trees anchor it in the lower right. Cézanne responds of Cézanne’s own devising. The watercolor relies on a limited palette with a relentlessly dynamic picture: he magnifies the inclination, gives of transparent colors laid down patiently in overlapping facets; each the radiating movements a push downwards and outwards, and paints new facet is set down on a fully dried surface. In this way, yellows, the road with vertical touches so that it will dip down and accelerate greens, pinks, ochres, blues, and violets – and nothing else, unless them. Above all, he creates a painting that is fiercely independent one counts the white reserved areas – are superimposed in different and self-contained in spite of its profound connection to the motif: its proportions to indicate hillsides, houses, trees and sky (or merely blues, greens and corals can be seen in every part of the canvas and all to suggest them). Soon one forgets that one has seen the site: it is the its surfaces have the same rhythm and density. The painting is a record sheet that is alive, with unceasing movements, ubiquitous correspon - of a motif, but it is also more: a revelation of its character. dences, a sense of unity – and of course with the traces of the painter’s When we come close to a scene as Cézanne saw it, then, we will hand, which pivots at the wrist in short movements. see that the painting’s principal structure, balance, and color relation - The oil shares with the watercolor the same radical, centrifu - ships were present before his eyes. Rather than inventing objects or gal composition (which is arrested and restrained at the bottom right changing the intervals between them, he accepted the configurations he by the trees), and it shares Cézanne’s conception of painting as seeing found and remained close to them as he reconstructed them. Of course, nature through a veil of interpretations by colored patches. Yet how so did many of the painters of his time; this is clearly illustrated in radically different the patches are when painted in oil. Being opaque, Reidemeister’s history of the sites of the region around Paris. 3 But we they do not make a third color when superimposed, nor do they hover would have expected this from earlier painters, if only on grounds of in some indeterminate space where one can be above another, or be - history; with Cézanne, however, the master of the analytic touch and the low, at the same time. In oil, if one paints one patch on top of another, complex composition, we might have supposed the paintings to have been it will remain on top; if one places a green patch on top of a blue one, largely independent constructions. Looking at Cézanne’s motif, we are it will remain green. Striving for unity – as Cézanne does here with faced instead with a paradox: with the artist’s equal attachment to vision greens in the sky and blues in the hillside – one will achieve it, but it and to painting, or better put, with his equal commitment to intense will be tangible rather than ethereal.
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