Cezanne in Provence

The Intensity of a Gaze

by Gregory Wolfe

The year 2006 marks the centenary of the death of Paul Cezanne, one of the masters of modern art. To celebrate the occasion, a major exhibition, “Cezanne in Provence,” was organized. Those who were lucky enough to be in Washington, DC, earlier this year when it was on view at the National Gallery of Art–its only venue in North America–were able to see 117 drawings and paintings, a remarkable collection.
Whether you were able to attend the exhibition or not, there is much to learn from pondering this artist, whose gaze upon reality was so intense that it changed the way we see the world. Though he was an outsider all his life, shunned by the art establishment in Paris and unwilling to throw in his lot with the rebels who came to call themselves Impressionists, Cezanne nonetheless rescued modern art from mere subjectivism and sentimentality.
Born in the southern region of France known as Provence, Cezanne struggled for many years to discover the freedom in which his “I” could flourish. His father, a domineering businessman, wanted him to become a lawyer. But in law school, Cezanne found himself skipping classes to paint. One of his closest friends was the novelist Emile Zola, who urged him to pursue his vocation to art. Though the two men would eventually part ways, Zola’s friendship played a major role in confirming Cezanne’s sense of his destiny.
The center of artistic activity in the late nineteenth century, of course, was Paris, but for the disheveled, eccentric man from the countryside, the city was an ambiguous place at best. Cezanne found the art world stifling and returned again and again to the stark beauty of Provence. There he experienced the freedom he needed to respond to the natural beauty that both wounded and moved him. For a time he participated in the efforts of the Impressionists to move away from an arid form of academic representation, which traded passion for a sentimentalized world of mythology. Yet he also grew more and more uncomfortable with the Impressionists’ interest in a merely “optical” approach. For Cezanne, this was to lose touch with the deep structures of reality, the truth of being and the mystery of the created order. Though Cezanne pioneered the movement in modern art from realism to an increasing abstraction, he was a deeply traditional thinker who retained a passion for reason. “You must think,” he once wrote. “The eye is not enough; it needs to think as well.”
At home in Provence, his gaze upon the gardens, country roads, and seaside villages sought out pattern and permanence. Painting in the coastal town of L’Estaque, he saw the eternal dialogue between the natural forms of sea and mountain and the human structures–the ocher-colored, tiered houses with red roofs that echo the sandstone crags of the surrounding hills. An occasional smokestack will remind the viewer that the modern world is changing the landscape, but for Cezanne the timeless power of nature remains the surest path to an intuition of Being.
His artistic struggle brought many brushes with melancholy–with nothingness–but this only impelled him to take greater risks. “What lies behind nature?” he wrote. “Nothing perhaps. Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand?”
Nowhere can this titanic effort to sense the “everything” be more clearly seen than in the series of oils and watercolors he painted of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the looming limestone ridge that dominated his thoughts. In every condition of light and weather he painted it, a great sail of rock angled up into the sky. It is no exaggeration to say that, for Cezanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire was an event, a presence that corresponded to something deep within him. His paintings move from sunnier, pastoral depictions to darker abstractions, but in each of them there is reverence, a desire to touch the infinite.
In his last years, having finally experienced the freedom that he long sought, Cezanne turned back to the human figure, painting a series of heroic scenes of bathers. These groupings of naked men and women looked back to his love of classical art and yet in the looseness of treatment they point forward to Matisse. Above all, they hint at a unity among human beings that is seldom achieved but always the source of our hope. As intense and brooding as Cezanne’s gaze may have been, it was always motivated by love.