AN ABRIDGED HISTORY OF EUROPE 
by William M. Brinton 

Paul Cézanne

"After fifty years of the most radical change in art from images to free abstraction, Cézanne's painting, which looks old-fashioned today in its attachment to nature, maintains itself fresh and stimulating to young painters of our time. He has produced no school, but he has given an impulse directly or indirectly to almost every new movement since he died. His power to excite artists of different tendency and temperament is due, I think, to the fact that he realized with equal fullness so many different sides of his art. It has often been true of leading modern painters that they developed a single idea with great force. Some one element or expressive note has been worked out with striking effect. In Cézanne we are struck rather by the comprehensive character of his art, although later artists have built on a particular element of his style. Color, drawing, modelling, structure, touch and expression – if any of these can be isolated from the others – are carried to a new height in his work. He is arresting through his images – more rich in suggestive content than has been supposed - and also through his uninterpreted strokes which make us see that there can be qualities of greatness in little touches of paint. In his pictures single patches of the brush reveal themselves as an uncanny choice, deciding the unity of a whole region of forms. Out of these emerges a moving semblance of a familiar natural world with a deepened harmony that invites meditation. His painting is a balanced art, not in the sense that it is stabilized or moderate in its effects, but that opposed qualities are joined in a scrupulously controlled play. He is inventive and perfect in many different aspects of his art.

"In this striving for fullness, Cézanne is an heir of the Renaissance and Baroque masters. Like Delacroix, he retains from Rubens and the Italians a concept of the grand – not in the size of the canvas but in the weight and complexity of variation. His grandeur is without rhetoric and convention, and inheres in the dramatic power of large contrasts and in the frankness of his means. His detached contemplation of his subjects arises from a passionate aspiring nature that seeks to master its own impulses through an objective attitude to things. The mountain peak is a natural choice for him, as is the abandoned quarry, the solitary house or tree, and the diversity of humble, impersonal objects on the table.

"The greatness of Cézanne does not lie only in the perfection of single masterpieces; it is also in the quality of his whole achievement. An exhibition of works spanning his forty years as a painter reveals a remarkable inner freedom. The lives of Gauguin and Van Gogh have blinded the public to what is noble and complete in Cézanne's less sensational, though anguished, career. Outliving these younger contemporaries, more fortunate in overcoming impulses and situations dangerous to art, he was able to mature more fully and to realize many more of his artistic ideas.

"Cézanne's masterliness includes, besides the control of the canvas in its complexity and novelty, the ordering of his own life as an artist. His art has a unique quality of ripeness and continuous growth. While concentrating on his own problems – problems he had set himself and not taken from a school or leader – he was capable of an astonishing variety. This variety rests on the openness of his sensitive spirit. He admitted to the canvas a great span of perception and mood, greater than that of his Impressionist friends. This is evident from the range of themes alone; but it is clear in the painterly qualities as well. He draws or colors; he composes or follows his immediate sensation of nature; he paints with a virile brush solidly, or in the most delicate sparse watercolor, and is equally sure in both. He possessed a firm faith in spontaneous sensibility, in the resources of the sincere self. He can be passionate and cool, grave and light; he is always honest.

"Cézanne's work not only gives us the joy of beautiful painting; it appeals too as an example of heroism in art. For he reached perfection, it is well known, in a long and painful struggle with himself. This struggle can be read in his work in the many signs of destructiveness and black moods, especially in his early phase; perhaps we may recognize it too even in the detached aspect of the world that he finally shapes into a serenely ordered whole. I do not doubt that the personal content of this classic art will in time become as. evident as the aesthetic result."

From Meyer Schapiro's Modern Art.
Mark Harden's Artchive
http://artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne.html

The Card Players [Les joueurs de cartes] (1890-92)
Paul Cézanne
Oil on canvas (134 x 181.5 cm)
The Barnes Foundation, Merion Pennsylvania
Mark Harden's Artchive
http://artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne.html

The House with Cracked Walls (1892-94)
Paul Cézanne
Oil on canvas (25 5/8 x 21 1/4 in)
Philadelphia Museum of Art
Mark Harden's Artchive
http://artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne.html

"Few Other Landscape images in Cézanne's career solicit such emotional response as The House with the Cracked Walls. An ocher-walled farmhouse sits at the top of a steep, rocky hill; a huge shelf of rock emerges on the right, while at the left, the earth seems terraced and is covered with only sporadic vegetation. The house itself has a sharply extended eave on one side, a profile similar to others in Cézanne's landscapes, ... with the same slightly askew, off-center single window. The site seems abandoned and the building disintegrating, with tiles falling from the roof (two have fallen against the rocks and one on the roof of the small structure on the right), while the shutters and window mullions have long since been salvaged or simply rotted away, leaving a dark, skull-like aperture. The large fissure that rends the upper part of the house and continues below into the attached, projecting outbuilding declares a slow but persistent collapse of the entire structure. It is indeed a haunting image made even more so by the exposure of the locale, the bleaching light on the facade and the rock, and above all, the completely airless quality created by the unrelieved density of the confining ink-blue sky. ...

"Cézanne was often drawn to isolated and uninhabited sites, perhaps as much by his desire to work in complete privacy as by the attraction of such places in themselves. During the 1890s he sought out such sites to the east of Aix, toward the foothills of Mont Sainte-Victoire, rather than the more populated regions where he had gone more regularly before. The road to Le Tholonet, passing through a sparsely wooded, rocky landscape, had particular appeal and just off it was the abandoned quarry of Bibemus, where he kept a small hut for his equipment within the high red walls of the artificial canyon. He was attracted to the seldom-used house, Chateau Noir, just above this road, belonging to an absentee chemical engineer. Despite its local name, its walls were actually stained a deep red, not unlike the color of the boulders in the quarry at Bibemus. It was a sinister place with half-finished structures and pointed gothic windows that held great appeal for Cézanne, who attempted to buy it, unsuccessfullv, although he continued to paint there throughout the l890s. It is tempting to draw parallels between the Chateau Noir with its enclosed and mysteriously distanced quality and local notoriety (it was sometimes called the Maison du Diable) and the present picture; however, a better comparison in the sense of evocative landscape motifs to which he may have been drawn would be the abandoned mill just below the Chateau Noir, whose blocks were slowly being reconsumed into the natural setting through the unhusbanded undergrowth.

"Unlike these sites, which may well have been quite near the cracked house and which recur in paintings and watercolors throughout Cézanne's later years, the cracked house is a unique image. It is a work of remarkable absence of atmosphere and perspectival calculation. Except for the wedge of shadow under the eaves and the view through the top of the window into the pitch-black interior, no perspectival devices were used. The trapezoidal silhouettes of the house and its two appendages are in a subtle repetition with the flattened outline of the right-angled projection of the rocks. The trees stand in complete profile, and the white shelf of rock on the right, despite the tremendously controlled suggestion of recession through the coloristic modulation of its surface, is only one step away from a complete identification with the picture plane, nearly exactly like the large repoussoir that fills the similarly claustrophobic and dense view of the Bibemus quarry, The Red Rock. All surfaces are handled with equal deliberation, both in terms of density of paint and degree of painterly animation within any given passage: the directional strokes of the terraced bank are paralleled in equal alignment to the side of the house, the leaves, or the sky itself. The drawing of the tree trunks aligns in a nonspatial manner, the left limb of the double-branched tree, third from the left, overlaying exactly the trunk of the tree behind it, while the etched line that describes the edge of the large white rocks does as much to hold its projection to the picture's surface as to create the crevice into which the house sinks. The most dramatic passage of the painting – the frayed outline of the cracks themselves – is the one element that departs from the measured application of all other areas."

From Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection, by Joseph Rishel.
Mark Harden's Artchive
http://artchive.com/artchive/C/cezanne.html

index of plates >
All contents © 1999 William M. Brinton