The Painting of Paul Cézanne, by John A Cooke

Paul Cezanne: Still life with Plaster Cast c.1894 © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London	Paul Cezanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire 1887 © The Samuel Courtauld Trust, Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery, London

One of the themes of John’s Gospel is about ‘seeing’ and ‘not seeing’. John uses the story of the man born blind to make the point that Jesus reveals the truth and that the Christian can also affirm, “one thing I do know, that though I was blind, now I see.” This affirmation contrasts with the Pharisees who think that they can see, but in point of fact, are blind to the truth of things.

I want to share with you my long-standing passion for the late nineteenth century French post-impressionist painter, Paul Cézanne. This extraordinary painter who is now called the ‘Father of modern painting’, was dismissed by the establishment of his day as “an ignorant dauber”, whose “distortions that his art deems indispensable” was produced by “an unconscious taste for the ugly and the coarse”. Blind interpreters indeed!

Paul Cézanne was born in 1839 in Aix-en-Provence and he was deeply rooted in his experience of the Provençal countryside. He abandoned studying law at University and a subsequent career in his father’s bank and took up his passion for painting. His early paintings were characterised by vigorous paintwork and emotional and sometimes erotic subject matter. He was then significantly influenced by Camille Pissarro, and others of the emerging group of French Impressionists. They were fascinated by light and capturing the effect of light and the fleeting moment. But gradually Cézanne’s work began to display a significantly individual style that seemed much more interested in the underlying structure of things. Constantly rejected by the official salons and attacked in the press, Cézanne struggled to find acceptance, selling few paintings and he only became financially secure on the death of his father in 1886. He was something of a recluse, although in the last decade of his life he began to find a dedicated following among discerning artists and some collectors, so much so that, a year after his death in 1906, a memorial exhibition of his work brought homage from the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Braque – some of the emerging giants of the art of the 20th Century.

It is very difficult to put into words the visual and spiritual emotion that Cézanne so miraculously transmitted to canvas and paper. The Catalogue of the Cézanne Exhibition in 1996 at the Tate, says, ‘to broach the subject of Cézanne is to enter upon holy ground’. What I can say is that for me, looking at the paintings of Paul Cézanne offers me a combination of exquisite, visual and intellectual pleasure. Indeed, for Cézanne himself, the very act of painting involves the ‘eye and the mind’.

One of the interesting features of the art of Cézanne, although perhaps one of the most difficult, is the way that he ‘sees’. Many paintings appear distorted with a radical distortion of perspective, or have a sketchy or unfinished quality. The illustrated painting, Still Life with Plaster Cupid, is a case in point. The cast itself appears twisted, the floor and some objects seem tilted up, some objects also slope to the left and the apple in the background looks too big. The painting has many blank patches, there are contour lines inside and outside the edges of objects and some of the colours of the fruit seem unnatural. These are intriguing and we may find ourselves asking the question, why does Cézanne paint like this?

In many works, Cézanne painted repeated contour lines around the edges of objects. Apples, fruit, plates and dishes often have numerous lines around them. Whilst our mind tells us that an edge is a hard line, there are in fact no lines in nature. It is difficult to simultaneously focus on the edge of an object and the background; and so, the longer we look at an edge, the more it vacillates. Because we have two eyes and observe objects slightly to the right and slightly to the left, there are hazy lines that mark edges and Cézanne’s objects do justice to a truthful attempt to convey them on the canvas.

I reflect that too often the religious mind wishes to see things surrounded by hard edges. But in truth, perception will not allow us to see things in that way. Hazy edges and ill-defined contours more adequately reflect the way things are. The desire for certainty and clarity blind us to the true nature of things.

Another feature of Cézanne’s optic is that objects sometimes look tilted up towards the spectator. The asymmetry of bottles and vases, the perilous tilt of a plate of fruit, the distortion of the table, indicate an astonishing departure from a unitary point of perspective. We do not look at objects like a camera which has a single fixed point, but we have two eyes, our head moves and we observe objects from a series of different angles. Cézanne fascinatingly describes this and allows us to see from a variety of perspectives.

I reflect, too, that our logic presupposes us to see things only from a unitary perspective. If we see things one way we are thereby obliged to deny the truth of seeing them another way. However, because we are human we do see things from a variety of perspectives and if we are prepared to wrestle with that tension, it is possible to bring an internal coherence to our understanding and in the process create interesting and novel patterns.

A third feature of Cézanne’s way of seeing is the way he seems to dispense with the strict application of scale in his paintings. For instance, in ‘Still Life with Plaster Cupid’ it looks as though the apple in the background is too large in comparison with the apples in the foreground. This is because Cézanne dispensed with the notion of constancy in perspective. As we actually look at the world around us, objects do not appear to swell or shrink as much as geometry predicts. Cézanne also often compresses the space between foreground and background in his paintings. He often stood at a considerable distance from his subject, so that the space between near and far objects seems less than normal, rather as in a photograph taken with a telephoto lens. This effect is very marked in Cézanne’s landscapes, for example, Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine, where the middle distance appears considerably foreshortened and the mountain itself appears much larger than it would in a photograph taken from the same point.

The relative importance of things is not determined by their distance from us.  We need to have sufficient insight to see the whole, but to determine what is significant. Another way that Cézanne expresses this is by labouring detail in one part of the picture and leaving other parts of the canvas empty or deliberately unfinished. The capacity to discriminate between what is important and what is not, and yet hold the whole in view is crucial to religious perception.

One of the great and immediate pleasures of encountering a Cézanne is the wonderful use of colour. Cézanne believed that naïve vision, pure retinal sensation, consisted only of variously coloured patches. ‘To paint is to register one’s sensations of colour’, and to read nature as ‘patches of colour’. The struggle of the painter applying paint to a canvas, is not to copy the objective world slavishly, but to translate the impression into another scale of sensation – the contrast and the relationship of colours. It is for the spectator to interpret them into meaningful spatial relations. Cézanne achieved this modeling through colours in a harmonious play of warm and cool, in that warm colours appear to advance and cool colours to recede. They can be used to produce effects of relief and recession.

No one patch of colour can model form on its own; it only contributes to the effect by the relationships of the painting as a whole. Just as notes only function within the harmony or the key of the whole, Cézanne often modulated or adjusted the local colour of objects in order to make it fit with the global harmony of the painting. Each touch of colour he added to the picture affected its harmony, so every time he applied a colour, he needed to ensure that it harmonised with the rest of the work. If he chose a colour that did not quite fit, he would adjust it by mixing or glazing. Occasionally he would even change parts of the rest of the picture. He often laboured for hours taking great care to match the colours.

Looking at Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine you can see that much of the landscape is expressed in patches or blocks of colour delicately and subtly and carefully placed with a wonderful sense of harmony. Cézanne was attempting to follow the principle of harmony in that he saw nature as harmonious. Cézanne who was a devout Catholic late in life believed that God’s presence was visible in the landscape.

One of the traditional ways of evaluating the art of Cézanne is to see him as the important precursor of the move to Cubism and abstraction. You can observe him stripping down appearances and discarding the inessential. You can marvel at the balance of the formal design and arrangement of his paintings. Many of his figures have a monumental gravity and presence and there is a concern with structure and solidity. The move to abstraction is palpable. In Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine the simple arrangement of the vertical column of the tree trunk is almost abstract and the tree itself acts  like a proscenium arch.

The landscape is expressed in cuboid buildings and fields of alternating greens and ochres. Many of his last paintings of the same mountain are arranged in simple blocks of colour. I stand in awe before a painting by Cézanne who seems to be the first person to ‘see’ the world in this way and I find that vision quite breathtaking.

By struggling to be scrupulously truthful in the way he ‘saw’ the world, by rapturously using colour to express his belief in the harmony of things, and by his capacity to pare things down to what is essential, Cézanne reminds me that the Christian too is called to a similar perceptual shift and see the world with new and discriminating eyes.

Revd John A. Cooke is a Supernumerary Minister in the Wesley’s Chapel & Leysian Mission Circuit. He is the representative of the Methodist Church on the Court of the Royal College of Art.

Use has been made of Interpreting Cézanne by Paul Smith, Tate Publishing 1996. The pictures Still Life with Plaster Cupid and Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine are reproduced by kind permission of the Courtauld Institute Galleries.