Paul Cézanne is probably best known for two things, his still lives with apples and his landscapes of a mountain in the south of France in Provence known as Mount Saint-Victoire. And we're looking at a painting of Mount Saint-Victoire here in the Philadelphia Museum of Art that dates to 1902. two to four. It's interesting to think about Cézanne painting this mountain over and over again, but also painting each painting of the mountain over an extended period of time.
Normally, we think about Impressionism as paintings that are done on site rather rapidly, but this is decidedly different. Paul Cézanne is often grouped with Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat, and called a post-Impressionist. He began his career exhibiting with the Impressionists in Paris. He moved back to the area that he grew up in, in the south of France, later in his life. This painting was made in the last few years of his life.
He would die just two years after it was completed. It's funny to talk about this painting being completed because it feels unfinished. There are places where we see the canvas.
underneath, there are buildings that seem to be taking shape, there are trees that seem to be half formed, even the mountain itself seems to be almost in the process of forming. We can clearly read a mountain, a sky, clouds, trees, farmland, and buildings, but at the same time, if we look too closely, they all fall apart, and they are all formed of a series of hash marks that create a sense of optical movement and change. But think about, historically, what it means for an artist to do this with light. landscape.
From the 17th century forward, painters like Poussin or Claude had been deeply concerned with creating space that was believable and Cezanne seems to be here directly attacking that tradition. He's creating what has been referred to as a curtain of paint. The paint is so present throughout the surface of the canvas, in the sky, in the foreground, that all of it rises up to the surface.
All of it announces its two-dimensionality that it is on a vertical plane. The whole tradition of landscape painting... and even the academic tradition in France of painting generally is about high finish, not seeing the brush strokes, which are so emphatically present here.
But to me, I'm not sure that he's attacking that tradition so much as being true to his own personal vision as he stood in front of this landscape. Here he is, the end of the 19th century, the early years of the 20th century. Impressionism has happened, this idea of depicting your own sensations or subjective optical experience. in front of the landscape, and I think that's a big part of this for him. There is an intimacy of vision of a man that has spent a lifetime looking at this mountain from these vantage points and is understanding his own visual experience and inventing a visual language to portray that experience.
Cézanne will be really important for Cubism. If we think about a painting like Braque's Viaduct at L'Estaque, you can see how Braque is thinking about the forms in terms of geometric shapes. and we have some sense of that here. But where Braque and Picasso will really fully open up form, what we have here is Cézanne just beginning to investigate what it means to break contour.
Look, for example, at the houses in the foreground. We can see the way in which the color of the field enters into the area that should be just the red of the roof. It's just a subtle opening up of form, ever so slightly, whereas Braque and Picasso will dismantle form almost completely. So from the hindsight of the 20th century, we see the way in which the color of the field this as an affirmation of the flatness of the canvas, a denying of the illusionism that was such an important part of Western painting beginning in the Renaissance. We shouldn't say complete denial because we can still see the mountain in the background.
We can still see the foreground of the hills before, and we can still see the brush immediately below our feet as we look from an adjacent hilltop. Nevertheless, all of the subtle cues that had built up in landscape painting in the centuries before have been left out. Normally, we we would expect to see atmospheric perspective.
We would expect to see the sky and mountains in the distance fading and becoming less bright in color, less clear in their focus. But in that way, Cézanne is treating every part of this canvas in the same way. DR. STEVEN ZUCKERMANN Instead of using atmospheric perspective to create a sense of form, the artist is simply delineating distance by choice of color. We have these blue browns in the foreground.
We have reds and greens in the middle ground. And we have blues in the most distant area. but it is a kind of arbitrary association of place with color. Cezanne is able to create an even greater degree of ambiguity by bringing color from one realm into the other.
Look, for instance, at the way that Cezanne takes that gray-purple from the immediate foreground and builds that into the sky so that when we see those colors in relationship to each other, that sky comes forward. What we have here is an investigation of landscape that's very different than what the Impressionists were doing. This is not about capturing the transitory effect of light into atmosphere.
This seems to be about something more permanent. What Cézanne is after, it seems to me, is a tension between the deep recession that we expect and the radical confrontation with the two-dimensionality of the surface.