Since childhood, Cezanne’s provencal landscapes have held a special significance for me. Never the early experiments in form and colour that textbooks might have had me believe, they were only ever – and remain to be – the most appropriate rendition of this harsh, scorched mediterranean lanscape as first viewed by an eight month old toddler – myself.
Aix-en-Provence, Cezanne’s birthplace and hometown for the majority of his life, has also been the home to my auntie and uncle for thirty seven years. Last week was my first visit for 9 years to the town I spent every summer in for the first decade of my life. In this gap, my understanding of art has developed and matured hundred fold and some, and ye the Aix I found last week was one of retrieved memories, not pictorial recreation. The heat, the searing smell of pine, lavender and European sewage, the constant chatter of crickets, they all returned me to a place in my formative years. In the gardens of the Pavilion Vendome, only the red roundabout rang true, not the 17th century chateau.
Yet my return comes as a result of the goings on of the last ten years of my life. It has been a coming together of my stages of evolution, with the presentation of “Picasso Cezanne” at the Musee Granet in this town my childhood, two years after the meteorically successful Cezanne retrospective there. The basic premise of the exhibition is to consider Picasso’s devotion to, referencing of, and development via the lessons of Cezanne, the master of Aix, whose work laid the path for modernism, and Picasso’s rendition of the world through newly found eyes.
It’s results are extraordinary.
Rather than writing a review of the exhibition, however, of which many exist, I have decided to briefly dabble with the ideas which came to be during my time in the exhibition, and in the following four days I spent in Aix and Marseille, in which time I visited Vauvernargues, Picasso’s home from 1959 and 1961 and his final resting place, opened only for the duration of the exhibition, l’Unite d’Habitation in Marseille, Le Corbusier’s great modernist housing block, the Fondation Vasarely in Aix, a purpose built home for the Polish Op-Artists works long since cared for with anything like an appropriate level of funding or maintenance, and of course this area inhabited by my artistic heroes.
The first real success which stood out for me came as a result of one of my auntie’s first comments after picking me up at Marignane airport, driving through the Provencal hills south of Aix. My flight landed at the – unusually for a budget flight – respectful hour of two in the afternoon. My auntie happily commented upon the reversal of shadows on the hills she had come to known so well driving back and forth to the airport for friends and family over the years. This movement of shadows immediately stood out for me as a simply put comment within the Bergsonian framework of time’s flow, and the integration of experience, memory and the present. Here was a non-static landscape constantly interrupting it’s own, and our memories; shadows able to tell different stories to a watchful and respectful audience; the passage of time exemplified by shifting shadows and light.
Appropriately then, the first stop we made once in Aix was a garden opened only a few years ago, a few hundred metres further up the avenue Paul Cezanne than his atelier, from where Cezanne painted some of his most famous views of the Mont Sainte Victoire. Standing here, one can see exactly the colours and shapes of Cezanne’s work, and one can imagine how the shifting shadows and colours over an afternoon, not to mention the shifting visibility resulting from the mistral’s intent, might lead to a confusion of colour and perspectival intent might be found more in artistic oratory of a view rather than any Bergsonian theory… or somewhere inbetween.
And so images by Picasso in the exhibition such as those painted in Gosol in 1905-06, in which shadows systematically disagreed with one another in orientation, then became for me rather a Cezannian lesson in the passage of time, and a romanticised view of the movement of light. Morning afternoon evening. Both of their landscapes have dramatically shifted in my cognition.
Visiting the Vasarely museum two days later, I was still thinking about this question when I encountered these optical art pieces; harsh abstraction for the sake of pure colour and form, yet in images similar to the one below, I found something of the above which I have yet to reconcile in my thought process.
It certainly seems to me there is something to be found in the space between these two works, or maybe more particularly in other examples. I have always found abstraction a hard conundrum to crack, but also saw these works in Aix as a child, and have always been intrigued by the games therein. Similarly, I like to see Picasso’s application of his own vision a game of sorts. Perspective becomes a word malleable in it’s ambiguity, as one’s perspective need not chime with the purest one identified and sought out by the past master’s. In modernism, perspective becomes a defiantly isolated view down a valley.
One other brief consideration I came upon was to do with why Picasso never seemed to usurp Cezanne in the way he did happily any number of greats in his career, even the Spanish greats. Though he did famously state upon buying Vauvenargues ”j’acheté le mont-Sainte-Victoire de Cézanne” as a result of it’s views over the mountain (not to mention the fact that the surround 10000 hectares included one side of the mountain), he never painted it but, arguably, for in one nude of 1959.
Yet in Braque’s early pilgrimage to l’Estaque where he first painted with the cubist style (if one is to accept THIS starting point), we find the most direct encounter between cubism and modernism at an early point. And in a later portrait of a man with a pipe by Picasso, possibly of Braque, we find a relation to similar such images of Cezanne, and Braque’s mystique appears more closely tied into the fable. Picasso never approached Cezanne so clearly in a career that lasted another seventy years!
Finally, in visiting the Unite d’Habitation a few hours before my flight: just another housing block in south marseille, the message became clear, as the art which emerged from the south of france throughout the modernist period so frequently found its place in the landscape and in it’s contemporaneous origins…
and on also discovering that Blaise Cendrars lived for a short period in Aix, my entire perspective of this town and this countryside had finally been overcome by my education… until the next time those smells and sounds hit me.
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