The Traveling Gallery: Paul Cezanne

A word of caution is due here. Great artists have many sides, and different ages - or even different cultures at the same moment - extract different things from them.

As Lawrence Gowing has remarked, the relation between late Cezanne and Cubism, is quite one-sided: he would not have imagined a Cubist painting, for his work "was reaching out for a kind of modernity that did not exist, and still does not." He would not have liked Cubist abstraction, that much is sure. For Cezanne's whole effort was directed towards the physical world - the shapes of Mont Ste-Victoire, of the tumbled inchoate rocks of the Bibemus quarry, of six dense red apples or his gardener's face. The idea of Cezanne as the father of abstract art is based on his remark that one must detect in Nature the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder. What he meant by that is anyone's guess, since there is not a single sphere, cone, or cylinder to be seen in Cezanne's work. What is there, especially in the work of the last decade and a half of his life - from 1890 onwards, after he finally abandoned Paris and settled in solitude in Aix - is a vast curiosity about the relativeness of seeing, coupled with an equally vast doubt that he or anyone else could approximate it in paint. In 1906, a few weeks before he died, he wrote to his son in Paris:

I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before Nature, but with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates Nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply...

These "motifs" were not merely rocks and grasses; they were the relationships between grass and rock, tree and shadow, leaf and cloud, which blossomed into an infinity of small but equally worthy and interesting truths each time the old man moved his easel or his head. This process of seeing, this adding up and weighing of choices, is what Cezanne's peculiar style makes concrete: the broken outlines, strokes of pencil laid side by side, the emblems of scrupulousness in the midst of a welter of doubt. Each painting or watercolour is about the motif.

But it is also about something else - the process of seeing the motif. No previous painter had taken his viewers through this process so frankly. In Titian or Rubens, it is the final form that matters, the triumphant illusion. But Cezanne takes you backstage; there are the ropes and pulleys, the wooden back of the Magic Mountain, and the theatre - as distinct from the single performance - becomes more comprehensible. The Renaissance admired an artist's certainty. But with Cezanne, as the critic Barbara Rose remarked in another context, the statement: "This is what I see," becomes replaced by a question: "Is this what I see?" You share his hesitations about the position of a tree or a branch; or the final shape of Mont Ste-Victoire, and the trees in front of it. Relativity is all. Doubt becomes part of the painting's subject. Indeed, the idea that doubt can be heroic, if it is locked into a structure as grand as that of the paintings of Cezanne's old age, is one of the keys to our century, a touchstone of modernity itself. Cubism would take it to an extreme.