Original subtitles

In our first lecture about Cézanne, we talked a lot about his personal life, firstly because

it plays a huge role in helping us understand his artwork and post-impressionism in general,

and secondly because he was a late bloomer and a lot of his most notable works didn't

come until the latter half of his life.

He didn't have his first solo show until he was in his 50s.

We left off the last lecture in the mid-1870s, with Cézanne under the influence of his friend

and mentor, Pissarro, leaving his dark phase and embracing light, color, and the plain

air landscape.

But as it turns out, Pissarro had dragged the grumpy and hermit-like Cézanne out of not

just the darkness of his studio, but also the darkness of his mind.

Personally, I think painting from nature took a lot of pressure off Cézanne, because in

his Paris studio, when he was trying to make paintings to get in the salon, he was starting

from scratch.

He had to create the concept, the composition, and the color palette.

That's a demanding creative and technical feat, especially for a young and inexperienced artist.

And in his early works, you see a great deal of earnestness.

You know he's really trying as hard as he can, but he doesn't quite have the training or experience

to pull it off.

But what he does have is discipline.

Say what you will about his hygiene, this guy could focus.

He would spend days, weeks, and months making a painting that, by my estimation, had only

about 90 minutes of actual brush-on-canvas time.

At least when we're talking about some of those smaller ones, which most of them were.

If they were fully conceptualized beforehand, they could be made pretty quickly.

Hopefully, a copy of one of these could be made in about 30 minutes.

But Cézanne had no interest in speed or volume.

He was laser-focused on the same subject for months and years at a time, painting the same

thing over and over from every possible angle.

By painting outside in nature, though, the composition was already there.

It was just a question of where to put the edges and frame the scene.

The color palette, too, is right in front of him.

Now he may choose to exaggerate some colors or mute others, but most of the palette choices

were already made by nature.

So with the composition and the color palette mostly decided, he was now able to more fully

focus on what the painting is about and how he would depict the scenes before him.

And again, we see his intense focus on this task.

Cézanne would look, and think, and look, and think, and then make a few marks.

Sometimes he'd go sit down, or he'd lay on his back.

He was intensely studying the scene before him, studying the elements of the composition

and thinking about the ways he wanted to paint them.

Let's look at how he depicts Mont-Saint-Victoire, one of his most beloved and frequently painted

subjects.

A famous mountain near his hometown of Aix, it stuck out dramatically from the mostly flat

land around it.

In a way, this mountain, this symbol of stability and strength and endurance, was the perfect

armature for Cézanne to hang his ideas on.

Cézanne will paint it many times over his career, so it provides a window into how his

approach evolves.

One of Cézanne's earliest paintings of the mountain includes a nearby viaduct.

Perhaps in a nod to Nicolas Poussin, this painting has more of a traditional, classical feel than

his later works.

This painting stands out to me because of the atmospheric perspective and deep space we see,

especially contrasted with the trees up front and center.

But even in this early painting, we can already see some of his ideas percolating.

He's bringing a lot of attention to the geometric shapes, especially in the valley.

And he's grouping his colors, not quite into abstract shapes yet, but he's moving in that

direction.

We'll see him gradually flatten that space over the years and bring the mountain closer to

the viewer.

About ten years later, when he returns to the subject, we see the layers of depth disappearing,

details starting to merge, and with darker shadows and thicker lines, there's a stronger

sense of the geometry of the scene appearing.

A few of the thoughts that were running through his mind as he was analyzing the landscape was

about those classical paintings in the Louvre, the giant, impressive, and powerful paintings

that had stood the test of time.

He was unimpressed by the speed and casualness of the Impressionists, despite all he had learned

and absorbed from them.

Cézanne was looking for permanence and the strength of geometric shapes, squares, cubes,

and triangles.

The shapes cathedrals and museums were made from.

The shapes of bricks and stones cut for building.

As time goes on, we see that journey continuing.

Cézanne continues to highlight geometry, ignore the details, and simplify the edges of objects,

or blur several together to create larger shapes.

It's almost as if he is looking at the landscape and trying to decipher its blueprint.

If this were to be built, what are the main shapes you would use to construct such a scene?

Even the clouds and the trees are not spared from this treatment.

We get very chunky, blocked clouds and leaves.

One thing I noticed is that the shapes he is painting are often about an inch square in width.

Now the quickest and most efficient way to paint a shape of that size would be to use a one-inch flat brush,

so you could hit that mark with a single gesture and move on.

But if you look closely, these shapes are made up of much smaller brush strokes.

They're a little wavy on the edges and have little striations.

So you can see he's using a smaller brush and on average about 10 strokes to build that one-inch square.

This suggests to me that he was not interested in speed or economy.

He wasn't trying to crank out a dozen new paintings for his next solo show.

While he was gaining admiration from other artists,

very few curators or collectors were interested in his work at this point.

Of course, there wasn't much pressure for him to be commercial in his approach to his work.

He always had his rent or mortgage covered by his father.

There weren't a lot of other pressures on him either, though.

He didn't have many friends, at least not many he saw very often, which was very much intentional.

He wasn't much of a family man as he spent many years apart from his wife and son.

He was a huge introvert and really just wanted to focus on his work.

So what is he doing when he's standing there, staring and thinking for 30 minutes between each brushstroke?

Impossible to know, but I'm guessing a lot of it is looking at an area

and trying to reduce it down to its most basic shape, color, and value.

He's kind of taking an average of all these different features of a particular spot in the scene.

The process of simplifying the world down to capture it is one we all do when trying to paint or draw from life,

because there's simply too much detail in the world to capture it all.

But it was the way that Cézanne was condensing the information is what spoke to so many,

that this underlying structure of forms and shapes feels true to us at some level.

Whether he's capturing something about the way our eyes work, the way our minds work,

or messing with our expectations, it was original and it was new.

Which makes me curious about these two views of Mont Saint-Victoire.

Perhaps I'm just anthropomorphizing, but don't they look oddly fleshy or body-like?

The mountain looks like a belly to me with rolls, and some of these hills in the foreground are looking rather sumptuous.

I like how rounded everything looks, especially when compared to a more classic Cézanne painting,

where he's really making use of the straight edge brush, giving us mostly triangles and rectangles.

Now in this version of the mountain, the foreground, mid-ground, and background are composed with very similar size brush strokes and marks.

Not only is the scene nearly completely flattened, but so is the lighting.

The brightest highlights are pretty muted mid-tones, giving us a much more limited range in value,

making the space more difficult to decipher.

Notice how hard it is to distinguish between the houses, fields, and trees, especially compared to his earlier paintings.

The houses almost become indistinguishable from boulders or fields.

The trees and bushes have also started to take on similar shapes and colors to the clouds and farms.

Which again tells the eye that these things exist on the same plane.

And even the mountain, which towers over the scene in his previous paintings, is almost merging into the sky here.

His abstraction goes even further in some works.

Look at this painting, in which the mountain almost disappears.

Except for the distinctive profile of the mountain, which we've seen in all his paintings,

you'd be hard-pressed to tell that this was the same familiar subject.

In this painting, it's almost like looking through a blurry kaleidoscope or a fractured looking glass.

When seen in context with all of Cézanne's other work, the subject becomes clear, and our brain fills in the details.

But there are no details to be found in this painting.

It's a complete dissolution of the landscape, with only fragments of color and value loosely jumbled together remain.

Let's leave Mont Saint-Victoire and look at another favorite motif of Cézanne's,

and one he could do from the comforts of his own studio, where he had heat, he could control the light,

and he didn't have to take down his easel and palette at the end of each day.

Apples are a subject Cézanne would paint again and again and again for decades.

He was kind of obsessed with them.

Cézanne had long been inspired by his contemporary, Gustave Courbet's realism,

and Courbet had painted a still life of apples a couple of years before Cézanne's first,

so perhaps that is where his infatuation started.

But Cézanne was completely invested.

He saw more than most of us when we look at an apple.

Once he said that he would astonish Paris with an apple.

And the crazy thing is, he did.

Let's talk about the science behind Cézanne's apples for a moment.

Binocular or stereoscopic vision was another preoccupation of Cézanne's.

Remember, he was inspired by the work in this area of his friend Baptiste Bale,

who was a professor of optics in Paris.

Today, most people are aware that we see the world in stereo,

where the left eye sees a slightly different angle than the right eye.

And the two images are fused together in our brain

to give us a sense of depth and dimensionality.

But in the 19th century, this is fairly new information,

and Cézanne was fascinated with its implications for art.

When you're looking at something far off in the distance,

like Mont Saint-Victoire, for example,

the stereoscopic effect is greatly reduced

as your eyes are basically getting the same view.

You'd have to travel quite a ways to the left or right

to see more of the side of the mountain.

But with a still life just a few feet away,

you can lean two feet over and see the exaggerated effect of one eye.

You could then lean over to the right and see the opposite angle,

where you see a bit of the other side of the object.

And when an object is just inches away from your face,

even switching the eye you use to look at can give you a very different view.

Lift your hand to your face like this.

Cézanne wrote to his son,

the same subject seen from a different angle offers subject for study

of the most powerful interest and so varied,

I could occupy myself for months without changing place

by turning now more to the right, now more to the left.

There's something odd about the space in these still lives,

which served as explorations of his fascination with optics and perspective.

In this early still life from 1877,

the background appears right up close behind the table,

almost as if it's wrapped or bent around the table corner,

but remains flat, creating a liminal space for the table to exist.

But he's not only leaning over and looking at the left and right side of the still life,

but he's changing the perspective vertically as well, looking up and down.

Imagine you walk up to a table.

Until you are standing over it, looking down at the plate,

you'd be seeing the whole top of the plate as a circle on the tabletop.

Now imagine as you begin to sit down, you keep your eyes on the plate.

As your eye level moves downward,

the shape of the plate is going to begin to flatten from a circle into an oval or an ellipse.

And you can see Cezanne playing around with this concept in his still lives.

Now have a look at this one and focus on the glass there.

Does something feel off or intuitively strange about it, but you can't put your finger on why?

Well, look carefully and you'll see that the base is much flatter than the opening.

He's painted the glass simultaneously from two angles,

one from down low, closer to the table, and one from up higher, standing up.

We don't really think about this in our daily lives,

but what he's painting with the glass is happening constantly to our perception.

Every time we approach a table with some objects on it and we sit down,

we are seeing all those objects from multiple perspectives within less than a second.

If we were lying on our side looking at that table from this point of view,

then our eyes would actually be seeing both of those angles of the glass simultaneously.

Only our brain merges those perspectives together to give us a consistent view of the object.

And our brain reinforces that with object permanence so that a basic shape, like a glass,

we can hold in our minds regardless of perspective.

Cezanne hasn't really told a lie with his glass here,

he's just painted a version of it that our brains would never allow us to see.

Cezanne liked to use coins or blocks to prop up certain objects like plates and jars,

or he might make things lean over to the left or to the right.

And again, this is all about showing different angles of the same reality.

In this way, Cezanne's paintings don't capture a snapshot, but a longer moment.

A lot of these gestures are subtle in Cezanne's work and not super obvious.

He didn't paint everything from different angles all the time.

But even in a simple still life like this one,

there is something curious about these apples that differ from more traditionally painted apples.

For one, the outlines which make them flatter than they would otherwise appear.

And they almost appear pixelated in some areas with some flat shapes on the round surfaces,

almost like a digital glitch.

As Cezanne later gained popularity and his paintings began to sell,

his dealer Ambrose-Voliard figured he could make more money if he had more paintings.

Since Cezanne wasn't a fast painter, he decided to start cutting up his apple paintings

and selling a few apples on a few inches of canvas at a time.

Which is why there are some oddly cropped small apple paintings of Cezanne's floating around.

These were originally part of larger compositions

and don't reflect the way Cezanne would have composed an image.

Sometimes we are privy to a more meta composition,

and we can see the room and the furniture around the still life.

As calm and lovely as this painting is, it's still a bit off-kilter.

The bowl of apples is leaning to the left.

The linen is oddly stiff and looks like it's trying to dump the bowl off the table.

Another interesting detail, the front of the table doesn't line up behind the cloth.

We are getting a few different perspectives, albeit subtly, happening simultaneously.

But it also seems like he has deliberately oversized the linen

and distorted the furniture to even out his composition.

There's a pleasing sense of balance between all the elements, even if it's all a bit impossible.

Playing around with perspective, as Cezanne does, was totally against the classical rules he would have learned

had he attended one of the major French art schools.

Even though it doesn't seem all that radical to us, this was exactly the kind of rebelliousness

that the academic critics of the salon in Paris would have found fault with.

To them, it's poor technique.

He's not painting in the right way.

But to his supporters, it's revolutionary.

And this is partly why art historians see Cezanne in the vanguard of post-impressionism.

Cezanne is engaging with a different kind of project to the impressionists.

This isn't a spontaneous impression of light he's making.

It's a very carefully and meticulous deconstruction and reassembling of reality.

This still life from the 1890s is unusual of Cezanne.

It's one of the few examples where he uses a live plant in the composition.

The problem is, Cezanne likes to paint slow, like really slow.

Plants are going to change and wilt or grow, and if you think about how Cezanne anguishes

over capturing the many angles and facets of a simple static shape like an apple,

you can imagine how much more impossible his task would have been for a plant,

which is constantly changing and has so much more complexity to it.

However, given the detail and focus and ambition of this painting, it seems he may have been saving

this plant for the right moment in this important work.

This is a nicely rendered piece, smoothed out and blended with a nice variety of light and shadow.

You can tell he spent a long time on this one, and it's still combining views.

The gray vase in the middle sits on the table, but the plate of apples is lifted up, as if it were sitting on a display stand.

We also see different perspectives on the opening of the green jug.

There's even a sense of movement or anticipation in this painting.

Look at the little pot in the middle.

It feels like it's about to topple over from the apple hitting it, or slide down the fabric.

Are you getting that same feeling of anxiety you get when you see a glass about to tip over?

It's maybe another little way Cezanne is pranking our senses.

Cezanne continued painting apples to the very end.

This elegant and ambitious still life he made the year before he died.

Looking a bit more traditional than some earlier paintings,

he's still skewing perspectives with the side of the table and the container above the fruit.

I'm going to spare you from a how-do-you-like-them apples joke,

but what makes Cezanne so unique here is that he's thinking like a scientist.

He spent decades painting apples over and over, repeating the experiment,

testing new angles and perspectives he could find to paint.

Probably many of his patrons thought of these as just quirky and charming,

but when you see them together, his true goal emerges.

He's showing us that even a simple object, like an apple,

has almost infinite realities you can capture.

Another of Cezanne's projects was bathers.

He made many paintings of this subject over his career,

but was especially focused on them in his final years.

This is a somewhat odd choice when you consider his passion for inanimate objects and landscapes,

and the fact that he was often uncomfortable working with models, especially female models.

Some have speculated for these reasons he was secretly gay,

which they will also attribute to his dark moods in isolation.

I don't know if there's any evidence for this beyond speculation,

but it wouldn't be surprising to me if it was true.

Some things start to make a little more sense when you see how these women were painted.

These are not the sensual, soft, and curvy women like one might see in a Rubens painting.

These women were not meant to be sexy or to satisfy the straight male gaze.

The most frequent female model for these pictures was his wife Marie Hortense Fiquet.

They had met in 1869 and had their son Paul in 1872 before getting married,

which was kept a secret for some years for Cezanne's fear of invoking his father's wrath.

Eventually their relationship became public and they married in 1886,

but by this point their relationship was very poor,

and the marriage was largely to secure legal rights for their son.

For the rest of his life, Cezanne would have a pretty distant relationship with his family,

and yet he would continue to produce portraits of Hortense,

their 29 in all, most of which maintain his boxy and flat style.

Yet in his late works on bathers, we do see some life and sensuality in his depictions,

and his models at least seem to have some curves.

These women were anonymous, box-like, often faceless props.

They conveyed a human shape but did not resemble people we know on this planet.

He still constructs these soft, delicate subjects with his trademark style of heavy lines and solid blocks of color.

Some art historians conjecture this could be a throwback to the only happy time in his life

when he and Emile Zola and Baptiste and Bale would spend hours together telling stories, exploring, swimming, and relaxing.

Some have attempted to find depictions of a young Cezanne and Zola in some of the pairs of bathers.

Myself, I can't help but wonder if he felt obligated to tackle such a traditional subject on large canvases

to secure his place in the museums alongside the classics.

At this point, he was getting some recognition and making a name for himself in Paris,

but mostly with other artists.

He made a decent income selling his work to patrons who enjoyed his style,

but the Louvre wasn't beating down his door to acquire them.

In 1886, Cezanne's old friend Emile Zola published El Louvre,

a tragic story of a groundbreaking artist who struggles to live up to his potential and create a true masterpiece.

Clearly inspired at least in part by Cezanne's career as a misunderstood artist,

the book led to the two falling out and their friendship sadly never recovered.

For the reclusive and insecure Cezanne to have one of his only true friends expose his life with such rawness

clearly cut very close.

Cezanne's latent switch to bathers on a huge canvas might have been motivated by wanting to prevent his life

from turning out like the book, his last shot at gaining the recognition in Paris he craved.

Let's look at one of his last works, and also one of his most ambitious, The Large Bathers.

Normally he painted easel-sized, but this last painting was around 7 by 8 feet.

The women are unnaturally posed in a large triangle formed by the trees,

with the women at the base. These are oddly shaped people with very long torsos, pinched necks, and small heads.

Faces, if they have them, are a mere shadow of a brow or a nose.

These bathers were more like architecture than flesh and bone, more like shapes that Cezanne was assembling in the landscape.

Yet, even in its partially unfinished state, there is a grandness and pretense to this work that we just don't see in his apples and mountains.

Personally, I feel like this last-minute pivot, though, isn't the right place to end our exploration of Cezanne.

To me, it's actually his lesser-known watercolors, which reveal the underlying direction he seemed to be going in the latter years of his life.

Because, ironically, Cezanne, the man who rejected Impressionism's fleeting light and instability in favor of strong shapes, power, and structure,

ended his career by making some of the most delicate, ephemeral watercolors, which were beautiful impressions of light and shadow.

His eyesight began to get worse after he was diagnosed with diabetes in 1890, and it rapidly deteriorated the last few years of his career, which his late watercolors reveal.

His interest in stereoscopic vision must have given him a lot of insight as his eyesight faded.

See, when the left and right eye are synced up properly, things appear sharp and in focus.

But if your eyes move out of alignment or cannot adjust to focus, as they do as our eyes age, the edges of objects start overlapping.

When things are out of focus, the edges are the first to disappear.

Contrast is muted as the edge of one thing bleeds into the edge of the other thing.

And when we look at some of his late watercolors, this is exactly what he is doing.

When I look at them, I feel like I'm losing my vision. Things look blurry. It's a very strange sensation.

And the switch from oil, the medium he had painted in his whole life, to watercolor, seems very deliberate here.

The watercolor strokes are much more naturally transparent, and in this way he can mimic the semi-transparent layers of our vision overlapping each other.

It's quite ingenious, actually.

The same old Cezanne, he refused to follow the traditional rules of watercolor, where an artist would make a graphite drawing first and then fill it with transparent watercolor.

He was interested instead in his own visual experience.

He left his surface white. This made it much easier to see the transparency of the color and to make the color more vibrant as well.

Thus, while still very much based on geometric shapes, squares, rectangles, triangles, Cezanne finished his career surprisingly close to the Impressionists, a movement he stubbornly rejected.

Yet Cezanne never did what was expected. He was the consummate rule-breaker, even, it seems, of his own rules.

It can make Cezanne challenging to understand or clearly classify. Art historians have long debated how to summarize his work, in part because he's a transitionary artist, echoing Impressionism in part, and yet engaging in an entirely different artistic project, using techniques and constructions that would eventually find full form in Cubism and early modern art.

An artistic loner who doggedly pursued his own vision and experiments in painting, regardless of convention, Cezanne started this whole new movement called Post-Impressionism that changed the course of art history forever.

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Thank you.