Michael Peverett: realization

Thursday, August 29, 2019

realization

Le Paysan (Peasant), 1890-92 oil painting by Paul Cézanne

[In the Hahnloser Collection, Winterthur. Oil on canvas, 55 x 46 cm.]

For several centuries Renaissance aesthetics were to impose on French painters a new system of optics based on perspective. This method of pictorial expression gave an illusion of reality rather than an exact transcription of it, and was more of an intellectual than a sensory process. .... Perspective... suggested horizontal depth by means of straight lines converging towards a fixed point, but did not take into account that verticals and curved surfaces are distorted when viewed obliquely. (p. 123)

Space in Cézanne's work excludes the notions of distance, emptiness or fullness, of metric measurement or depth.... ...for Cézanne, light is born of colour, just as form is also. ... No one has been able to rival Cézanne in combining chromatic values to render the quality of light and form. (p. 147)

The word 'realization' was often on his lips. For him, realization was a way of ensuring that objects distorted by his own sensations, and colours modified by their effect on one another, remained interdependent. It meant linking one form to another, one shade to the next, and giving stability to a form of architecture which had been deprived of its traditional means of support. But he required a method which would be at once sufficiently flexible and sufficiently strict to enable him to eliminate the discrepancies, discontinuity and diffractions of visual phenomena. He spared neither time nor effort to master this method and, when it escape him, he rebelled with great violence. 'I cannot tear them [the objects] away,' he cried one day, 'they cling so to the point at which I am looking that it seems to me they are going to bleed!'
His contemporaries saw only rickety tables, distorted bottles, dislocated limbs, squinting countenances and a horrifying lack of proportion. We today can discern the delicate strand of logic whereby he unites the most violent disparities. The illusions created by the juxtaposition or mere proximity of two objects are well known. As any painter will confirm, the curves of a bottle are diminished when the bottle is placed next to a round dish. Conversely, they swell out when the bottle is near a cubic box; and the more oblique the outer edge of the table, the more the bottle will seem to slant. A light surface seems larger than a dark one; consequently, the side of an object that is in the light will seem bigger if the opposite side is in the shade. That is why certain objects of Cézanne's lose their uprightness or their solidity, swell out in one part or shrink in another, and also why an apple is no longer spherical, a house no longer upright, a pine tree no longer vertical.

(pp. 149-150)

Arbres en V (Trees in a V), 1890-98 watercolour by Paul Cézanne. (Reproduced in monochrome.)

[In the collection of Princess Bassiano, Paris.]

I adore books but for that very reason the sight of books I'm not actually reading depresses me, so I'm always trying to reduce the number of books at home. And I've several times eyed this one, Frank Elgar's Cézanne*, picked up casually in the spring for ten minutes of cafe reading, but so far I've been unable to let it go. The book is mainly a biography: I wanted to find out more about Cézanne's friendship with Zola. I ended up reading it all quickly, thoroughly enjoyed it (I know very little about painting), and then meant to shake it off, but I find I've been lured into looking too closely at these paintings, and becoming moved, absorbed, addicted... It seems inevitable that I'll now re-read it much more slowly. This really wasn't on my agenda!

[* Published in French in 1968; English translation 1975 (translator not named). Frank Elgar was the pen-name of Roger Lesbats, 1899 - 1978, journalist and art critic. Paul Cézanne was born in Aix on 19 January 1839 (several years before his parents married), and died of diabetes, also in Aix, on 22 October 1906.]