Cézanne in Philadelphia and Everywhere Else

By Greg Gerke

Within a half a mile in Philadelphia there are nearly ninety paintings of Cézanne, a tenth of his total output—the greatest concentration of his work in the world, with the Barnes Collection having 69 works. All one has to do is find the Schuylkill River—near the Belmont plateau in Fairmount Park… there, in the buildings, is Cézanne. We went to the Philadelphia Art Museum first to see the large Bathers painting, Cézanne’s last and biggest and reportedly “unfinished” canvas greets one from a distance, like Mont Sainte-Victoire, his noted mountain. The design of the museum highlights how central it is to the collection, as Rogier Van Der Weyden’s Crucifixion does on the other side of the museum—with one viewable from the far end of a corridor that goes through many rooms.

The Bathers stands out for being the final and possibly unfinished work of a master, a bit like Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut. We don’t know what Kubrick would have taken away and we don’t know what Cézanne would have added. The Bathers (and the two other “large” ones in The Barnes and London) were, of course, born of other Bathers canvases, some quite small—and those by others throughout history, consuming Cézanne’s last years, his 66th, 67th, and 68th on the planet. Perhaps the simplest (and most naive) comment about Cézanne is that his brand of impressionism, like Monet’s, leaves much to be completed by the viewer—though Merleau-Ponty’s essay “Cézanne’s Doubt” (which anchored me) colors the way we see the artist with his own toolkit of paints and tints—it’s a biography of his own seeing. What did I see in this overwhelming canvas—possibly one of the most overwhelming in history since the Bathers goes right into Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Matisse’s The Joy of Life? The triangular Renaissance composition leaves us with a work of such startling features, where can our modern mind go but to other works? The “people” in the Bathers (were they people?) were moving endlessly—it was of another time—eternal time as in the ending of Tree of Life on the beach with all the characters living and dead gathered, or that of the finish of Twin Peaks: The Return: “What year is it?”

Even if I had seen the Bathers maybe ten years ago, where I saw it more was in a PBS documentary on Cézanne that I’d watched a few times in the late 90s—the talking heads standing in front of the Bathers for the large show in Philadelphia in 1996. It was this “show” that I keyed back into as I became a half-pompous, half-sincere man who stands in front of a painting while gesticulating and making grandiose statements about it in front of his family, but when I did so I surprised myself with some very heartfelt feelings that I couldn’t contain. “And look at these two distant figures in the middle of the painting… they are walking away from us… and where are they going…?” Perhaps I now understood that someone’s passion about their subject is often greater for observers than the subject itself.

The experience of the Barnes Foundation was quite different from that of the Philadelphia Museum. It is a more intimate space, holding probably the greatest concentration of Impressionism in such a small area. Cézanne, Renoir (181 works), and Matisse, along with Seurat, and Modigliani—it is a wonderment, all according to Barnes’s plan at his death for the paintings to continue to be hung in a certain order without identification and with irons and other accoutrements alongside them. The main high-ceilinged room that one first enters is the prime example of these tastes, with nearly wall to wall Cézanne and Renoir, accompanied by two towering canvases by Picasso and Matisse that are alone on the the windowed south wall, as the latter artist’s Study for the Dance Mural decorates the top of the room (so the space is anchored). All the side rooms of the first floor (and second) issue out of this nexus, overseen and highlighted by those semicircles of blue, white, and black in the Matisse. It is in this main room that Cézanne’s 1903 Bathers reposes (there has been a competition with the Philadelphia Museum’s larger Bathers when they bought it in 1937), but, like the Seurat at the other end, it is placed high up (not a natural viewing point, our gaze being on the incline), above Renoir’s The Artist’s Family, a lesser painting. Underneath the Seurat (it is hard to see his pointillism) is the magisterial The Card Players, 1892–4, one of the largest canvases Cézanne ever painted.

This is the painting I beelined to, given that I had just read T.J. Clark’s chapter on the piece and its previous incarnations in his masterly book, If These Apples Should Fall. Reading about something beforehand gives a different weight to an aesthetic experience, but seeing a painting or sculpture is quite unique in that there is only one and we must travel in most cases—to see it, to experience it—and unlike cinema, we have control over the duration of the experience.

The Card Players produced an off-shoot of the feeling I had in front of the large Bathers the day before—more grounded, more solid, not as ethereal as that unfinishedness, which Da Vinci also plays with. It felt like the people playing and watching had been in the same position for a while, maybe an eternity. They weren’t moving, unlike the “people” in the Bathers. What does it suggest that the series meant so much to Cézanne that he painted five versions of the players? I think Clark sums it up solidly, quoting Cézanne: “I love above everything else the aspect of people who have grown old without doing violence to old habits” and “These days in reality everything is changing, but not for me, I live in the town of my childhood, and it’s in the look of people of my own age that I see the past again.” What do these quotes of Cézanne mean, truly? “The aspect of people who have grown old without doing violence to old habits”—it’s certain that Cézanne, the man who painted hundreds of complex canvases produced such a sentence and not someone else. The people he speaks of are those three older card players in the Barnes painting and those other elders in the four other Card Player paintings. They are mensches—the thing in itself. They aren’t moving and for that fact they aren’t going anywhere. Beckett: “We lay there without moving. But under us all moved, and moved us, gently, up and down, and from side to side”—this was my experience in front of The Card Players, though Seurat’s quite provocative Models seemed implanted over it like a bad joke. (Why not put it with the large Bathers and maybe have another portrait painting near The Card Players? Barnes liked how one “bled” into the other.) And why this paean to old habits? Cézanne would answer me grandly, adding to the above quote that those “people” are “letting themselves follow time’s laws” and “I hate people’s efforts to escape these laws.” This is how we make it through life. Our habits sustain us and as long as we can manage them, we come through fine.

Why did and does this painting mean so much to me? The blues, the folds of that startling curtain, as heavy as those in David Lynch’s Black/White Lodge. A quote from Dante describing the lights in heaven that Clark points out earlier in the book glitters: “Because our speed, not say our imagination, has no colours/To match folds like these.” Again, it is all about composition, there is a triangular one, seemingly minimal, but not truly—the painting in the painting is at the apex with the man and the pipes in the second cut, though the corners are anchored by the monumental curtain and the green and white jar. Everything in its place. But this Beckettian scene—almost an Endgame—does have an inevitability about it that in the Bathers series is obliterated. Meyer Schapiro writes about the card players’ “life of their separateness,” whereas the bathers are part and parcel, creatures that grow out of each other.

Another reason this painting held high for me is that I had a copy of Joyce’s A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man growing up that had the D’Orsay painting on the cover—so I often associated Ireland with a scene out of Aix-en-Provence (did they look Irish?), further pasting that prose of Joyce’s with a very different breed in a customary Cezanne. I’ve been holding these crossed-up conjugations inside, only to try and finally let them out, almost exorcise them because they had been breathing too long via the wrong angle, the wrong country. But I’m only just starting to reckon with the two “Cézannes”—the portrait painter (and one could include the Bathers series in that) and the landscape and still-life painter. I think people are more familiar with these two latter categories because when it comes to people, the quote of his great grandson in that PBS documentary continuously echoes: “He did not want people to touch him.” Where are the eyes of Madame Cézanne in her portraits, where are they in The Card Players and in the Bathers where are the faces? But T.J. Clark zooms into the ”scene’s distinctive space”: the way a set of class actors “make that space by occupying it and playing the old game within it. So Cezanne’s subject, or so it follows, is the space of a room as it comes into being in the game, in the moment of waiting and concentrating…” The truth of this was much more sparkling than not. As soon as I started reckoning with two Cézanness, the whiplash made me conscious that there is only one. Aren’t the mountain and the apples and pears doing the exact same thing as those card players? “Beneath us all moved…”

In the Barnes, as we went to rooms we hadn’t seen after lunch, I saw my wife take a picture of a Cézanne I’d barely given time to, a landscape called Rocks and Trees from 1904. It reminded me of Pines and Rocks (1897) that I’d seen in the MOMA a few months prior. I asked her why she photographed it (she was actually using the Barnes’s identifying app) and she said, It was very unlike his other paintings, more cubistic—and I wanted to know about it. The Cézanne rock and quarry paintings have enough renown that there is an entire book devoted to them. Clark also highlights the rock and quarry paintings, as well as those showing isolated houses in landscape, such as in House Near Gardenne—these are strange deserted brocades of a sort, since the people are gone, the landscape is there, but it is not the end of the world. I pondered why Rocks and Trees, dimmed in my memory for days after until I finally called it up on the computer, re-glowed so. Why do these rock paintings, including the quarry and milestone ones, transfix? They are tied to my twenties and a time in Oregon, which does not share much geographical overlay with Aix though there are mountain ranges and some dense forests—whereas Aix is dry and lavender-scented, Oregon (the West half) is more lush, damp, and moldy, with rain often making appearances for ten months out of the year. Yet the painting highlighted several years of my life that I rarely look back on, even if there is photographic evidence—not of the events, but the mood. The experience is related to Bachelard’s wonderful “the poetic image expresses us by making us what it expresses.” In looking at Cézanne over the years, my life has come to be expressed—in its haecceity; it sounds wrong but it’s right. For Merleau-Ponty, the imagination is weak and perception is thick. The encounter with the complexities of Cezanne’s paintings starts early and in the lifetime of seeing them, we fill in the lines and colors for ourselves. Merleau-Ponty:

It is not enough for a painter like Cézanne, an artist, or a philosopher, to create and express an idea; they must also awaken the experiences which will make their idea take root in the consciousness of others. If a work is successful, it has the strange power of being self-teaching. The reader or spectator, by following the clues of the book or painting, by establishing the concurring points of internal evidence and being brought up short when straying too far to the left or right, guided by the con-fused clarity of style, will in the end find what was intended to be communicated. The painter can do no more than construct an image; he must wait for this image to come to life for other people. When it does, the work of art will have united these separate lives; it will no longer exist in only one of them like a stubborn dream or a persistent delirium, nor will it exist only in space as a colored piece of canvas. It will dwell undivided in several minds, with a claim on every possible mind like a perennial acquisition.

Regarding Rocks and Trees, I see a wild scene, though it’s just rocks and trees. The colors blur—this is a painting created a few years before his end. It’s a very vertical piece and what calls out are not just the color of the rocks or the trees, but the more umber- and ocher-hued parts of the hill they are assembled on. I vaguely wished I had taken a picture of it, as I did The Card Players, the Bathers, and other paintings, even Van Gogh’s Postman as a nod to my past—but what would that have proven? I might see it better, instead of reminding me of the memory of turning the corner out of that small room in the Barnes, hurrying because our daughter was alone outside in the courtyard—completely by herself for the first time (she didn’t want to see any more art). Perhaps that sequence brought me closer to the art in a subtle way, reminding me of Thoreau’s wonderful sentences in Walden (via Guy Davenport in his “The Concord Sonata”):

At his small sanded white pine table in his cabin at Walden Pond on which he kept an arrowhead, an oak leaf, and an Iliad in Greek, Henry David Thoreau worked on two books at once. In one, A Week on the Concord and Merrimac Rivers, he wrote: Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand. In the other, Walden, or Life in the Woods, he wrote three such sentences: “I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtledove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travelers whom I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves.

Perhaps I’ve been in search of this painting and when I finally found it, nothing became settled but I did start going my own way in the world—a Catch-22 of sorts. I’ve been searching for the right Cézanne that I could maybe never find and when my wife happened upon it I was not ready to take it in, and when I turned that corner in the Barnes, lightly fondling the Modigliani in the next room while continuing to rush upstairs to Matisse, I had a feeling that the Rocks and Trees had been ignited and this was the painting that might change my life… maybe the unknown masterpiece of Balzac’s short story (Cézanne alludes to Frenhofer, the painter, as his favorite character in literature)—in a similar fashion (as in Jacques Rivette’s film of the book) it has been hidden from me (Edgar Allan-Poe-like) behind a brick wall, not only of imagination. As Merleau-Ponty would say, these are more perceptions than my imagination running, since my imagination can’t conjure a satisfying resolution of the narrative. There is a “thickness” to the experience of Rocks and Trees, even if it had been subsumed without a true view—maybe twenty-five seconds in reality. In the Phenomenology of Perception, Merleau-Ponty offers an interesting personal aside:

I might hesitate over the date of a memory, having before myself a certain scene, but without knowing to which point in time it belongs; the memory has lost its anchorage. Then I might reach an intellectual identification established upon, for instance, the causal order of events: I must have had this suit made before the armistice, given that English fabric has been impossible to find ever since. In this case, however, I do not reach the past itself. On the contrary, when I uncover the concrete origin of the memory, this is because it again takes its place in a certain current of worry and hope that runs from Munich to the war, because I rejoin lost time, because, from the moment at issue right up until my present, the chain of retentions and the interlinking of successive horizons assures a continuous passage.

When I read this quote, I assume a certain expression from his vague methodology to apply to Rocks and Trees: I do not reach the past itself because Rocks and Trees is only taking place in my present and it wasn’t until I knew that I was searching for something that the past was skipped over and became the present. I may or may not want to uncover the concrete origin because if I rejoin lost time what will happen to my present? So I try to get in the way of continuous passages but Merleau-Ponty will end up stating that his “past cannot be reduced to this synthesis,” which in some manner I’m striving to achieve. There was a painting in me all the time and maybe it started to get designed in my twenties (while on my own for the first time in that clunky-sounding state, Oregon), and when I turned fifty I finished some version of it (hence, unknown, but a masterpiece) and it was Rocks and Trees, it wasn’t The Card Players or the Bathers—it’s often not the big works that disarm, not Moby-Dick but Paula Fox’s The Widow’s Children, not 2001 but John Casavettes’ Love Streams.

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Other artists have stated: “I’ve been getting closer to my parents my whole life—even if we aren’t that close.” I feel that I am getting closer to Cézanne, which is surely getting close to the “source,” maybe the source of all art—one can latch onto any of Cézanne’s pronouncements as a twenty or thirty-year-old (“the totally blue odor of the pines which is harsh in the sun, must marry the green odor of the fields which freshen there each morning…”), or as a gruff fifty-year-old, but the paintings are another matter. At first we like Cézanne because everyone else admires him, and someone reverently mutters “Cézanne” when they see one of his canvases, whether in life or likeness. Maybe these rock and trees paintings (most of them pine) remind us of how we saw as a toddler—a mass of different colors. All along there had been an infant’s view of the world and we hardly knew it—but I pointed to my twenties, the time of my first true awakening to life. I was walking alone in nature, often alone—seeing blurs of rock and trees that sustained me, though I did not know that then. In 1999 (in the midst of living in Oregon) I tried to find Cézanne in Aix, just as I tried to find Van Gogh in Arles. The youth hostel in Aix had a view of Mont Sainte-Victoire, but I don’t think it was from the flank Cézanne often painted it. In person, I couldn’t find him in me—it just doesn’t work that way.

Only at fifty could I finally see that Cézanne’s images had come to life for the years that I had put myself through—not in the “putting oneself through college” way but putting myself out into the world so the sun could warm me up just as I had “a mind of winter.” The canvases—the numerous Mont Sainte-Victoire’s, the apples and pears, and the Bathers series had recorded my time on earth as mine own eyes had, though for a not so safe keeping. This is why we often in the end grasp for works or people that we initially thrust a hand toward. They are weird, they disturb, but eventually we come to be in pursuit, finding value in retrospect. I can pretend to know what the artist wanted to communicate, but I can believe that what has been communicated—the poetic image of the rocks and trees (each brushstroke)—now expresses me, my life. And it expresses something else for T.J. Clark, which he might not readily communicate in his book. Peter Handke, in his novella “The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire” has a wondrous three-page section on that “Lesson” and what it meant for the narrator. It had to do with the painting Rocks Near the Grottos Above The Chateau Noir—the dominant feeling being “nearness,” a word he enwrapped in a film image that is near in the way of family, yet not so compatible with Cézanne—a scene of a mother and son dancing in John Ford’s warm-hearted The Grapes of Wrath. He adds: “The pines and rocks were deep within me—just as a flushing bird momentarily flies through one’s body with giant wings; but instead of passing as such phantasms of horror do, they remained. Yes, my feeling of nearness was an insight. In the year 1904, when this picture was painted, something irrevocable happened, a cosmic event; and the cosmic event was this picture.” This goes further than The Grapes reference, though I believe I know exactly what he means. The cosmic event was this picture, just as Rocks and Trees is a cosmic event for me, though I only had twenty seconds of eye-time—it became a way marker. The years in Oregon consisted of going into myself in a way I thought not possible, but it was something that had to be done to allow me to write. Merleau-Ponty:

The truth is that that work to be done called for that life. From the very start, Cezanne’s life found its only equilibrium by leaning on the work that was still in the future. His life was the preliminary project of his future work. The work to come is hinted at, but it would be wrong to take these hints for causes, although they do make a single adventure of his life and work. Here we are beyond causes and effects; both come together in the simultaneity of an eternal Cézanne who is at the same time the formula of what he wanted to be and what he wanted to do.

Here was another “lesson.” The “eternal Cézanne” comes out in what we all strain for. What I wanted to do—to write—called for a life of making false starts, watching other people rather than participating until I was ready. The picture in Rocks and Trees, that blur—that was me, inchoate viewing, not so accessible, people called me “oblique,” “opaque,” and many obfuscating words. I wasn’t ready to see the world until the work was done or partially made.

We are wont to seek content over form with the old masters, even with the old masters of writing: Flaubert, Ruskin, James, which paved the way for Proust and Joyce, but when we get to the Rocks and Trees maybe I’m starting to appreciate memory itself? The pictures and the mind’s eye are in those brushstrokes. Cezanne might make a model wait for an hour when deciding on one.

When I continue to view Cézanne in my mind’s eye I begin to see and hear, but mostly see, the verses of the poet Wallace Stevens… and inexplicably, the late poem The Hermitage at the Center:

The leaves on the macadam make a noise --
     How soft the grass on which the desired
     Reclines in the temperature of heaven --

Like tales that were told the day before yesterday --
     Sleek in a natural nakedness,
     She attends the tintinnabula --

And the wind sways like a great thing tottering --
     Of birds called up by more than the sun,
     Birds of more wit, that substitute --

Which suddenly is all dissolved and gone --
     Their intelligible twittering
     For unintelligible thought.

And yet this end and this beginning are one,
     And one last look at the ducks is a look
     At lucent children round her in a ring.

This might be a gimmicky choice, because the first lines of each stanza can make a separate poem by themselves, as Helen Vendler and others have pointed out, but the mood, diction, and the rhythms are Cézannian, starting with the indelible first line: “The leaves on the macadam make a noise.” Vendler adds: “What Stevens liked in Cézanne was the reduction, you might say, of the world to a few monumental objects.” “Sleek in natural nakedness” and “Their intelligible twittering/For unintelligible thought”—these lines summon the palette of Cézanne—his shadings of blue, green, purple, brown: the landscapes.

I recall or at least imagine Wallace Stevens’s trips to Philadelphia (there were few), but am I imagining correctly? The later Cézanne is not to be soldered to the early Stevens, but the late Stevens. But all of Stevens, especially his essays, puts one in the mind of the Barnes Foundation and the Northeast museums in general and how people used to look at paintings and art—an experience much removed from our digital era. Stevens owned works by Paul Klee and others. He named one of his books Parts of the World, and one of his poems “The Poem that Took the Place of the Mountain”:

There it was, word for word,
The poem that took the place of a mountain.

He breathed its oxygen,
Even when the book lay turned in the dust of his table.

It reminded him how he had needed
A place to go to in his own direction,

How he had recomposed the pines,
Shifted the rocks and picked his way among clouds…

Stevens believed that poetry and painting were intimately connected, working at the juncture between imagination and reality and that they become a “vital assertion of self in a world where nothing but the self remains, if that remains.”

In Stevens’s essay “Figure of the Youth as a Virile Poet,” he writes: “It was of the temperament of the artist that Cézanne spoke so frequently in his letters, and while we mean something more, so, it seems, did Cézanne. He said: “Primary force alone, id est temperament, can bring a person to the end he must attain.” These nuggets are similar to Stevens own Adagia, brief aperçus on poetry and art like “Reality is a motif” and “The poet comes to words as nature comes to dry sticks.”

That Stevens should pop up is not surprising—in an essay Clark didn’t collect for the Cézanne book (on his portraits, though he probably raided it for lines), he writes:

There is a cluster of poems by Wallace Stevens, mostly from the 1940s, that seems to me helpful. I think they were written with Cézanne in mind. ‘Less and Less Human, O Savage Spirit’ is central, and especially the poem’s conviction that ‘It is the human that is the alien,/The human that has no cousin in the moon.//It is the human that demands his speech/From beasts or from the incommunicable mass.’ Compare the instructions in ‘Credences of Summer’: ‘Let’s see the very thing and nothing else’; ‘Look at it in its essential barrenness’; ‘Without evasion by a single metaphor.’ (A flower in Cézanne is never a metaphor for the person holding it.) ‘Words, lines, not meanings, not communications,/Dark things without a double.’ (Dark as the seam in the Woman with a Cafetière’s dress.) ‘Any stick of the mass/Of which we are too distantly a part.’

When one reads about Cézanne from many different sources, one could say that one takes the information and all the criticism and they come out as a kind of mist or watering from the source—the paintings themselves. All of Clark’s words make us see them better, but we don’t necessarily hold on those words. But then one has Cézanne’s own words (or something close to them). In Conversations with Cézanne there is a curious passage at the beginning of Joachim Gasquet’s long “dialogue” (fifty pages) with Cézanne that is the inverse of my feeling of Stevens through Cézanne, as Cézanne describes writers and painters, sentences and colors, even scents:

The world spinning in the back of the brain causes the same movement that is perceived by the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, each with its own poetry…art puts us in that state of grace where universal emotion is somehow expressed to us precisely, but very naturally…if I close my eyes and think of the hills of Saint-Marc…they bring me the aroma of scabies, my favorite perfume. I hear all the green woodsy odors of the fields in Weber. In Racine’s verses I feel a local color as in Poussin…while Flaubert was writing Salammbo he said that he was seeing purple…when I was painting [Old Woman with a Rosary], I saw a tone of Flaubert…a bluish and russet color which emanated, it seemed to me, from Madame Bovary.

Even if Gasquet embellished, there is enough kernel in these words to draw inferences, to draw water from that ungodly stone himself, Cézanne.