(piano music)
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] Paul Cezanne
is probably best known for two things,
his still-lifes with apples,
and his landscapes of a mountain
in the south of France, in Provence,
known as Mount Saint-Victoire.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And we're looking
at a painting of Mount Saint-Victoire
here in the Philadelphia Museum of Art
that dates to 1902-04.
It's interesting to think about Cezanne
painting this mountain over and over again,
but also painting each painting
of the mountain over an extended period of time.
Normally we think about impressionism
as paintings that are done onsite,
rather rapidly.
But this is decidedly different.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] Paul Cezanne
is often grouped with Gauguin and Van Gogh
and Searat, and called a Post-Impressionist,
but he began his career exhibiting
with the impressionists in Paris.
He moved back to the area that he grew up in,
in the South of France later in his life.
And this painting was made
in the last few years of his life.
He would die just two years after it was completed.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] And it's funny
to talk about this painting being completed,
because it feels unfinished.
There are places where we see the canvass underneath
or buildings that seem to be taking shape.
There are trees that seem to be half formed.
Even the mountain itself seems to be,
almost in the process of forming.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] We can clearly
read a mountain, a sky,
clouds, trees, farmland, and buildings,
but at the same time,
if we look too closely,
they all fall apart
and they are all formed of a series of hash marks
that create a sense of optical movement and change.
To think about historically,
what it means for an artist to do this with landscape.
From the 17th Century forward,
painters like Poussin or Claude,
had been deeply concerned
with creating space that was believable
and Cezanne seems to be here
directly attacking that tradition.
He's creating wipe has been referred to
as a curtain of paint.
The paint is so present
throughout the surface of the canvass.
In the sky, in the foreground,
that all of it rises up to the surface.
All of it announces its two dimensionality
that it is on a vertical plain.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] The whole tradition
of landscape painting,
and even the academic tradition in France
of painting generally,
is about high finish.
Not seeing the brush strokes
which are so emphatically present here.
But, to me, I'm not sure that he is attacking
that tradition so much as being true
to his own personal vision
as he stood in front of this landscape.
Here is is, the end of the 19th Century,
the early years of the 20th Century,
Impressionism has happened,
this idea of depicting your own sensations
or subjective optical experience
in front of the landscape.
And I think that's a big part of this for him.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] There is an intimacy
of vision.
Of a man that has spent a lifetime
looking at this mountain from these vantage points
and is understanding his own visual experience.
And inventing a visual language
to portray that experience.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] Cezanne will be really
important for Cubism.
If we think about a painting like Braque's
Viaduct at L'Estaque.
You can see how Braque is thinking about
the forms in terms of geometric shapes.
And we have some sense of that here.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] But where Braque and Picasso
will really fully open up form,
what we have here is Cezanne
just beginning to investigate
what it means to break contour.
For example, at the houses in the foreground.
We can see the way in which
the color of the field enters into the area
that should be just the red of the roof.
It's just a subtle opening up of form,
ever so slightly.
Whereas Braque and Picasso will dismantle form
almost completely.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] So from the hindsight
of the 20th Century,
we see this as an affirmation
of the flatness of the canvass.
A denying of the illusionism
that was such an important part of Western paining
beginning in the Renaissance.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] We shouldn't say complete denial
because we can still see the mountain
in the background.
We can still see the foreground of the hills before
and we can still see the brush immediately
below our feet as we look
from an adjacent hilltop.
Nevertheless, all the subtle cues
that had built up in landscape painting
in the centuries before have been left out.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] Normally we would
expect to see atmospheric perspective.
We would expect to see the sky
and mountains in the distance fading
and becoming less bright in color,
less clear in their focus.
But in that way Cezanne is treating
every part of this canvas in the same way.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] Instead of using
atmospheric perspective to create a sense of form,
the artist is simple delineating distance
by choice of color.
We have these blue-browns in the foreground.
We have reds and greens in the middle-ground,
and we have blues in the most distant area.
But it is a kind of arbitrary association
of place with color.
And Cezanne is able to create an even
greater degree of ambiguity
by bringing color from one realm into the other.
Look for instance, at the way that Cezanne
takes the gray-purple from the immediate foreground
and builds that into the sky.
So that when we see those colors
in relationship to each other,
that sky comes forward.
- [Dr. Beth Harris] So what we have here
is an investigation of landscape
that's very different than what the impressionists
were doing.
This is not about capturing the transitory effect
of light and atmosphere.
This seems to be about something more permanent.
- [Dr. Steven Zucker] And what Cezanne is after,
it seems to me, is a tension between
the deeper session that we expect
and a radical confrontation
with the two dimensionality of the surface.
(piano music)