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the conquest of cezanne ________________________________________________________________

I shall quote from the guardian online--

there's no better way of understanding Cézanne than by looking at Le Lac d'Annecy in London's Courtauld Gallery.

The view is framed by a tree whose broad trunk rises on the left, and whose branches cut across the upper part of the picture in two dark waving thrusts towards the bottom. The lake divides the canvas in half and its far shore appears as a straight line, which perfectly bisects the main body of the trunk. So the painting is structured like a "T" on its side, while across the crystalline lake floats a chateau whose tower is a dense cylinder.

Nowhere in Cézanne's art do you more immediately see what he meant when he said the artist must "treat nature by means of the cylinder, the sphere, the cone". Cézanne shades the cylinder to denote its chunky volume, placing it over a roof of regular triangles. Along the shore is a smaller house captured in three planes of colour: red roof; bright side wall; shadowed end wall. From this description of symmetries and volumes, it might seem Cézanne was a cold, clinical painter who turned the visible world into a diagram. Nothing could be less like the experience of looking at Le Lac d'Annecy.

Blue, green and black diagonals cleave a sky that shatters into pink and blue diamonds. The slope of the hill is parallel to the overhanging branches, so the three repeated downward blasts become almost oppressive. The splintered mountains and sky torn through by these driving stormy bolts are energised shards of emotional information - hot and cold pulses. Cézanne has changed a benign view he feared might be "picturesque" into an almost apocalyptic spectacle. Yet he has absolutely nothing in common with the Romantic painters for whom this would come naturally. He doesn't fool himself that a real storm is brewing. He knows the storm is in him.

The Lac d'Annecy is, in its very violence, a triumph of order. Cézanne unleashes wild forces above the lake in order to tame them. The forces are his own - and so is the resolution. The drama of this painting is the emotional drama of the painter sitting there at his easel, thinking terrible things, overcoming his terror and anger, finding in the landscape a multi-faceted mirror of his inner struggle.

ilove art...i wish crystal bridges were right here, right now...

posted by wrangler steve at Saturday, September 16, 2006 >1 comments

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