Cézanne

Photography of Paul Cézanne, c. 1861
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Paul_cezanne_1861.jpg)
no copyright infringement intended

Cézanne made the bridge between two universes: the 19th  and 20th centuries. He departed from Impressionism and foresaw Cubism. The father of us all, would both Matisse and Picasso say (wiki).

• The Dialog of Music and Painting
• Cézanne and Beyond: Picasso
• Cézanne and Beyond: Jeff Wall 
• Cézanne and Beyond: Beckmann 
• Cézanne and Beyond: Mondrian
• Montagne Sainte Victoire vue prés de Gardanne  

(The Moderns)

The Dialog of Music and Painting

The first two pages of the autograph of Bach's Chaconne
(http://tonvanos.com/tekst2.php?tl=2&id=13&cat=&subCat=&tekst=&kid=8&refr=)

A vision in sound, written in one go: and He saw that it was good (Ton van Os)

I find the Chaconne one of the most wonderful, most incomprehensible pieces of music: on one stave, for a small instrument, the man writes a whole world of deepest thoughts and most powerful feelings (Johannes Brahms in a letter to Clara Schumann)

Van Gogh died childless, and considered the paintings his only heirs; each viewing celebrates their father's short life (Huffpost Arts)

Yesterday, March 30, was Van Gogh's birthday.

Bach's Chaconne with paintings by Vincent van Gogh
(video by BGkowalski)

I met with Van Gogh's art firstly while in high school: an exhibition was organized in Bucharest with works brought from some German museums. I knew virtually nothing about Van Gogh's place in the history of art, but I wrote some emphatic impressions in the visitors' book. Every time I remember that episode it's for me a renewed lesson of humility.

I met then with his works in museums in Moscow and Sankt Petersburg: after being shown the old masters, the guide was telling us that we have half an hour to go to the upper level and see the impressionists and all that stuff on our own. We, me and my wife, were already tired, but the effort was of course worthily.

1985 was for me a year of great musical joys, and of terrible sorrows: it was the anniversary of three hundred years from the birth of Bach, Handel, and Domenico Scarlatti. It was a horrible winter, and I was going to listen organ recitals with Bach's music, I was dressed like going to the mountains, with a hanorack, and gloves. And then came the spring. My first wife passed away in the spring, and for a long time I was ashamed for my passion for the music of Bach.

Years passed, winters and springs, and summers, and autumns. My son grew up, he got married and I have now two granddaughters, and sometimes I think at my first wife: she should have been here to enjoy the view of the granddaughters.

My life went on, and my passion for music and for visual arts went on.

I had the joy to be with Van Gogh's works at my leisure, in Washington, for seven years: to go to the National Gallery, or to Phillips Collection, and to spend as much time as I wanted in front of his paintings. Time to meditate, time to enjoy.

Meanwhile I had watched a movie by Kurosawa (Dreams): in one episode Van Gogh was played by Martin Scorsese and was speaking with a Manhattan accent. And the main personage of the movie was entering in one of his paintings, wandering through its universe, and exiting from another painting. These two paintings are at the Washington National Gallery.

Here are two videos I have made sometime in these seven Washingtonian years. Enjoy!

Van Gogh, Gauguin, and a bit of Cézanne, at Washington National Gallery
(Musical Background: Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake - Waltz)

Soutine, Van Gogh, Chagall, Cézanne, Picasso, Braque in distance
Phillips Collection
(Musical Background: Mendelssohn - Frühlingslied)

(Amintiri din Garla Mare)

(Van Gogh)

(Cézanne)

Cézanne and Beyond: Picasso

Paul Cézanne - Mont Sainte Victoire

Pablo Picasso - Nudes in a Forest

Pablo Picasso may have been the single most important and faithful Cézannist, ever. Cubism's kaleidoscopic fracturing of things is just an extension of the breakage already begun by Cézanne. The feathered brush strokes that define each of the many surfaces we see in a cubist picture are the same strokes that Cézanne used to pull apart his art. But the relationship goes much deeper than these surface similarities. Cézanne discovered that a modern artist could play at dreaming up new languages for describing reality, without feeling obliged to supply a key to understanding them. Looking at a Cézanne, you feel as though you're witnessing an orderly translation of objects into paint, but you never come away with a clear sense of the objects in question. Picasso ran with that method: he created the strong impression that cubism had a grammar and vocabulary that worked (think of all the attempts that wall texts make to explain it as a set of rational procedures) while allowing it to speak in tongues (think of how unconvincing all those explanations end up being). And it was thanks to Cézanne that modern art became a matter of the most radical, ongoing experimentation, rejecting established precedents or newly fashionable theories or any consistency of style. As art historian John Elderfield puts it in the exhibition's massive catalogue, Picasso saw the extremism in Cézanne's art and made it his own (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).

See also the Press Room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(Blogosphere)

(Cézanne)

Cézanne and Beyond: Jeff Wall

Paul Cézanne - The Card Players

Jeff Wall - Card Players

What could Jeff Wall, a Canadian who makes huge backlit color photos of staged scenes, have in common with a long-dead French master who mostly painted small still lifes, portraits and landscapes, most often from life? A great deal, at least when Wall's at his best. It's not when Wall looks most like Cézanne that he comes closest to him. Wall's recent photo of old women playing cards, on view in Philadelphia, is such an obvious reworking of Cézanne's famous Card Players that it risks becoming an art-historical one-liner, without the depth of Cézanne's original or of Wall's more important works. Wall is most like Cézanne -- more like him than most other living artists -- when he achieves Cézanne's uncanny blend of the clear-cut and the cryptic, of old-fashioned realism and newfangled conceptualism. At first glance, many of Wall's photos can have a banal, what-you-see-is-what-you-get effect: He presents photos of a path leading to a warehouse, or a storm drain with two girls playing at its mouth, as though that's all there is to see in them. Yet in every case, there's something so clearly willed about his choice of scene, and so calculated in his depiction of it, that you're launched into a search for hidden depths. Wall doesn't make pictures that look like Cézanne's. He makes pictures that work like Cézanne's (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).

See also the Press Room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(Blogosphere)

(Cézanne)

Cézanne and Beyond: Beckmann

Paul Cézanne - Large Pine and Red Earth

Max Beckmann - Seascape With Agaves and Old Castle

For Max Beckmann, a founder of German expressionism, Cézanne had nothing to do with abstraction; the Frenchman was the great realist, getting to the core of what the world is all about. Where some artists saw a revolutionary flatness, Beckmann saw depth, in every sense of the word. In 1905, the 21-year-old Beckmann was already saying that he found Cézanne deeper, more dramatic, more nervous and much more tragic than van Gogh. Cézanne, said Beckmann, is able to express his deepest emotions in an onion and I can remember landscapes he has painted which are like a living drama. . . . He has found the finest and most discreet way ever to express the soul through painting. Such romantic hyperbole is actually a credible reaction to some Cézannes: to his images of skulls, as grimly soulful as anything can be, as well as to his uniquely penetrating portraiture. But it also fits a work as seemingly straightforward as his Large Pine and Red Earth. That picture has so much going on in it, it becomes an automatic metaphor for the most profound complexities of being (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).

See also the Press Room of the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

(Blogosphere)

(Cézanne)

Cézanne and Beyond: Mondrian

Paul Cézanne - Château Noir, 1900-1904
oil on canvas
Washington DC National Gallery of Art

Piet Mondrian - Opposition of Lines, Red and Yellow

By 1920, Mondrian had reduced his pictures to a grid of verticals and horizontals -- the same grid that Cézanne, even at his most disorderly, had relied on 40 years before. Mondrian's flat fields of unmixed color, bordered in black, can also be spotted in details in most of Cézanne's paintings. Mondrian said that Cézanne had discovered that everything has a geometric basis, that painting consists solely of color oppositions. That doesn't even start to explain Cézanne, but it's a fine account of the small part of him that Mondrian drew on (Blake Gopnik in W.Post).


(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)

(Cézanne)

Cézanne, Montagne Sainte Victoire vue prés de Gardanne, à Washington National Gallery

(Washington DC National Gallery of Art)

(Cézanne)