In my last post the was a quote from Robert Hughes about Cézanne. Here is a little bit more, this from Hughes’s well-known text, The Shock of the New (1980). The first paragraph is a quote from within a letter written by Cézanne to his son:
I must tell you that as a painter I am becoming more clear-sighted before Nature, but with me the realization of my sensations is always painful. I cannot attain the intensity that is unfolded before my senses. I do not have the magnificent richness of colouring that animates Nature. Here on the bank of the river the motifs multiply.
These “motifs” were not merely rocks and grasses; they were the relationships between grass and rock, tree and shadow, leaf and cloud, which blossomed into an infinity of small but equally worthy and interesting truths each time the old man moved his easel or his head. This process of seeing, this adding up and weighting of choices, is what Cézanne’s peculiar style makes concrete: the broken outlines, strokes of pencil laid side by side, are emblems of scrupulousness in the midst of a welter of doubt. Each painting or watercolour is about the motif. But it is also about something else — the process of seeing the motif. No previous painter had taken his viewers through this process so frankly. In Titian or Rubens, it is the final form that matters, the triumphant illusion. But Cézanne takes you backstage; there are the ropes and pulleys, the wooden back of the magic Mountain, and the theatre — as distinct from the single performance — becomes more comprehensible. The Renaissance admired an artist’s certainty about what he saw. But with Cézanne, as critic Barbara Rose remarked in another context, the statement: “This is what I see,” becomes replaced by a question: “Is this what I see?”
-Julie
