 | When Cézanne speaks about Sainte-Victoire
“In going to Marseilles, I was accompanied by Mr. Gibert. The people there see well, but they have the eyes of professors. While traveling along the railroad near the Alexis countryside, a stunning motif appeared to the east: Sainte-Victoire and the rocks which dominate Beaurecueil. I said: “what a beautiful motif”; he answered: “the lines are too balanced”.”
(Letter to Zola, April 14th, 1878)
“For a long time I was not able, I did not know how to paint Sainte-Victoire, because I imagined the shadow as concave, like the others who do not really look at it, yet all the while, look at it, it is convex, it runs out from its center. Instead of being condensed, it evaporates, become fluid. Completely bluish, it takes part in breathing the air around it.”
“I need to know the geology, how Sainte-Victoire takes root, the geological color of the earth; all this moves me and improves me.”
“I need to know the geometry, the plans, everything that supports my
reasoning. 'Is the shadow concave?' I wondered. 'What is that cone up there? Wait. Is it the light?' I saw that the shadow on
Sainte-Victoire is convex, filled out. You see it like I do.
It is incredible. It is as if… It sent a great chill down my spine. If I could, through the mystery of my colors, share this chill with others, wouldn't they perhaps have a more haunting sense of the world, so much more fertile and more delicious? “
“Everywhere, a ray taps on a somber door. A line encircles everything with a captive tone. I want to release them. The great classical lands - our Provence, Greece, and Italy such as I imagine them - are those where clarity is spiritualized, where a landscape is a floating smile
of sharp intelligence… The delicacy of our atmosphere is due to
the delicacy of our spirit. The one is in the other. The color is the
place where our brains and the universe meet. “
“The intensely blue odor of the pines, rough in the sunlight, must marry with the green odor
of the meadows that cool each morning, with the odor of the
stones, the perfume of the far-away marble of Sainte-Victoire. “
“Look at this Sainte-Victoire. What momentum, what a driving thirst for the
sun, and what melancholy in the evening when all this gravity
descends again… Those blocks were of fire. There is fire still in them.
The shade, the day seems to recoil with a shiver, afraid;
up there lies Plato's cave: notice that when large clouds go by, the shadow they cast quivers on the rocks, as if burned, immediately consumed by a mouth of fire. “
“Look at this Mont Sainte-Victoire, is it not a ruin?
That is to say, the image of all accidents which have occurred since the beginning?
Where can nature be found in its divine entirety, if chaos has passed over it? “
Joachim Gasquet recounts:
“From the depths of this contorted fog, he painted, having placed
his easel before the Mont Victoire one morning. He stayed with the motif. He painted.
One of those gray days that he liked now, a pale laugh, one of these soft mornings of the age of the world. He painted… When his carriage came for him, his coachman found him shivering, his palette in hand, soaking wet. The rain had stopped. A silver sky calmed the fields.
The rainbow enshrouded the tragic mountain.
Cézanne seeing nothing, could hardly get into the carriage.
A book, his old Virgil, tumbled into the mud.
“- Leave it, and leave my canvas,” he groaned. He had a fever. He was delirious. He was put to bed. All night he reenvisioned, at the horizon of his painting, there at the horizon of his thoughts and his life, a Sainte-Victoire as he had never seen it before. He painted it as if it were divine. He saw it shining, supernatural, and real, in its essence and its eternity. Perhaps he still reenvisions it … “
“I wandered alone up to the dam and to Saint-Antonin. I slept there in a straw bed, at the home of people from the mill; good wine, good hospitality. I remembered these attempts at climbing.
Will we never start again? “(Letter to Numa Coste, July 1868)
“The beautiful expedition that we were to make to Sainte-Victoire fell through this summer, because of the excessive heat, and in October because of the rain.” (Letter to Numa Coste, at the end of November 1868)
In 1896, Cézanne gave Joachim Gasquet a picture of the Mont Sainte-Victoire, “Mont Sainte-Victoire with Large Pine” (NR 599), today housed at the Courtauld Institute in London.
“Your son will undoubtedly be in Aix soon. Give him my greetings, and my recollections of our walks in Peirières, at Sainte-Victoire.”
(Letter to Solari, July 23rd, 1896)
“The bluish phantom of Sainte-Victoire floated at the edge of his thoughts and was present with him at the horizon of all landscapes.” (Joachim Gasquet)
“One day, on an afternoon of heavy mistral winds, when I came to surprise him with my friend Xavier de Magallon, believing he was not working, we found him stamping his feet on the rock, fists clenched, enormous tears streaming down his face, over his torn canvas, carried away by a gust of wind. And as we ran to retrieve it, caught up in the shrubs in the quarry:
“Leave it, leave it," he shouted… "I was going to get it this time… it was there, it was there… But it was not to be. No. No… Leave it”.
The great landscape of Sainte-Victoire, cool, gentle and radiant, shining above the bluish valleys, stuck in the undergrowth where the wind had entangled it. We saw, torn by the gust of wind, the russet-red portions of the canvas, the red marbles, the pines, the jewelled mountain, the intense sky… It was, even compared to nature, a masterpiece, fully its equal. Cézanne, his eyes popping out of his head, looked along with us. An enormous rage, a madness, we had no idea what possessed him. He went in the table, took it, tore it, threw it on the rocks, stamped it to bits under his shoes, trampled it. Then, in total contrast, he went limp, and shaking his fist at us as if we were responsible: “Get the hell out of here, just get the hell out…” And hidden in the pines, we heard him cry like a child for over an hour.
He did not get up again. “
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