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Cezanne's strugglePaul Wells asks what the great artist was trying to doAll summer long the terrace of my favourite cafe in Aix-en-Provence has been packed out with tourists. Les Deux Garcons was also frequented by the painter whose work they came to Aix to see. An exhibition assembling about 120 paintings from all over the world has been running all summer, after having been on in Washington last spring. Almost 400,000 visitors have been through the doors of the museum to gape at this astonishing array of pictures and the local shopkeepers have been laughing all the way to the bank. Paul Cezanne (1839-1906), together with his erstwhile friend the writer Emile Zola of ‘affaire Dreyfus’ fame, is the most famous son of this town and the exhibition celebrated the anniversary of his death. He was a post-impressionist painter and his work is a bridge from the realistic art of the 19th century to the radically abstract art of the 20th century. The quote attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that calls Cezanne ‘the father of us all’ witnesses to his importance. Personally I do not know anything more about painting than the average M. Dupont, and I am a little sceptical of the way ‘modern art’, which often seems to be little more than random daubing, is beatified as high art or culture. However, Cezanne is different, and as this was the major event this summer in the town where I live, I thought I had better go along and take my wife who appreciates this form of entertainment more than the World Cup. Created a worldThe exhibition was remarkable and put side by side paintings that will not be seen together again for a long time, so you could get a sense of the development of Cezanne’s work. The paintings were a truly amazing riot of colour and light, familiar to anyone who has visited Provence, and Cezanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour and composition. The small brush-stokes form complex fields that in the context of the picture as a whole convey a sense of the reality portrayed. Cezanne created a world on canvas that was at the same time like what we see and yet different from it. I was amazed to see that the canvas of my favourite Cezanne, ‘The bay of Marseille seen from l’Estaque’ (1879), actually glistens and radiates with a light that you don’t see in the reproductions. However could that have been done? It was not till the end of my visit that I began to feel something of what was at stake. Cezanne's paintings show intense observation of the subjects and struggle to deal with the complexity of the reality before our eyes. What holds it all together? How can the power that holds the potentially chaotic diversity around us in the world as we know it be conveyed? In a way I felt that Cezanne was struggling to attain the same power in his painting as the power that makes our world what it is. But if that were the case, it would surely be an idolatrous enterprise, as only God can make reality gell together as a unity. Jesus Christ alone is ‘the radiance of the glory of God and upholds the universe by the word of his power’ (Hebrews 1.3). Back on Mars hillIn the museum at Aix, it seemed in a sense that we were back on Mars Hill in Athens, with the apostle Paul, looking at pagan attempts to capture the invisible power in constructions honouring the unknown gods of nature. So, here, I felt, we had it. Just as the ancient Greeks struggled with reality to understand its coherence — ‘all is fire, all is water, all is air’ — Cezanne was seeking the universal behind the phenomena, the life force that makes reality what it is. Did we see here in these paintings a sense of ‘the God who made the world and everything in it’ (Acts 17.23)? I can’t say that I experienced it to be so. Beautiful, yes, the paintings were, painfully beautiful, but mute and silent, lacking the word of joy that the knowledge of the Creator brings. Losing the struggleOn the contrary toward the end of his life, one has the impression that Cezanne is losing his struggle and that reality is falling apart under his brush. This seemed to be particularly so in three paintings of the mountain that Cezanne loved to depict, the Mont Sainte Victoire, which towers behind Aix to the east, and shines like a jewel in the setting sun. In the first of these paintings, which all present the view from the Chemin des Lauves to the north of the town, there is a sense of fluidity, unity and striking brightness of colour. The second, painted a couple of years later, is dark and rather menacing, not a joyous celebration of the beauty of colour, but a brooding pessimism. The third, painted nearer Cezanne’s death, shows the same scene but here things are falling apart, and to use current language, one has the impression that reality is deconstructing. Looking at these three paintings one after the other, I could not but feel sadness. Had not Cezanne lost his struggle with reality? Did he not experience with the onset of old age and the nearness of death the bitterness of a world decomposing even as he tried to hold it together? This decomposition was to become a shattering of reality when the likes of Picasso went to work. I left the exhibition with the words of Ecclesiastes ringing in my mind: ‘Vanity of vanity, all is vanities’ — ‘Remember your Creator… before the evil days come and the years draw near of which you will say, “I have no pleasure in them”’ (12.1). Bob Dylan at CannesFunnily, I heard a similar message to that of Cezanne at another cultural event of a much different type this summer, a Bob Dylan concert in Cannes a few days later. ‘Modern Times’ are bad times, times when things are falling apart before our eyes, apocalyptic times when the spirit is gone and when human beings are T.S. Elliot’s hollow men who resonate with groaning futility. ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper.’ It is time to seek the Lord: ‘All has been heard, “Fear God and keep his commandments,… for God will bring every deed into judgement, with every secret thing, whether good or bad”’ (Ecclesiastes 12.13). Paul Wells,
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