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Lot Essay
The Mont Sainte-Victoire, its striking silhouette rising as a unique presence above the countryside around Aix-en-Provence, has since prehistoric times been a legendary site in the mythology and history of the region. For Cézanne, a native of Aix, Sainte-Victoire was an embodiment of the Provençal land and culture he deeply loved. The writers and poets of the Provençal Revival, some of them his friends, shared his attachment to their native land and celebrated it in their work. But for Cézanne, an artist of the highest ambition, Sainte-Victoire can also be seen as a symbol of his solitary, lifelong struggle to ascend the heights, to become the Moses he evokes in his letters, the prophet of a new art. So it is not surprising that it became his most familiar pictorial motif, the subject of scores of oils, watercolors, and drawings from the late 1860s to his death forty years later.
Choosing different vantage points over the years, Cézanne sees Sainte-Victoire from afar as a small blue silhouette or from very near as a looming, deeply scarred rock face. Sometimes it appears as a squat, truncated cone, sometimes as an endless, massive wall of cliffs. In the most "classic" views, it is a roughly symmetrical mass, flat at the top, with sloping, undulating flanks. In these sweeping vistas, seen across the valley of the Arc river, the mountain seems to rise in measured steps from the patchwork of fields and trees and foothills below it, a balanced, centered form, framed by large pines in the foreground. But it is only in the last views he painted, in the last four years of his life, that Cézanne, seeing the familiar motif from an unfamiliar viewpoint, was able to capture its full stature, rising majestically above the broad valley below it and dominating the sky all around it.
This new viewpoint was from the crest of Les Lauves, a hill north of the city of Aix, on whose slope Cézanne bought land and built a studio in 1902. The view from the crest afforded a vast and exhilarating panorma, in which, in John Rewald's words, "the mountain now presented itself as an irregular triangle, its long back gently rising to the abrupt, clifflike front that tapered off to the horizontal extension of the Mont du Cengle. At Cézanne's feet extended a vast, undulating plain with a quilt-like pattern of fields and clusters of trees, interrupted by occasional farm buildings. Rather than squatting beneath the immensity of the skies, the mountain seems pointed toward heaven, as imposing as ever, and possibly even more majestic. Floating ethereally in the southern light, it appears like a glorious symbol of Provence." (Paul Cézanne. The Watercolors, Boston, 1983, p. 240).
In the four years that remained to him, Cézanne painted variations of this view, each subtly different from the others, in seventeen oils and eleven watercolors. Distinctive to the present watercolor and the closely related oil (fig. 1) is their unusually wide horizontal format, the width of the watercolor in particular being more than twice its height. It is in fact the most extremely horizontal of Cézanne's watercolors; even Reflets dans l'eau, lac d'Annecy (Rewald, no. 474), an attempt to capture the sweep of the lake's opposite shore, is less extreme. That work could still be made on a single sheet; whereas to make the present one Cézanne had to add a second piece of paper at the right. It is the only landscape watercolor in which he seems to have done so; the other sheets enlarged in this way are an allegorical composition, a nude model, and a bathers composition (Rewald, nos. 68, 387 and 606). Why then did he so radically alter the format in the case of this landscape?
The only answer given thus far, that he endeavored to represent the full breadth of the panorama dominated by Sainte-Victoire that unfolded before him as he stood on the height of Les Lauves (Rewald, p. 239), is appealing but unconvincing. Rewald himself, or at least his camera, could not take in so comprehensive a view when he stood there about 1935, taking the photograph illustrated here (fig. 2). The fact is, the panorama is too vast to be encompassed in a single view. If Cézanne began by focussing on the Mont Sainte-Victoire at the far left, he had to turn to the far right in order to view in its full breadth the Mont du Cengle, the low rock platform located directly below the southern flank of Sainte-Victoire. Also a feature of local history since Roman times, it had long been familiar to Cézanne, who depicted it in several earlier works, notably in a watercolor of about 1895 (Rewald, no. 411), a closer view showing its rugged form more distinctly. In the present watercolor, he strengthens its appearance by using dark mauve-blue tones, a deeper echo of those on Sainte-Victoire. They are echoed again in the gnarled branches of the olive trees in the right foreground, which integrate effectively the nearest and furthest elements at the right side and help to link them with the left side. Apparently scattered, but with their own formal, form-creating logic, are the countless washes of light blue and orange, green and pink that likewise unify the surface, while animating it with the sparkle of sunlight and the flicker of air.
Seeing both the Mont du Cengle and the Mont Sainte-Victoire together in the same work is, then, as much a conceptual as an optical experience, integrating what is known and what is directly observed into a coherent work of exceptional breadth and ambition. Rather than the unified but essentially static view of the motif in the other watercolors of this series, we experience here a challenging, dynamic view whose elements seem to unfold sequentially as our eyes move from left to right across the sheet.
By Theodore Reff, october 2008.
Choosing different vantage points over the years, Cézanne sees Sainte-Victoire from afar as a small blue silhouette or from very near as a looming, deeply scarred rock face. Sometimes it appears as a squat, truncated cone, sometimes as an endless, massive wall of cliffs. In the most "classic" views, it is a roughly symmetrical mass, flat at the top, with sloping, undulating flanks. In these sweeping vistas, seen across the valley of the Arc river, the mountain seems to rise in measured steps from the patchwork of fields and trees and foothills below it, a balanced, centered form, framed by large pines in the foreground. But it is only in the last views he painted, in the last four years of his life, that Cézanne, seeing the familiar motif from an unfamiliar viewpoint, was able to capture its full stature, rising majestically above the broad valley below it and dominating the sky all around it.
This new viewpoint was from the crest of Les Lauves, a hill north of the city of Aix, on whose slope Cézanne bought land and built a studio in 1902. The view from the crest afforded a vast and exhilarating panorma, in which, in John Rewald's words, "the mountain now presented itself as an irregular triangle, its long back gently rising to the abrupt, clifflike front that tapered off to the horizontal extension of the Mont du Cengle. At Cézanne's feet extended a vast, undulating plain with a quilt-like pattern of fields and clusters of trees, interrupted by occasional farm buildings. Rather than squatting beneath the immensity of the skies, the mountain seems pointed toward heaven, as imposing as ever, and possibly even more majestic. Floating ethereally in the southern light, it appears like a glorious symbol of Provence." (Paul Cézanne. The Watercolors, Boston, 1983, p. 240).
In the four years that remained to him, Cézanne painted variations of this view, each subtly different from the others, in seventeen oils and eleven watercolors. Distinctive to the present watercolor and the closely related oil (fig. 1) is their unusually wide horizontal format, the width of the watercolor in particular being more than twice its height. It is in fact the most extremely horizontal of Cézanne's watercolors; even Reflets dans l'eau, lac d'Annecy (Rewald, no. 474), an attempt to capture the sweep of the lake's opposite shore, is less extreme. That work could still be made on a single sheet; whereas to make the present one Cézanne had to add a second piece of paper at the right. It is the only landscape watercolor in which he seems to have done so; the other sheets enlarged in this way are an allegorical composition, a nude model, and a bathers composition (Rewald, nos. 68, 387 and 606). Why then did he so radically alter the format in the case of this landscape?
The only answer given thus far, that he endeavored to represent the full breadth of the panorama dominated by Sainte-Victoire that unfolded before him as he stood on the height of Les Lauves (Rewald, p. 239), is appealing but unconvincing. Rewald himself, or at least his camera, could not take in so comprehensive a view when he stood there about 1935, taking the photograph illustrated here (fig. 2). The fact is, the panorama is too vast to be encompassed in a single view. If Cézanne began by focussing on the Mont Sainte-Victoire at the far left, he had to turn to the far right in order to view in its full breadth the Mont du Cengle, the low rock platform located directly below the southern flank of Sainte-Victoire. Also a feature of local history since Roman times, it had long been familiar to Cézanne, who depicted it in several earlier works, notably in a watercolor of about 1895 (Rewald, no. 411), a closer view showing its rugged form more distinctly. In the present watercolor, he strengthens its appearance by using dark mauve-blue tones, a deeper echo of those on Sainte-Victoire. They are echoed again in the gnarled branches of the olive trees in the right foreground, which integrate effectively the nearest and furthest elements at the right side and help to link them with the left side. Apparently scattered, but with their own formal, form-creating logic, are the countless washes of light blue and orange, green and pink that likewise unify the surface, while animating it with the sparkle of sunlight and the flicker of air.
Seeing both the Mont du Cengle and the Mont Sainte-Victoire together in the same work is, then, as much a conceptual as an optical experience, integrating what is known and what is directly observed into a coherent work of exceptional breadth and ambition. Rather than the unified but essentially static view of the motif in the other watercolors of this series, we experience here a challenging, dynamic view whose elements seem to unfold sequentially as our eyes move from left to right across the sheet.
By Theodore Reff, october 2008.