Stories in painting III: like a dog

Paul Cezanne. Compotier, Glass and Apples. 46 x 55 cm. Oil on canvas. 1880.  

This still life by Paul Cezanne returns us to the tale of disappearances of stories from paintings (here are two first posts from this little series: 1, 2). Another episode of this particular plot in the history of painting: its conscious divorce from "literature" in the age of impressionism. 

Rainer Maria Rilke recounts an interesting dialogue in his "Letters on Cezanne" (letter of October 12, 1907). He asked a painter friend of his, Mathilde Vollmoeller, to go with him to Cezanne's exhibition; and at one point, she told him: "He sat there in front of it like a dog, just looking, without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive." 

A remarkable turn of phrase, "like a dog", isn't it? I believe it means, first and foremost, "story-less": a quieted mind, without endless "stream of consciousness" which tends to keep talking in our heads, weaving endless stories about itself and the world, and creating nervousness and ulterior motives in the process.  

As far as I recall, Noam Chomsky estimates that this ceaseless silent talking constitutes 95% of our linguistic activity; in other words, 95% of talking goes on in our heads without ever being "externalized". Which means, for him, that that is the function of language: thinking, not communication. Yet there is also a theory (or rather, a cluster of theories from different fields) that real thinking happens non-verbally; that this eternal internal story-telling, while not without some usefulness, takes over too much of our inner life and distracts us from awareness of here and now; from being fully alive and present in the moment: like a dog.  

There is also this hypothesis (present in somewhat different forms in different theories) that this inner storyteller's role (however one calls it) in our lives has been increasing throughout history and is actually getting out of hand, occasionally becoming more harmful than it is useful. Insofar as this is true (as I believe it might be), this evolution could just be what the age of Impressionism was responding to -- in moving painting away from stories and towards here and now.    

It might also be the reason why impressionism remains relevant, and meaningful, and so alluring for painters and viewers. I will return to this theme tomorrow, please stay tuned... 

Cezanne and Rilke: towards the inner core of art

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 1895. 73x92 cm. Oil on canvas. 

How to see a mountain like Moses

In his introduction to Rainer Maria Rilke's "Letters on Cezanne", Heinrich Wiegand Petzet quotes this remark made by Rilke to Count Harry Kesler in front of a picture of Montagne Sainte-Victoire: 

"Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly"

I cannot know which of the multitude of versions of "Mont Sainte-Victoire" they were looking at, but that doesn't really matter: the remark evidently applies to either of them, or rather, to all of them. Just pause and have a long look at this painting above, letting Rilke's sentence play in your mind, and you will feel it.

Cezanne's composition: the first look at how it works

Paul Cezanne. Mont Sainte-Victoire. 65 x 81 cm. c. 1890.

Paul Cezanne is often called "the father of modern painting", and that's true in so many senses that it almost becomes false: it's a father who would probably never acknowledge most of his "children". What I mean is that (I believe) Cezanne achieved a new kind of synthesis between different aspects and elements of painting, and his various "descendants" took this fragile whole apart, running away with one or another part of it (and often making it into an all too easy "recipe" for painting-making). So, for example, Cubism (especially the analytical cubism) evidently descends from Cezanne's achievements, but it's very much debatable whether Cezanne himself would have accepted its flat planes without colour modulations as a painting (as we know, he intensely disliked even Gauguin's flat shapes). 

What I want to do is go back to the original synthesis, to try and understand how this all works together in composing a painting. As of now, I am planning a two-months series of (weekly) posts on Cezanne's composition (to be completed before my two-weeks vacation in September), but it may be continued later.    

Still life I: living things

Paul Cezanne. Still life with apples. 46 x 55 cm. O/c. 1894

This blog post is the first in a series about still life, prompted by a comment on Google+ today, which (albeit supposed to be critical) suddenly clarified and brought into focus my own relationship with this genre. Here is what Wassily Kandinsky had to say about Paul Cezanne's still lifes: 

"Cezanne made a living thing out of a teacup, or rather in a teacup he realized the existence of something alive. He raised still life to such a point that it ceased to be inanimate. He painted these things as he painted human beings, because he was endowed with the gift of divining the inner life in everything." [Kandinsky, Wassily. "Concerning the Spiritual in Art." (Kindle Locations 434-436). Kindle Edition.] 

Indeed, Cezanne's still life objects don't really sit still. Technically, that's because they are shown from slightly different perspectives simultaneously, so they seem to move before the viewer's eye. This is something, by the way, that happens "on its own", quite naturally, if your still life set-up is close enough to your easel, and you paint it from standing position, constantly moving closer to and farther from the easel, to look at the picture. In other words, it is something you've got to be consciously avoiding if you want to paint a traditionally "still" still life from life; not, of course, if you paint it from photo, where even people are devoid of movement.