Paul Ceznne

THE MOTIF
Nature is seen more as depth than as surface
(from a conversation with Joachim Gasquet).
From: "Conversation with Ceznne" (pag. 109-112) : Emile Bernard, Jules Borly,
Maurice Denis ... / Michael Doran, editor; translated by Julie Lawrence Cochran;
introducion by Richard Shiff; Berkely, California, University of California Press,
Ltd. London. England; Copyright 2001 Edition Macula.
Translation copyright 2001 by the Regents of the University of California
"Cezanne: The Logic of Organized Sensations" 1992 Jenny Gowing

That day, we surveyed the valley of the Arc from under a tall pine tree on the side of a green and
red hill in the area of La Blaque, not far from Les Milles and three-quarters of an hour from Aix
and the Jas de Bouffan. The sky was blue and fresh, an early autumn morning at the end of
summer The city, hidden by the side of a hill, could be discovered from its smoke. We turned our
backs to the ponds and on the right one could see the horizons of Luyne and the Pilon du Roi, and
imagine the sea. Before us. under the virgilian sun, lay Mont Sainte-Victoire huge, delicately
tinged with blue the undulations of the Montaiguet, the Pont de l'Arc viaduct, houses, rustling
trees and square fields, the countryside of Aix.
This is the landscape Czanne painted. He worked on his brother-in-laws land, where he had set
up his easel in the shade of a stand of pines. He had been working there for two months, on one
picture in the morning and another in the afternoon. Work was going well; he was content. This
session was nearly over.
Balance slowly infused his painting. His chosen image, meditated upon, linear in its logic, and
which he must have quickly sketched out in charcoal, as was his habit, began to emerge from the
colored patches that encompassed it on all sides. The landscape seemed to be fluttering, because
Czanne had slowly delimited each object, sampling, so to speak, each tone. Day after day he had
imperceptibly and with a sure harmony brought together his color values He linked them to one
another in a veiled brightness Volumes emerged, and the great canvas reached its maximum
equilibrium and saturation of color, which, according to Elie Faure, are characteristic all of his
paintings.1 The old master smiled at me.
JOACHIM GASQUET

This is an interesting description of the development of a Czanne oil painting, from the first sketchy outlines
(which however seem usually to be in soft pencil, not charcoal), to the emergence through the color patches, of the
solid volumes of the image. Elie Faure: Portraits d'hier, No. 28, Paul Czanne, Paris, Fabre, 1910, and Paul Czanne
in L'Art Dcoratif, October 5th 1911.

CZANNE: The sun shines and fills my heart with hope and joy.2
ME: You are happy this morning?
CZANNE: I have my motif ... (He clasps his hands together.) A
motif, you see, it is this ...
ME: What?
CZANNE: Oh, yes! (He repeats his gesture, separates his hands,
spreading his fingers apart, and brings them slowly, very slowly
together again, then joins them, clenches them, intertwining his
fingers.) That's what you have to attain. If I go too high or too low,
all is lost. There must not be even one loose stitch, a gap where
emotion, light, and truth can escape. Try to understand, I guide my entire painting together all the
time I bring together all the scattered elements with the same energy and the same faith.
Everything we see is fleeting, isn't it? Nature is always the same, but nothing about her that we
see endures. Our art must convey a glimmer of her endurance with the elements, the appearance
of all her changes. It must give us the sense of her eternity. What is beneath her? Perhaps nothing.
Perhaps everything. Everything, you understand? So, I join her wandering hands... I pick her
tonalities, her colors, her nuances from the left, from the right, here, there, everywhere. I fix
them; I bring them together ... They form lines. They become objects, rocks, trees, without my
thinking about it. They take on volume. They have color values. If these volumes and values
correspond on my canvas and in my senses, to my planes and patches, that you also see before
you, well, my painting joins its hands together.3 Nature doesn't waver; it passes neither too high
nor too low. It is true, it is dense, it is full ... But if I have the least distraction, the slightest lapse,
if I interpret too much one day, if today 1 get carried away with a theory that contradicts
yesterday's, if I think while I am painting, if I intervene, then bang! All is lost, everything goes to
hell.4
ME: What do you mean,"if you intervene"?
CZANNE: An artist is only a receptacle for sensations,5 a brain, a recording device ... Damn it, a
good machine, but fragile and complex, especially where others are concerned ... But if it

Source: letter zo Gasquet, 13th June 1896.

The gesture described here, with interwoven fingers, has been discussed by Loran (1946, 15), and likened by
Gowing (Edinburgh/London exhibition 1954, 10), to that in the Columbus (Ohio) Portrait de Chocquet (1877,
RP296V373).
4

The precariousness of his concentration is often stressed. See letter 8 to Bernard, where "the color sensations [...]
are what create abstractions that keep me from covering my canvas" and Larguier (Dictum XI): "Genius is the ability
to renew one's emotion by daily contact with nature".

Source: letter to Gasquet, 215: July 1896.

intervenes, wretched thing, if it dares of its own will to intervene in what it should only translate,
if its weakness infiltrates the work, the painting will be mediocre.
ME: So, in your opinion, the artist is inferior to nature?
CZANNE: No, that's not what I said. How do I explain this to you? Art is a harmony parallel to
nature. What would you think of idiots who would tell you, the painter is always inferior to
nature!6 They are parallel, if the artist doesn't intentionally intervene . . hear me well. His entire
will must be silent. He must silence all prejudice within himself. He must forget, forget, be quiet,
be a perfect echo. Then the full landscape will inscribe itself on his photographic plate. In order
to fix it on his canvas, to exteriorize it, his craft comes into action. But it must be a respectful
craft which, itself also, is ready only to obey, to translate unconsciously so long as it knows its
language well, the text it deciphers, these two parallel texts: nature seen and nature felt, the nature
which is out there (he indicates the blue and green plain) and the nature which is in here... (he
taps himself on the forehead) both of which must unite in order to endure, to live a life half
human, half divine, the life of art, listen a little ... the life of God. The landscape is reflected,
becomes human, and becomes conscious in me. I objectify it, project it, fix it on my canvas. The
other day, you spoke to me of Kant. I probably can't say this clearly, but it seems to me that I'll be
the subjective conscience of this landscape, just as my painting will be the objective conscience.7
Both my painting and the landscape are outside of me. One is chaotic, fleeting, confused, and
without logical being, external to all logic. The other is permanent, tangible, organized,
participating in the modality and drama of ideas ... and in their individuality. Yes, I know, that's
an interpretation ... I didn't go to the university. I wouldn't dare talk like this in front of Dumesnil8
Oh, God! How I envy your youth with everything bubbling up within you! But time pushes me
on. Perhaps I was wrong to joke like that. . . Not theories! Works of art... Men can get lost in
theories. It takes a hell of a lot of energy, an almost inexhaustible vitality, to resist them. I ought
to be more level-headed. At my age I should remember that getting carried away like this is bad
for me. It always gets me into trouble.9
His mood darkened. He was often despondent after an outburst of enthusiasm like this. I did not
dare try shake him out of his melancholy; he would only become enraged. He was suffering. After
a long silence, he look up his brushes and looked back and forth from his canvas to his motif.
6

Source: letter to Gasquet, 26th September 1897. For "Art is [...] parallel to nature", no doubt a commonplace of the
time, see Arsne Alexandre, quoting Puvis de Chavannes: "Painting is not merely an imitation of reality, but a
parallel with nature."

"subjective [...] objective" these thoughts are distinctly non-Czanne, see Gasquet (1919, 83), "Music reaches
nature subjectively through man, poetry teaches man objectively in nature." As for Kant, even Bernard's largely
ridiculous Conversation avec Czanne (1921, 375) has the good sense to see Czanne as opposed to the "German
philosophers, for whom all is illusion, dream, mere appearances", though this cannot, of course, be taken as an
authentic Czanne quotation.
8

Dumesnil the philosopher: Georges-Edouard Dumesnil (1855-1916) taught in a number of places, and received his
Sorbonne doctorate in 1892. He was Gasquet's teacher at Aix. Gasquet (1926, 113-4) says that Czanne liked to
discuss religion and philosophy with Dumesnil. Two letters of 30th January 1897 (to Philippe Solari and to Gasquet)
indicate Czanne's wisch to present two paintings to Dumesnil.
9

Source: letter to Gasquet, 18th July, here distorted.

No, no. Look. That's not at all right. General harmony doesn't exist This painting doesn't feel
anything. Tell me what perfume emanates from it. What odor does it emit? Let's see.
ME: The smell of pine trees
CZANNE: You say that because of the two tall pines spreading their branches in the foreground
... But that's a visual sensation ... Anyway, the totally blue odor of the pines which is harsh in the
sun, must marry the green odor of the fields which freshen there each morning, with the odor of
the stones, and the perfume of marble from Sainte-Victoire in the distance. 1 haven't gotten it yet.
I have to realize it. And in colors, without words. Like Baudelaire and Zola who, through a
simple juxtaposition of words, mysteriously perfume an entire verse or sentence. When sensation
is at its fullest, it is in harmony with all existence.10 The world spinning in the back of the brain
causes the same movement that is perceived by the eyes, ears, mouth, and nose, each with its own
poetry And I believe that art puts us in that state of grace where universal emotion is somehow
expressed to us precisely, but very naturally. We should find general harmony, like that expressed
by colors, everywhere. Look, if I close my eyes and think
of the hills of Saint-Marc, you know, my favorite corner
of the world, they bring me the aroma of scabiosa, my
favorite perfume. I hear all the green woodsy odors of the
fields in Weber In Racine's verses I feel a local color as in
a Poussin. In the same way, an ode, a whisper, a rhythm
of Ronsard unfolds under some of Rubens's purples.11
You know that while Flaubert was writing Salammb, he
said that he was seeing purple.12 Well, when 1 was
painting Vieille au chapelet [Old Woman with a Rosary], I
saw a tone of Flaubert, an atmosphere, something
indefinable, a bluish and russet color which emanated, it
seemed to me, from Madame Bovary. In vain I tried
reading Apuleius to chase away this obsession which I
feared would be too literary and would hurt my painting.
Nothing worked. This great bluish-red aura descended over
me and sang in my soul. I was completely bathed in it. [...]

10

This offers a remote echo, or caricature, of the eleventh opinion in Bernard, L'Occident: "when color is at its
richest, form is at its fullest."

11

This paragraph interweves a number of themes taken from Mes Confidences. The association of Ronsard with
Rubens is also found in L'art vainqueur (65), where Gasquet writes of "the great decorative stanzas, la Rubens, that
be used."

12

Letter to Gasquet, 29th September 1896: "I reread Flaubert."