Ladybug’s Reviews > Cezanne: A Life > Status Update

When you fall in love w/one person above all others, that love makes special claims on you. In that mysterious way of love, Cézanne singles me out. Cézanne's last 3 great Bather pictures excite me more than any other art except Kafka's 3 novels. Both of these trios were left unfinished/finished at the death of their makers. Cézanne's lessons appear endless to me, encyclopedic like, Shakespeare or Beethoven

They r all there in one square centimeter/another. Picasso &Braque, Matisse &Modigliani, Kandinsky &Klee, Giacometti &Morandi, Johns &Kelly, De Kooning &Lichtenstein, Gorky &Kossoff, Marsden &Kitaj, Freud &Auerbach, Strand &Wall. The sublime little grimalkin is large. He contains multitudes. According to Klee, he is the teacher par excellence. According to Peter Handke, he is the teacher of mankind in the here &now

Cezanne has 3 blue pigments: cobalt blue, ultramarine, &Prussian blue. Asked why he was so fond of blue, “b/c the sky is blue, the sky is blue before it is sky.” Prussian blue is found only in his oils and indigo only in his watercolors. It’s said that he used at least 16 shades of blue. Titian is supposed to have said that a painter needed only three colors: white, black, and red. Cezanne needed blue.

Cézanne acknowledged Pissarro's influence:
I was an impressionist. Pissarro had an enormous influence on me. a green patch is enuf to give us a landscape, a flesh tone translates into a face/gives us a human figure. all of us come out of Pissarro. in 1865 he had eliminated black, bitumen, sienna &the ochers fr his palette. Paint only w/the 3 primary colors &their immediate derivatives. He was the first impressionist

In Pissarro's injunction to Lucien, "Don't bother trying to look for sth new: u won't find novelty in the subject matter, but in the way u express it.” As comrades &collaborators Cézanne &Pissarro were profoundly intertwined, over a much longer period than is generally realized, &the impress of that experience remained w/them to the end. Stylistically they grew apart; spiritually they were inseparable

Cézanne's landscapes r depopulated. Neither peasants nor nymphs make an appearance. Bathers apart-the biped is banished. Unfortunately what is called progress is nothing but the invasion of the bipeds, who do not rest until they have turned everything into hideous quais w/gas lamps &-even worse-electric lights. If progress meant newfangled ways of illumination, Cézanne was against it.

"Talking about art is almost useless," he wrote to Bernard, in Flaubertian mode. "Work which realizes some progress in one's own craft is sufficient compensation for not being understood by imbeciles." For both men, progress was a hard slog. Goncourt mocked Flaubert as the "one-word-a-day book-constructor." Much the same was said of the mythical interval between Cézanne's every brushstroke.

"All my compatriots are arseholes beside me," said Cézanne at the end." Stupidity about art, wrote Flaubert, comes less fr the public than fr "1 the government, 2 theater managers, 3 publishers, 4 newspaper editors, 5 official critics-fr holders of power, bc power is essentially stupid," a sentiment that might almost have been expressed by Cézanne.

Degas, Gauguin, Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir, all kept an eagle eye on Cézanne. All found him in varying degrees fascinating and disconcerting. All copied him. And all collected him, discriminating, well ahead of most of their fellow men.

He wrote to Pissarro: "On Sat (18 Mar 1865) we're going to the shack on the Champs-Élysées [the Palais de l'industrie], carrying our canvases, which will turn the Institute red w/rage &despair." If Cézanne was familiar w/Stendhal's letters, he may well have recalled a good line about Delacroix &the Salon of 1839: Delacroix, whose 3 pictures were refused by those animals at the Institute, thru envy: the swine!