PBS Cezanne in Provence

Pablo Picasso once said he was my one and only master don't you think I've looked at his paintings I spent years studying them Cezanne he was like the father of us all in 1895 a French painter from a small town of Exxon Province was given the first solo exhibition of his work in the heart of the art world Paris this huge exhibition showcasing some 150 works was the break the artist needed for fame and financial success Paul Cezanne had been painting for more than 40 years with little public recognition but when his exhibition opened he wasn't there he stayed home in Provence painting you saison and Provence is made possible by a generous grant from the Eugene B casey foundation they are treasures to be taken away from this country which has not yet found an interpreter equal to the abundance of riches which displays pulses on whatsit pulses on a part was his lifelong quest to paint the land that gave birth to him and to which he would always return suzanne wrote it is only there that I have found true evidence of the life of our light present in its simplest form the austere and tender beauty of upper walls Kivar senses on to find each other as a child he ran in its fields bathed in its streams and climbed its hills one companion a boy named Emile Zola would grow up to be as important an author as Suzanne was an artist when Zola left their hometown ExxonMobil's the young Suzanne wrote to his friend my dear a meal do you remember the pine tree which planted on the bank of the river Alek bowed its shaggy head above the steep slope extending at its feet these pine which protected our bodies from the blaze of the Sun ah may the gods preserve it from the woodcutters axe Suzanne and his friends were very well-versed in the classics so they had a very deep understanding of Arcadian literature the way that Virgil and other writers created an Arcadian world a perfect world and when they looked at the beautiful countryside around Exxon provoked the unspoiled countryside as it was at that time they saw themselves in a sense living in the modern Arcadia in Missoula left X for Paris in 1858 at age 18 but the excitement of the capital could not dim the fond memories of his childhood home Paris is big full of amusements of charming women X is small monotonous petit also full of women god forbid I should slander the women of X and in spite of that I prefer X to Paris is it because of the trees swaying in the breeze because of the wild gorgeous the rocks piled high on top of each other is it the landscape of pavo's which draws me there I do not know yet my parts dreams tell me that a rough rock is worth more than a freshly whitewashed house the murmur of the Warriors is more than that of a big town virgin nature more than nature starched and tormented and yet Paris was the only place to be for an ambitious young writer or painter Zola wrote to Suzanne Paris offers you an advantage which you could find nowhere else from 6:00 in the morning until 11 o'clock you could paint from a living model in an art school studio then take your lunch and from 12 until 4:00 in the afternoon you could copy a masterwork which attracts you in the louver or in the Luke's anbu museum that will mean nine working hours I believe that is sufficient but Suzanne had obligations his father had worked hard to become a successful banker he wanted his son to play it safe to enroll in law school alas I've taken the torturous path a flaw taken is not the word I was forced to take it the law the horrid law will make my life miserable for three years says I'm long to study art in Paris but even in his youth new that would never replace home he wanted to be an original an artist of unique vision emile zola agreed m'dear says an approved completely of your idea of coming to Paris to work and then returning to Provence I believe that this is a way to escape from the influence of the schools and to develop some originality if one has any when Susan's father reluctantly gave in to his son's dreams Paul immediately left for Paris arriving in 1861 I have seen the looks on boo and the sigh and Louvre leaving our small allowance from his father Susanne took classes and copied the work of the Masters but struggled and was his own worst critic emile zola wrote sometimes so you tell me you throw your brushes at the ceiling when your results do not come up to your ideas why these discouragements this impatience i must confess my heart is not very gay i fritter away my petty existence to the right and to left I have not been able to touch my painting to prove something to seasoned would be like trying to persuade the towers of Notre Dame to dance the quadrille nothing can bend him nothing can wring a confession from him otherwise he remains the best fellow in the world he was a young provincial artist with a heavy province our accent and he fell in with the circle around Edouard Manet mani was a very sophisticated totally Parisian artist and the artist who worked around him were similar very high bourgeois confident sophisticated Parisians and Suzanne came there and really felt the country bumpkin as for me old man my hair and my beard are longer than my talent rather than try to emulate them he played up the role of the rebel artist the rough country type there's a famous story where he met many for the first time and many put out his hand to shake Susan's hand and says and said oh no please don't shake my hand I haven't washed for a week that was his whole goal to make a point of being a Provencal someone from an entirely different culture that's why he spoke Provence and all around Paris he wore his Provencal outfit you know he had a red belt wrapped around his waist that was part of the traditional programs address like other ambitious artists of his time Suzanne submitted his work to the all-powerful government-sanctioned exhibition called simply the salon each year an elite jury sat in judgment with the part make or break a career rewarding technical skill / artistic innovation they rejected anything that threatened the status quo the Impressionist and indeed Cezanne himself had a somewhat ambivalent attitude to this world says on him actually always wanted to be accepted at the salon but she realized that he wasn't going to be so he took the contrary route and actually did provocative paintings that he knew would be rejected on Saturday we're going to the shows alizée to bring our canvases which will make the Institute blush with rage and despair in 1866 Suzanne sent his portrait of Antony valor Bragg who was a parrot and a friend of his Rex from Provence to the salon he knows it will be rejected so that's also a way of getting publicity I mean in a way it was a self-promotion to be seen to be thwarted or --'tis as was expected Paul has been refused by the sanno jury so have all the others they have gone back to work although working among the Impressionists Suzanne managed to stand apart from them striving to make a unique contribution to the forum not an easy thing to do when there's so much competition around in Paris in the 1860s and 70s his work done in Paris in the 1860s is dark dramatic often very thickly and awkwardly painted and I think this is a deliberate provocation to his contemporaries to show that he was a rough tough Finchel artist laying on the paint by the trowel load he painted in a very bold thick way which was later called ku yard or ballsy meaning that is kind of very strong and expressive and exaggerated we think of the Impressionist money money and orang hua among others as being rebels themselves but essentially this is a little bit of a romanticized view they were courting both the establishment and the the rebellious avant-garde now Suzanne was one step further than them in rebelliousness the others school pay money money etc feel and see as I do but they have no courage they paint pictures for the saloon I however dare I dare I have the courage of my convictions and he who laughs last laughs best he develops more and more in the original direction which is nature prescribes for him I have great hopes traveling back and forth between Paris and eggs Suzanne practice his craft and searched for his own style he used his family in X as models including his sister playing the piano a mutual friend wrote My dear Zola when Suzanne returns to Paris you will see some pictures that you will like very much among others a portrait of his father in a big armchair which looks very good the painting is light in color and the attitude very fine Cezanne's feelings for his father even in the 1860s come out strongly in the great portrait where he's shown reading the newspaper live in the mall it shows him as a very imposing figure but also it's a portrait done with great care and affection in fact the way that Cezanne throughout his life laid such an important emphasis on work on hard work is almost an attempt to prove to his father that becoming an artist in Paris or ever was not just becoming a bohemian and sitting around and smoking drugs and hanging out with models that actually was serious solid intellectual and physical work however in 1869 the painter met a Parisian model Porto speak a she became his lover his lifelong companion and the mother of his child my sense is that she was a commanding and strong-willed woman which would be a good match for Suzanne likewise a commanding strong-willed man and she held the household he was the artist you but Suzanne kept his family hidden from his father for more than a decade which is strange indeed because Suzanne's own parents were in fact from quite humble origins and they only married themselves after Caesar and his sisters were born his mother was a the typical wife and mother of provincial household self-effacing always out to support her children his mother knew about his relationship um his mother knew about the son her grandchild so she was in the secret beginning in the late 1860's Susanne's work was profoundly affected by his close friendship with the impressionist kami Passau pisarra was a kind of eternal figure forces on in many ways replacing the father figure that he always wished to have and didn't find in his own father and what Pizarro taught him and in the broader sense what he learned from Impressionism was to work out of doors to experience nature at first hand and to pin nature with a broad free brushy technique while residing in Paris Suzanne spent each summer in exile province applying the lessons of Pisa Hall and the Impressionists to his own native landscape all pictures spent it inside in the studio will never be as good as those down outside when out of door scenes are represented the contrasts between the figures and the ground is outstanding and a landscape his magnificent I shall have to make up my mind only to do things out of doors when France declared war on Prussia in 1871 left Paris and settled in the village of les dock on the Mediterranean coast just 18 miles from Exxon Provence he'd offered a new and inspiring landscape it also kept him safe from the conscription officer and kept his family secret from the prying eyes of his father his studies of the sea Atlas duct led to a gradual lightening of his palate into a new way of capturing light on canvas my dear Amy I shall not return to Paris before next year I have rented a little house and garden at l'Estaque just above the station and at the foot of the hill where behind me rise the rocks and the pines I am still busy painting as you say there are some very beautiful views here the difficulty is to reproduce them I began to see nature rather late though this does not prevent it being full of interest for me Susanne's art develops as a way of rejecting Paris and taking on Provence as his one and only context while at the same time trying to apply to Provence what he learned from Paris he wrote back to his friend Pizarro in Paris that for the first time he understood what the impressionist meant by using patches of color as opposed to modeling in tone saison actually draws very little under his oil paintings very faintly just to put things in place and then essentially the work is being done with a color the traditional academic way of painting was to model a form gradually from light to dark or vice versa what the Impressionists introduced was a way of painting were juxtaposing colored brush marks patches of color which would serve to model a form My dear peaceable I have started two little motifs with the sea it's like a playing card red roofs over the blue sea the Sun here is so tremendous that it seems to me as if objects are silhouetted not only in black and white but in blue red brown and violet I may be mistaken but they seems to me to be the opposite of modeling in 1874 Claude Monet organized an independent exhibition entirely free of the salons rigid ideals it included paintings by names now recognized among the most famous in the history of art Durga Hanwha and Cezanne the exhibit was both popular and controversial one critic singled out Suzanne for special mention describing him as a sort of idiot who paints in the throes of delirium tremens undaunted Suzanne continued to associate himself with his impressionist colleagues but he also kept apart from them sometimes abstaining from their exhibitions and soon moving beyond them in style and content we must not be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors let us go forth to study nature let us try to free our minds from them let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperament the way he took one phase of modern art and transformed into something entirely different Impressionism into an art of Greater expression and abstraction is wonderful it's his way of calling himself a link Suzanne once famously remarked that he wanted to make the art of Impressionism something solid and serious like the art of the museum's he wanted to reconcile the immediacy of impressionist painting with the more solid meaningful compositions of the old masters he admired I am beginning to consider myself stronger than all those around me and you know that good opinion I have of myself has only been reached after serious consideration I have to work all the time I must strive after perfection only for the satisfaction of becoming truer and wiser maybe his greatest goal was to try to put into a permanent artistic form his feeling of engagement with the world his sense of being in the world if you like his existential experience as a man and an artist to somehow capture that in paint two renders he said very often a harmony parallel to nature a wonderful example of his Harmony parallel to nature would be the great late watercolor which he made from the terrace of his studio at Lille over looking across the city of exon Provence where you see the tower of the Cathedral and the mountains beyond and it's a great watercolor in the way in which he lays these wonderful color washes one on top of the other in a very rhythmic way across a sheet of paper it has its own internal logic its own internal harmony parallel to the divine harmony as he would say in nature you when you listen to music you don't know how to write notes or things like that it's just you hear that and you feel well or not well and it's the same with a painting that is with your eyes and when you read a poem it's the same thing you have emotion and that's what the dipendra try to to give you as Suzanne moved into middle-age he anchored himself in his beloved Provos his focus on its unique landscape helped him to grow in new directions he made his own way and helped set the standard for those who would follow I still see before me the powerful landscapes of my youth I feel so strongly that I belong to them that what little love and truth there is in me comes from their tranquil passion the family home near X called the joie de Buffon was an especially resonant subject acquired by Susan's father in 1859 it came to embody their complex relationship though disappointed with his son's chosen profession Suzanne's father also showed his support building a studio on the top floor and allowing his son to paint life-size murals in the main salon the just before game says I am somewhere that was private I kind of almost a secret studio both in the house and then in the ground to kind of outdoor studio where he could work uninterrupted unobserved and develop his art Suzanne executed his first open-air paintings in the grounds of the JA de Buffon ultimately painting the view of the montana Victoire seen through a screen of trees Suzanne painted the Montana side Victoire like no one else first of all it was just there when you're in Exxon Provence when you take a trip out of town it dominates the surrounding landscape as mountains go it's not a very tall mountain it's something like 4,000 feet so compared with the Rockies or the Alps it's not a big mountain but it has a tremendous presence in the local landscape because everything around it is pretty flat my dear I mean when I went to Mass a a stunning motif appears on the Eastside San Victoire and the rocks that dominate it's quite possible that Paul Cezanne was painting right at this very spot a hundred years ago he painted nine major oil paintings from this spot and a number of watercolors so we could say it really was one of his obsessive motifs more tanks are Victoire held both a philosophical and ascetic fascination for Cezanne he understood that it was ancient his friend Marian had discovered prehistoric remains there it had been a religious symbol in pre-roman times and it had tremendous personal associations for him it was a place where Zola and their other friends had explored during their carefree youth it presided over the landscape that he had loved so much as a child he loved the changing light the changing colors and expressed it in the whole series of nearly a dozen paintings all taken from the same point of view I am still striving to discover my way as a painter nature presents me with the greatest difficulties Suzanne deeply loved the quarry at B Bemis it's a place where he could almost literally penetrate the landscape of his native province he went down deep into the quarry underground there he loved the silence and the solitude and the escape from the world around him also I think he was attracted by the way the rocks had been cut by the striations of the chisels that we can still see today or something that I think appealed to his aesthetic sensibility and found a kind of correspondence in his own brushwork season rambled all over this countryside looking for just the right motif in his landscape painting he visited the supposed house of the sculptor Pierre Bouchet and clearly the historical association of that place was important to him I think there's a good deal of self-identification on the part of the artist with a lonely house set in woods when rocky terrain we loved the solitude of the backcountry behind the stack where he painted the dramatic rocks it has a kind of primeval feeling still and I think Cezanne responded to that remoteness climbing the hills and the Sun Goes Down one has a glorious view of Lhasa in the background all enveloped towards evening to a very decorative effect in 1886 after a decade of secrecy Suzanne's father learned of Otto's and of his grandson Paul jr. all were reconciled and Hawk Das and Suzanne were married just months before his father's death but in that same year Emile Zola published lover a novel which featured a barely concealed an unflattering portrait of Cezanne Zola wrote he threw himself into the impossible task of putting all nature on one canvas and exhausted himself without ever bringing forth the expected work of genius it was the end of their friendship in spite of his excellent nature enriched natural gifts Paul cannot bear any criticism however gentle it may be it wasn't often that Suzanne could be drawn away from his home but in 1894 some of the leading artists of the time gathered at the home of Claude Monet in giovani Monet wrote I hope Suzanne will join us but he's so strange and so shy of new faces that I fear he will let us down he is a true artist but has far too many doubts about himself Suzanne did attend one female artist described him in vivid detail when I first saw him I thought he looked like a cutthroat with large eyeballs standing out from his head in a most ferocious manner a rather fierce looking pointed beard and an excited way of talking that positively made the dishes rattle I found out later that far from being fierce or a cutthroat he has the gentlest nature possible he doesn't believe that everyone should see alike my deal money Here I am then landed again in the south from which I should perhaps never have separated in order to fill myself into the chimerical pursuit of part to end may I tell you how happy I was about the moral support received from you which served as a stimulus for my painting in 1895 gallery owner Amboise vola came across Suzanne's work at a Parisian art supply shop where artists traded canvases for supplies he was inspired and a solo show was arranged dear Masha Villa I do not think that I shall in any way harm the course of my studies by exhibiting the exhibition featured some 150 canvases and promised the artists widespread public recognition but season chose not to attend he both wanted recognition but didn't want it and he in fact was quite upset when he read some of the reviews of the show even positive reviews that his work was becoming known it's very puzzling in a way but he I think lived for his art I was in a way disdainful about his public success yet at the same time it's hard to believe he didn't somehow enjoy that at the end of his life he was like a monk in fact that's why he wanted to be alone free and alone and he didn't like to have someone around him and he was when he paint visitors arrived in ex seeking the man whose paintings had inspired a new vision of what art might achieve but the reclusive season was not pleased I thought that one could do good painting without attracting attention to one's private life certainly an artist wishes to raise himself intellectually as much as possible but the man must remain obscure the pleasure must be found in the work Goga met him and wrote very interestingly about that meeting and how Suzanne was almost like a an ancient of Shepard from prehistoric times sitting on top of a mountain contemplating nature and the Stars so he saw him as a philosopher in 1899 the Jasta Bufo had to be sold after say zones mother's death and at that point one of his friends made a final visit to the house with Suzanne and he described Suzanne breaking down in tears in front of the portrait of his father in the house he was so moved and upset by the selling of the house partly because it was so deeply associated with his father with whom he had very affectionate memories after the sale of the ja de Buffon season bought an apartment in X on the who bulaga he built a studio on the top floor with a north-facing window for the best light he lived there for several years but the space was small and cramped and he felt the need to have a larger studio Dilma's chavalla I have had a studio built on a small plot of land that I bought for that purpose I shall inform you of the results achieved as soon as I have obtained some satisfaction from my efforts this is the atelier de l'aube the studio which Suzanne built at the very end of his life in 1902 and way he worked principally for the last four years until his death in October 1906 he built it for two main reasons one was that he needed isolation to work successfully the town was noisy and busy he had too many visitors coming to his studio he didn't like people trying when he was at work the second reason was that Eve had begun at the end of his life to paint some monumental canvases mainly devoted to the female nude and you needed a very large space in which to paint them and this room fitted the bill this is a big theme for Suzanne his relationship to the female body to females and to the nude he applies to them the kind of distortive qualities that he applies to everything to bottles to houses to trees to apples it's all part of that deliberate awkwardness that primitive izing quality that he wants to establish as an aesthetic value which he also sees as being an aesthetic value of the provincial countryside he modified the more naturalist way of looking at nature which was the Impressionists way in a more abstracted more stylized way which had very many similarities with popular culture the studio was constructed with this very large North window tisane like most painters like the cool clear northern light when he was working and they're also draped there so that he could adjust the intensity of light because the light here in Provence can be very very bright indeed and then also behind me you see a special tall narrow doorway a kind of slot which he had built-in again especially so that he could roll of very large campuses in and out of Studio the studio remains much asses are left it many of the objects were here during his lifetime including the big ladder which he used to paint the top part of the very large paintings bowls of fruit designed to evoke the atmosphere of his studio and small plaster Cupid which in his lifetime was attributed to the Provencal artist Pierre pooja whom he greatly admired we also see his painting boxes we took out into the countryside when he went plein air painting the men of letters expresses himself in abstractions whereas a painter by means of drawing and color gives concrete form to his sensations and perceptions get to the heart of what is before you the long years of hard work had brought him to the very position he had sought from the beginning his work was forever linked to the landscape but it never stopped evolving within the views he painted of the mountain from nearly love between 1902 and his death in 1906 there's quite a variety of style I think it depended on the quality of light at the time the effects of color and light that he saw in the landscape and was trying to match in his paintings we need to take into consideration to that say xan's eyesight may have been failing towards the end of his life this is perhaps a rather controversial point of view but we shouldn't forget that he had been suffering from diabetes since 1890 a remarkable example of his late abstraction is the painting taken from the terrace of the studio at Lee lobe looking across exon Provence and there we see broad areas broad patches of color which are really abstract at first it's hard to determine what you're looking at I think he couldn't see clearly but he was responding to these colored sensations he was receiving from the sky and the landscape itself now being old nearly 70 years the sensations of color which give the light offer me the reason for the abstractions which do not allow me to cover my canvas entirely nor to pursue the delineation of the objects where their points of contact are fine and delicate on the other hand the planes fall one on top of the other nature if consulted gives us the means of attaining the end when Suzanne heard of Zola's death in 1902 he broke into tears and locked himself away the sense of frustration he had often shared with his old friend had never lessened my age and health will never allow me to realize my dream of art which I have been pursuing all my life to my mind one does not put oneself in place of the past one only adds a new link he was looking for something that he always seemed to be beyond what he had created in some ways is that he never recognized the value of his works the aging artist was also unhappy with the changes wrought in his beloved landscapes I remember perfectly the ones so picturesque coast of l'Estaque unfortunately what his cold progress is nothing but the invasion of bipeds who will not rest until they have transformed everything into hideous case with gas lamps and what is even worse with electric lights what times we live in he wrote often to his son Paul my dear Paul in order to give you news as satisfactory as you would like I would need to be 20 years younger I eat well and a little moral satisfaction would do me a lot of good but work alone can give me that I am waiting for four o'clock the carriage will take me to the river by the breach of the duty have failed very well there yesterday I started a watercolor I am going up to the studio I get up late this morning after five o'clock my dear Paul I have nothing to do but paint Suzanne was already moving into a mood of greater distance and bitterness from the artistic world of his time especially the world of artistic trade of galleries exhibitions in fact he wasn't interested in showing anymore what absorbed him by them was entirely problems that had to do with his painting how do you handle volume how do you handle perspective how do you handle nature how do you handle tradition the sense you get is one of consistent search in Suzanne the skulls became a very significant motif for Suzanne at the end of his life he was very conscious of his own mortality says and also painted a very moving series of portraits of his gardener mr. Ovalle a who looked after the garden and helped Suzanne move the large campuses in and out of the studio the portraits of Valley are very moving very Rembrandt s they're extremely thickly painted emphasizing the old man's rugged features and knild hands and I think that Cezanne saw in this old man a kind of premonition or his own old age and his impending death I am in such a state of mental disturbance I fear a moments that my frail reason may give way will I ever attain the end for which I have striven so much and so long I hope so but I am old ill and I have sworn to myself to die painting in mid October 1906 Cezanne was caught in a storm in this very neighborhood he collapsed in the rain a passing laundry man put him on his car trundled him back to the rouble ago in town Susanne's final words are unknown but his last letter was true to form it was to his the art supplier Monsieur it is now eight days since I asked you to send me ten burnt lakes number seven and I have had no reply what ever is the matter an answer and quick please accept Monsieur my distinguished greetings Bowl season an independent man an artist proud to call himself provincial a painter who paved the way for cubism and the inspiring work of the 20th century Paul Cezanne was above all a local a native apostle I have asked myself whether the short-time given us would be better used in an attempt to understand the whole of the universe or to assimilate what is within our reach on October the 20th 1906 the painters sister Marie wrote to his son your father has been ill since Monday he remained outside in the rain for several hours he was brought back in a laundry cart and two men had to carry him up to his bed early in the morning he went into the garden to work on a portrait of Valley II he came back dying three days later on October the 23rd 1906 Paul Cezanne died you even now a century later young artists pay homage to him and to his indelible influence on the course of modern art we must not be satisfied with retaining the beautiful formulas of our illustrious predecessors let us go forth to study nature let us try to free our minds let us strive to express ourselves according to our personal temperament pulses on more about the life and work of paul cezanne visit the saison and Provence website on PBS org saison and Provence is available on videocassette or DVD the companion book is also available to order call PBS home video at 1-800 play PBS

Channel: Karin Ek

Views: 284,815

Rating: 4.8652668 out of 5

Keywords: Paul Cézanne (Visual Artist), Documentary (TV Genre), Public Broadcasting Service (TV Network)

Id: UAAubItti-I

Length: 56min 14sec (3374 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 20 2015