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Issue Number: 120
The French artist’s letters provide a vital key to understanding 20th-century painting, as a new translation shows, says Edmund Fawcett
Paul Cézanne liked to say that it was pointless to talk about painting. Luckily for us, he ignored the warning. In letters to fellow artists and friends, the great French painter poured out thoughts about art throughout his life (1839- 1906). Though many of Cézanne’s letters are lost, the just under 300 extant are a trove of insight into what this sharp-tongued and frequently misunderstood painter was after.
Cézanne set 20th-century painting on its course. The Fauves, Cubists, Mondrian, the German Expressionists, and Russian Suprematists and Constructivists all followed where Cézanne led. Finding his ‘pictorial way’ as he called it, did not come easily. It took years of looking, thinking and trying again. Weeks before his death, when he was still up early each day to paint in the countryside, Cézanne wrote to a fellow artist Emile Bernard, ‘I always study from nature, and it seems to me that I’m making slow progress.’
Paul Cézanne, Self-Portrait with Soft Hat, c.1890-94. Bridgestone Museum of Art, Ishibashi Foundation, Tokyo. In the late 1930s, the Cézanne scholar John Rewald published an edition of the letters, which was then translated into English. Now Alex Danchev has brought out a new edition in English, copiously illustrated with Cézanne’s work. Danchev is a multi-talented professor of international relations and a military biographer who has also written lives of Braque and Cézanne. For this edition, Danchev has added some previously missing letters, corrected transcription errors, put back earthy language that Rewald bowdlerised and, as he tells us, freshened the translation to make it sound less stiff to present- day ears. A manuscript sample shows Cézanne’s vigorous hand.
Its right-sloping letters with high risers and descenders fill the page in an all-over grid not unlike
his angled marks on the canvas.
With theatrical vividness, Cézanne’s letters track the dramas of his personal life: conflicts with family and friends, early money troubles and complex attitudes to artistic fame. Candid and thin-skinned, he poured his feelings on to the page in urgent, angry bursts. Yet never lost to view amid the squalls is Cézanne’s clear-blue singleness of artistic purpose.
His parents were the ‘foulest’ people in the world, Cézanne complained to Camille Pissarro in 1866. At 27, Cézanne still counted for money on his banker-father, who did not want him to be a painter. He took his father for a tyrannical hypocrite. Cézanne was five before his parents married. Even so, terrified of being cut off, he tried to hide from his father the existence of his mistress – later wife – Hortense Ficquet, and their son.
The writer Emile Zola dominates Cézanne’s correspondence in the 1870s and early 1880s. They were boyhood friends from Aix-en- Provence. As young men in the big city they stayed close at first. Soon Zola was a celebrated, author. Cézanne remained an obscurity, admired by Monet, Degas, Renoir and Pissarro, but shunned by the Salon and mocked in the Paris press. Zola, an engaged left-winger, campaigned for radical causes. Cézanne had a conservative indifference to politics. He focused on his painting. Perhaps inevitably they drew apart.
Zola would send Cézanne his latest novel. Cézanne wrote back in praise, though with ever more inventive excuses as to why he had not quite read the new one through. An accomplished Latinist and translator of Virgil, Cézanne preferred the classics to modern fiction, though he admired Balzac and Stendhal.
In April 1886 Zola sent The Masterpiece, his melodramatic novel of a misunderstood artist who kills himself in despair over an unfinishable painting. To Cézanne, the gesture was absurd. ‘If you can’t finish a painting, you toss it in the fire and start again,’ he told the dealer who finally brought him commercial success, Ambroise Vollard. Cézanne thanked Zola for The Masterpiece in a brief, impersonal letter. It was the last letter between them that survives.
Cézanne had a ready wit and quick temper. He played the bumpkin up from the provinces. When introduced in 1866 to the suave Manet, Cézanne refused to shake hands, excusing himself, ‘I haven’t washed for a week’. He carped about his artistic supporters, grumbling for example that an early champion, the critic Gustave Geffroy, was ‘an intellectual’ stuffed up with what he remembered from museums. Institutes, stipends and honours were for careerists and fakers, Cézanne told Bernard. He could afford to talk that way. After the death of his father in 1886, Cézanne was rich.
With age, Cézanne’s health declined. Doctors diagnosed diabetes in 1890. He suffered small strokes and withdrew more into himself. It was as much a withdrawal into painting. The painter should stay in the shadows and work, Cézanne believed. His last 15 years marked an artistic arrival and summation. The letters from this period, though occasionally harsh and bleak, are more often magisterial, packed with hard-won wisdom and aphoristic thoughts about painting.
Painters, Cézanne insisted, needed ‘personality’, by which he meant clear artistic aims and strength of purpose to carry them through. They should ‘study nature’, by looking at it long and hard so as to grasp lasting appearances rather than to chase fleeting impressions. ‘I wanted to make of Impressionism,’ Cézanne said, ‘something solid and enduring, like the art in museums.’ In the introduction or in footnotes, Danchev suggests – without laying down the law – how to take Cézanne’s shifting use of innocent looking but loaded terms such as ‘study’, ‘motif’ and ‘nature’.
Cézanne’s letters are as essential to understanding the painting of the past century as were Van Gogh’s and Pissarro’s. Cézanne’s scorn for painting talk was understandable. The worse sort leads you away from painting’s trials and achievements. Cézanne’s letters are the better sort. They lead you back.
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