Saturday, August 22, 2009

Non-Review (Semi-Review? Quasi Review?)

This is just going to be a few quick notes on a book I'm reading: Lost Earth, by Philip Callow. No, it's not about a luckless group of space travelers stranded out there after the earth explodes, it's A Life of Cézanne, as the subtitle tells us.

The title may come from what Callow calls Paul Cézanne's "incessant effort to paint the earth's virginity". Below, one of his many paintings of the mountain outside his hometown, Aix.


Montagne Sainte-Victoire, 1904-06






(Yes, it's an affiliate link. For one thing, that lets me post the picture without any copyright issues. For another, anyone who wants a copy of the print can click through, order it, and earn me a little commission.)

Not that
Cézanne was what today is called an "outsider artist". As Lost Earth says, "an abiding sense of history and a deep awareness of his cultural predecessors meant that he could never see himself as being educated by nature alone". Good for him; we could use more of that sense and that awareness today.

Though not an outsider artist,
Cézanne was in many ways an outsider -- mostly because of his fears and aversions. He hated being touched unexpectedly and was afraid of women. (Maybe the idea of wanderers with no world to go back to isn't so unrelated after all.) How he got together with the eventual Mme. Cézanne is a mystery. She may have started out as one of his models, which would have been a part-time job in addition to the bookbinding she did for a living. She certainly modeled for him often after they moved in together.




Woman with a Coffee Pot, c.1890-95




I'd like to show a closeup of her face -- you can almost hear her thinking, "Finish the ******* painting, Paul, I want my coffee!"


Woman with a Coffee Pot, c.1890-95 (detail)





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