Art: Watery Depths

“Unfortunately what is called progress is nothing but the invasion of bipeds who will not rest until they have transformed everything with gas lamps—and, what is worse—with electric lights. What times we live in!” So wrote Paul Cézanne in 1902, and, choosing not to live in his times, he spent his last years in the sunlit hills of Southern France in a solitary search for the pure sensations of color. And even more than his oils, the hermit master’s ventures in the casual medium of watercolor blaze with a natural incandescence that never could be summoned by a light switch.

Many critics have long considered Cézanne’s watercolors simply tentative studies for his oils, and they are apt to be treated as wallflowers. The 74 watercolors on view in Manhattan’s M. Knoedler & Co. form the biggest assembly of these fragile sketches since the 1907 memorial show in Paris, held a year after Cézanne died. They are priceless, rainbow-hued documents of his passionate, lifelong homage to nature, but Cézanne often treated them like so much scrap; he even lighted the stove in his Provençal studio with works that might now be worth as much as $16,000 each. Only the foresight of his friends and early admirers—Gertrude Stein. Monet, Degas, Renoir, Pissarro—saved those that are left.

Cone to Crazy Quilt. With such castoffs, Cézanne did the spadework for cubism. He laid the landscape bare to its essential structure, yet cloaked it in a crazy quilt of color like a Jack Frost with spring fever. Unlike his contemporary impressionists, he wanted to show the unchanging longitude and latitude of the earth rather than the fleeting snapshot of the instant. But he left to the later cubists the task of actually depicting the geometry of “the cylinder, the sphere, the cone” of his famous dictum on the elements of art.

Since light in watercolors comes from the bare whiteness of paper, Cézanne progressively left more and more blank white space. After 1885, his watercolors began influencing his oils: patches of canvas showed through watery thin layers of bright paint. Cézanne’s work became like unfinished jigsaw puzzles.

Only Nature Counts. The kinship of his harlequin colors seems miraculous. Foliage flutters before the eye like scurrying butterflies. An overcoat lying on a chair takes on the bulk and presence of its wearer. A still life of skulls—piled more like strange fruit than memento mori—melts their contours into the curves of a parti-colored tablecloth in a haunting arabesque.

As time passed, Cézanne shunned even still life as overly contrived nature and sought out the chaotic, uncultivated thickets and hillsides of Provence’s virgin countryside. Among his most stunning works are views of the barren rock walls of an abandoned quarry that are so economically suggested by a few pencil lines and scattered smears of color that they presage modern abstractions. “Nature alone counts, and the eye is trained through contact with her.” Cézanne wrote. Hour after hour, facing the warm vistas of Provence, his eye sounded the depths of nature, and, dipping his brush into his wet colors, he deposited the traces of color that are the record of a contact with nature more direct than most men ever know or envisage.