Cezanne

Cézanne: paint it black

After decades of writing about art, John Berger thought he knew Cézanne. But a Paris retrospective proved a revelation

John Berger

guardian.co.uk, Monday 12 December 2011 22.00 GMT


Out of the darkness … a detail from Cézanne’s La Pendule Noire (1869-71), on show in Paris. Photograph: Bridgeman Art Library

Any European who lived during the 20th century and was passionate about painting had to come to terms with the mystery, the achievement, the failure or the triumph of Paul Cézanne's life's work. He died six years after the century began, aged 67. He was a prophet, although like many prophets this was not what he set out to be.

At the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, there is now a magnificent exhibition of 75 paintings from all periods of his life. This offers us the chance to look at him, in all his originality, yet again. To me, after a lifetime's companionship with him, the show was a revelation. I forgot about impressionism, cubism, 20th-century art history, modernism, postmodernism – and saw only the story of his love affair, his liaison, with the visible. And I saw it like a diagram, one of those diagrams you find in a booklet of instructions about how to use a new appliance or tool.

Let's begin with the black found in many of his earliest works, painted when he was in his 20s. It's a black like no other in painting. Its dominance is somewhat similar to the darkness in late Rembrandts, only this black is far more tangible. It's like the black of a box that contains everything that exists in the substantial world.

About 10 years further into his career, Cézanne begins to take colours out of the black box: not primary colours, but complex, substantial colours, and he searches to find places for them in what he is looking at so hard: a roof or an apple for a red, a body for a skin colour, a particular area of sky between clouds for a blue. These colours he takes out are like woven fabric except that, instead of being made from thread or cotton, they are made from the traces a paintbrush or palette-knife leaves in oil paint.

Then, during the last 20 years of his life, Cézanne begins to apply those swabs of colour to the canvas, not where they correspond to the local colour of an object, but where they can indicate a path for our eyes through space, receding or oncoming. He leaves more and more patches of the white canvas untouched. These patches are not mute, though: they represent the emptiness, the hollow openness, from which the substantial emerges.

Cézanne's prophetic late works are about creations – the creation of the world or, if you wish, the universe. I'm tempted now to call the black box, which I see as his starting point, a black hole – yet to do so would be a verbal trick and, therefore, too easy. Whereas what Cézanne did was obstinate, persistent, difficult.

During his journey as a painter, I believe his state of mind changed eschatologically, his thinking becoming more apocalyptic. From the very beginning, the enigma of the substantial obsessed him. Why are things solid? Why is everything, including ourselves as human beings, made of stuff? In his very early work, he tended to reduce the substantial to the corporeal: the human body in which we are condemned to live. And he was acutely aware of what being flesh meant: our desires, our blind longings and our aptitude for gratuitous violence. Hence his repeated choice of subjects such as murder and temptation. It was perhaps better that the black box be kept shut.

Gradually, however, Cézanne began to expand the notion or sensation of corporeality, so that it could include things that we do not normally think of as having a body. This is particularly evident in his still lives. The apples he painted have the autonomy of bodies. Each apple is self-possessed, each has been held in his hand and recognised as unique. His empty porcelain bowls are waiting to be filled. Their emptiness is expectant. His milk jug is incontestable.

In the third and final phase of Cézanne's life's work, according to my notional diagram, he pushed the notion of corporeality further still. A teenager, probably his son, lies on the grass by a river somewhere near Paris and is visibly touched by the air around him – in the same way as his Mont Sainte Victoire in Provence is touched by the sunlight and wind of a particular day's weather. Cézanne was discovering a complementarity between the equilibrium of the body and the inevitability of landscape. The indentations of some rocks in the forest of Fontainebleau have the intimacy of armpits. His late baigneuses form ranges like mountains. The deserted quarry at Bibémus looks like a portrait.

What is the secret behind this? Cézanne's conviction that what we perceive as the visible is not a given but a construction, put together by nature and ourselves. "The landscape," he said, "thinks itself in me, and I am its consciousness." He also said: "Colour is the place where our brain and the universe meet."

This is how he unpacked his black box.

The Card Players, an iconic work by Cézanne (1892).

Les Grandes Baigneuses, 1898–1905: the triumph of Poussinesque stability and geometric balance.

Still Life with a Curtain (1895) illustrates Cézanne's increasing trend towards terse compression of forms and dynamic tension between geometric figures.