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A centennial celebration of Cezanne: the innovative pioneer, renowned in his lifetime as "The Master of Aix," died 100 years ago "on the eve of a revolution in art that his work had firmly set in motion."
USA Today (Society for the Advancement of Education), March, 2006
Dominating the countryside surrounding Aix, the Montagne Sainte-Victoire loomed large in the identity of the area. Locals venerated it for its legendary ties to antiquity--its very name had come to be associated with a celebrated victory by the ancient Romans against invading Teutonic armies--while the paleontological excavations on its slopes by Cezanne's friend, Antoine-Fortune Marion, who discovered evidence of its earliest inhabitants, evoked prehistoric times. Artists had long taken note of Sainte-Victoire's distinctive silhouette, but none had approached it with the single-mindedness of Cezanne. He conducted a long, intense engagement with the mountain, visible from virtually every location he painted in the Axois countryside, that resulted in at least 25 oils and watercolors, starting from the 1880s until his death.
In "Montagne Sainte-Victoire" (c. 1887), an arch of tree branches in the foreground frames a panoramic view that unfolds across a wide valley. At the foot of the mountain, a modern railway viaduct reads like a Roman aqueduct, suggesting the classical landscapes of 17th-century painters such as Nicolas Poussin, whom Cezanne greatly admired. With its harmonious palette of greens and blues and an all-encompassing vista, the painting captures the tranquil beauty of Cezanne's corner of Provence in a manner reminiscent of the paintings of the bay of L'Estaque executed two years earlier. It was his personal, living Arcadia.
It is in his late, extraordinary paintings of Sainte-Victoire that Cezanne's obsession with the mountain reached its culmination. Between 1902-06, he painted nine major oils and numerous watercolors from virtually the same spot, a hillside above his studio at Les Lauves outside of Aix. Quite distinct from the earlier classical views of Sainte-Victoire, these intense images draw their power from animated brushwork and vivid coloring, often with passages left unpainted. In "Montagne Sainte-Victoire Seen from Les Lauves" (1902-04), motifs such as the mountain, trees, and houses are constructed out of patches of color that create a faceted pattern on the verge of dissolving into pure abstraction. the patches make the canvas seem alive with movement and lay bare the painstaking process by which Cezanne translated his sensory experience of nature--its color, light, and spatial dimensions onto the two-dimensional picture plane. As he noted late in life, "To read nature is to see it ... by means of color patches, following upon each other according to a law of harmony.... To paint is to record the sensations of color."
Alter his family sold the Jas de Bouffan in 1899, Cezanne moved back into the city. However, the studio in his apartment could not accommodate the most ambitious project of his final years: three monumental scenes of bathers in a landscape. He acquired a plot of land north of the city on a hillside known as Les Lauves, within walking distance of his apartment. There, he set about building a more serviceable space. The Atelier des Lauves, a two-story structure that still exists, gave Cezanne the privacy he craved while placing him closer to favorite motifs such as the Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Cezanne often painted directly in the open air. He even worked on his "Large Bathers" outside: he had a special doorway built for the oversize canvases, more than six feet wide, so that they could be moved in and out of the garden. He had treated the theme of bathers for many years, not only in oil paintings, but in many watercolor studies. The subject had personal associations for Cezanne, for it conjured up his idyllic youth spent swimming in the River Arc with Zola. Baille, and others.
