(4 of 5)
Cezanne has often been called a universal artist, but you cannot grasp his work unless you realize that he was a deeply local one as well. He was not just French but southern Mediterranean French, a Provencal; and the obsessive, enduring, reinforcing sense of the particular landscape of his cultural memory is wound into his work so far as to completely remove it from the domain of pure, unsymbolic form. In a sense it is part of the great movement away from the national toward the local that characterized so much of European, including French, culture in the latter half of the 19th century.
You feel it particularly in Cezanne's series of landscapes of his "sacred mountain," Mont Sainte-Victoire. Now it is a mere shimmer of profile in a watercolor, whose blank paper becomes the white light of the Midi, burning through the pale flecks of color. Elsewhere, in the late oils, it achieves a tremendous faceted density, that crouched lion of rock. In between there are lyrical tributes to it, as in Mont Sainte-Victoire Seen from Bellevue, 1882-85, where it appears almost shyly on the left of a tender, early springtime landscape, all new green, traversed by an aqueduct (sign of the ancient Roman roots of Provence) and crossed by a pale road whose kinks are tied to the branch forms of the pine that rises in the foreground to bisect the canvas.
These apart, perhaps the most beautiful evocation of Provence in Cezanne's work is a seascape, The Gulf of Marseille Seen from L'Estaque, circa 1886. A blue bay, with blue hills on the horizon and a pale, scrubbed blue sky; a pier running into the blueness on the upper left, reaching (it seems) toward a white scarf of smoke coming from a chimney in the right foreground and binding the whole space between; below, the faceted blocks of houses and the lovely staccato rhythm of chimneys. It radiates peace and balance and, above all, easefulness--the sense of being united with a landscape of ancestral memory.
But anxiety is never far away; it breaks through time and again. It is the Thanatos to the Eros of Cezanne's Provencalism. The summation of both--along with his deep relation to his own pictorial gods, such as Poussin--is in the paintings of bathers that Cezanne worked on in the last decade of his life.
In the last of them, his unfinished The Large Bathers, 1906, one sees the characteristics that have always rendered these peculiar arcadian scenes difficult to love even as they compel admiration and even a certain awe. This group of 14 stock nudes gathered around what must have been a picnic basket is as resolutely antisensuous as an assembly of naked women could possibly be. Some of them look like seals stranded on rocks. Others are lumpish giantesses. None were painted from actual models because, as his friend the painter Emile Bernard recalled, "he was the slave of an extreme sense of decorum, and...this slavery had two causes: the one, that he didn't trust himself with women; the other, that he had religious scruples and a genuine feeling that such things could not be done in a small provincial town without provoking scandal." Instead, he recycled his old art-school drawings, a process which must have contributed to the strangely abstract look of the figures.