On the Ground with Cezanne

Paul Cezanne, 1906, Photograph by Ker-Xavier Roussel

by Kyle Gallup

Viewing “Cezanne’s Card Players” exhibit currently at the Metropolitan Museum was like visiting with a dear friend. The show renewed my thinking about Cezanne’s painting, and in a personal way. I appreciate anew the totality of his vision and the intimate relationship he had with his Provencal landscape.

In Aix for the summer

Having painted in Aix for a summer some time ago, I know what the light, color, and heat do to the landscape. It makes things shimmer. The glare from the Mediterranean sun on the rocky dry land, makes everything very hard to read visually. If you stand anywhere in Tholonet, looking south, north, east or west, you’d feel like you were inside a Cezanne painting. He painted what he saw. He kept his paintings open while he worked to accommodate what he was looking at. Cezanne’s color comes right out of the landscape. It’s very complicated light and color to translate onto canvas or paper. I believe he struggled with it everyday. I’m sure of this. I also think that by the end of his life, he did have doubts—you know when you’re looking at a landscape for a long time and know it really well and then you take your painting back into the studio to look at it, but it doesn’t have the feeling of all you saw and wanted to capture? This probably disappointed him.

Paul Cezanne, Chateau Noir, 1903-4, oil on canvas, 29 x 36 3/4 (MoMA)

Cezanne’s handheld palette

I can’t emphasize enough how difficult it is to paint outside in the bright sun of southern  France. It flattens everything out. It simplifies forms. You must squint to see color differentiations. When looking at a Cezanne landscape painting, I try to imagine what his palette might have looked like at the beginning of his workday and then, at the end of the day. He may have laid out all his warm colors on one side of the palette—let’s say raw sienna, burnt sienna, naples yellow, red ochre, vermilion and some lead white. On the cool side, he may have had ultramarine blue, cobalt, viridian, and a small amount of peach black. By the end of the day the opposing colors would have met in the middle of the palette, mingling with their counterparts, becoming grayed-down with all the mixing and cross-mixing he was doing. He would also add a little white to build opacity or to make color tones lighter. Cezanne was very careful with black in his paintings, and used it sparingly. He used it to emphasize the volume of the brushy tree greens, adding density and mass. He also used black to extend the various dark greens to their darkest tone, being careful not to turn them black like the shadows.

Daubing color, master mixer

Cezanne daubed color onto the canvas with relatively small brushes while accommodating the ever-changing light and shadow. Observing how transient light affected the color, he structured his pictures accordingly. Cezanne’s skies have green in them. It’s from the nearby tree colors he had mixed. His paintings have grayed down oranges that turn to delicate purples, gray-purples. He was a master mixer. With all the deep analyzing of the color he was seeing while working, he never let go of his emotional connection to his subjects. At times, his bunches of trees would dissolve into a mass of brush stokes of color, and buildings became the most beautiful and satisfying orange cubes in all of painting history—if he only knew.

Living, breathing, painting

Cezanne approached painting in a direct, personal and modern way. He had the courage to leave areas of his canvas unpainted in a single picture. Sometimes I forget that when I look at Cezanne, but who else was doing this at that time? He touched the surface with deliberation over and over, building up the color in some areas, almost modeling the faces or hands in a portrait. But at the same time he would leave sketchy flat backgrounds to flow into the more modeled areas. Cezanne was very aware of the canvas surface as a living, breathing space on which to work. His sensitivity to the surface was acute. It gave him an opportunity to try again.

Fini for now

A century of painting history separates me from Cezanne, yet his work speaks to me today. The freshness of his paintings, their quiet emotional pull and my understanding of all he wanted from the work sustain me. At the end of his life though he was probably unsure of his accomplishments, I hope he was still gratified by the attention and respect the next generation of artists had for him.  I’m guessing he had a few respectful visitors. He must have felt somewhat satisfied by the many years he had to work day in and day out pursuing his personal dream. For me, no artist has crystallized light this viscerally or made color so tangible.



Kyle Gallup is an artist who works in collage and watercolor.