Cezanne's Watercolors, Guided by Light

The show-within-the-show arrives midway through the oils in "Cezanne in Provence" at the National Gallery of Art. In two rooms are 29 sheets of paper, each lightly touched. Their thoughtful, pale beauty -- tender and alerting -- refreshes the exhibit the way a demitasse of iced sorbet interrupts the feast.

Twenty-nine watercolors by Paul Cezanne (1839-1906). He did the finest late in life. You seldom get to see so many. They're different from his canvases, especially the early ones, whose thick and oily paint he spread like butter with his palette knife.

Cezanne's late watercolors aren't thick with color. They're largely untouched white paper. That whiteness is, of course, the light source of these images, which appear, when you first see them, to be made of heart-of-light.

This is how he did them: With a bright sheet set before him, he would look out at Provence. Sunbaked rock and tree, greenery and mountain. And while looking at the landscape he would touch the paper gently in two ways -- rhythmically, with a graphite pencil, and wetly, with a brush. His dripping brush left wet marks that, once they had dried, would leave stained into the paper tinted see-through veils in closely sequenced colors as thin as Chinese tea.

Lesser watercolor painters use their pencil for drawing the outlines of things, and for shading them, and their colors for coloring in. Not Cezanne. He didn't want flat, uninflected, Japanese-print colors. "Without volume," he insisted, "there are only cartoons." He didn't want outlines either. He called the tempting inclination to "circumscribe the contours with a black line" a "fault that must be fought at all costs." He had something else in mind.

Deconstructing beauty is usually a chump's game, but Cezanne's late watercolors seem to call for deconstruction, for the painter had a system, and he asks your eye to track it. You can count every separate pencil stroke. You can count each colored blotch.

Watercolors die. Many of Cezanne's, exposed too long to sunlight, have faded irretrievably. Those chosen for the show by curator Philip Conisbee are exceptionally bright. He could not have selected sheets much richer than these.

They are irresistibly instructive. Each one shows exactly how its marks were made. Cezanne's method can't explain the beauty he achieved, but still it is a method, and breaking down his system seems a proper place to start.

These are all tripartite pictures. Three different ways of thinking are going on in all of them. First, there's the drawing, the pencil drawing. Second, there's his painting, the way that he deploys his discrete patches of wet color. And, third, there's the outdoor view, the aspect of Provence, spread before his eyes.

Somehow he is able to bring all three together -- while holding them apart. It's in watching Cezanne do this that one begins engaging the magic of his art.

"The Bridge of Trois-Sautets," a loan from Cincinnati, is one of his last sheets. We're underneath the bridge, its white arc is high above us. There is sun-glare in that whiteness. Cezanne had clambered down the rocky bank. The air must have been cooler down there by the river. That's where he chose to paint.

Start with his drawing, which isn't line drawing. Look, for instance, at the way he outlines with his pencil the tall tree at the right. No one sharp line defines it. Instead, he offers 20 lines vibrating in parallel. It's those 20 lines together shivering in sympathy that guide the mind and eye around the roundness of the tree.