Cezanne's Watercolors, Guided by Light

By Paul Richard
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, March 28, 2006

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.

His painting is still more abstract. All you see at first is a sea of tinted patches often overlapping. As your eye proceeds from left to right, Cezanne's formless patches begin to take on shape, turning into triangles that rhyme with one another.

Provence doesn't look like that. Cezanne's trick is metaphoric. He doesn't show the streamside rocks, or the weeds that grow between the rocks, or the surface of the water, and yet you sense the cragginess, the smoothness of the water, the thickness of the shrubbery, the moisture in the air.

How did he do it? How did Cezanne wrangle that trembling of pencil lines, and that strew of pointed patches, and make these so obedient to the spirit of the place, to its coolness and its shadows, that you know that you are there?

The answer lies, I think, in the ferocity of his looking. The subordinate marks Cezanne deployed, the color stains, the pencil lines, do not in themselves represent anything. They don't depict this rock, that leaf, nor do they veer off into prettiness. They're ruthlessly controlled by an overarching vision. They're there to conjure -- without copying -- the whole scene before his eyes.

"I keep coming back to this," he wrote. "The painter must dedicate himself totally to the study of nature."

When he studied the familiar scene just outside his door, he did so with the same intensity. "Pistachio Tree in the Courtyard of the Chateau Noir," circa 1900, is from the Art Institute of Chicago. His method is the same. The branches of the trees display the same familiar stuttering of pencil lines. And yet you see -- and know -- the tree line in the background, and the smoothness of the wall, and the weight of those cut stones. You can almost feel the mistral, the wind of Provence, sweeping through the trees and beating down the bushes. You can feel it in the background trees, it sets their branches swaying. An angled stroke above them places in the landscape the monumental roughness of his beloved Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Roughness pleased Cezanne. He dressed roughly, there were paint stains on his jacket. He smelled of garlic. He never lost his country accent. But don't be misled. Cezanne was no rube. He read closely and widely. He'd been a student of the law. He was versed in Greek and Latin, and would translate, for the fun of it, an idyll of Theocritus. Few painters of his time had a better education.

What he disliked was the polished. Academic art distressed him. Cezanne thought the suave smoothness of the art of J.A.D. Ingres "pernicious." His own roughness was intentional.

He was proud to seem a primitive -- "a primitive," he wrote, "of the way I have discovered."

Examining his way, deciphering his method, may seem, at first, a useful way of entering his art, but it will not take you far. Cezanne was no logician. The National Gallery's Conisbee, who put together this majestic exhibition, calls Cezanne "a total sensualist. His art is all about sensations."

It's a tingling responsiveness to the landscape of Provence, to those reddish rocks, those swaying trees, the thinness of the air, that calls his markings into harmony and holds his art together.

Cezanne's pictures don't work swiftly. They require concentration. The longer you look, the more his watercolors give you. Every stroke of graphite, every touch of paint, is present for a reason. And the longer you look, the more the painter's roughness begins to seem a sweetness, an energizing sweetness that simultaneously suffuses both your vision and your mind.

Cezanne in Provence will remain in the West Building of the National Gallery of Art through May 7. The museum, at Fourth Street and Constitution Avenue NW, is open Monday-Saturday 10 a.m.-5 p.m., and Sunday 11 a.m.-6 p.m. Admission is free. For information call 202-737-4215 or visit http://www.nga.gov/ .