Paul Cézanne: A Private Life

1906, Aix-en-Provence.

I went back to the motif after the collapse because the motif remains what it is regardless of the body, and if the body now protests, falters, surrenders its force in the rain beneath the mountain, that does not alter the mountain’s necessity or the unfinished canvas waiting in the studio with the same quiet and intolerable right it possessed the day before I dropped in the field. The farmhands carried me home, Madame Brémond made the kind of domestic objections that practical people always make to the only work worth doing, and two days later I was back before Sainte-Victoire because the interval had clarified nothing, neither the condition of the body nor the condition of the unfinished canvas, except that delay, at this stage, is merely another form of incompletion that adds nothing to the account and costs time the account can no longer afford to spend on rest and incompletion, when the thing attempted is large enough, is no argument against the attempt.

I am sixty-seven years old. The health has been warning me for some time, though warnings are vague instruments and I have never respected vagueness. The chest, the fatigue, the damp taken too long in the clothes after a storm, the recovery slower than it was and then slower again, all of that belongs to the account now, but I am not disposed to grant the body retrospective authority over the work merely because it is beginning to speak in larger interruptions. The mountain has occupied twenty-five years; the studio on the Lauves road exists because of that occupation; the stacks of canvases leaning on one another in the room are not evidence that I have failed to conclude but evidence of the scale at which the conclusion must be earned. A man does not lightly close an inquiry that has consumed half a life. If the inquiry remains open, the size of the opening may itself be the nearest measure of what was undertaken. A painter who has spent twenty-five years returning to the same mountain and has not resolved the painting has not spent those years in failure. He has spent them discovering the true scale of the problem. The discovery of scale is itself knowledge, and knowledge of scale is what separates the painter who worked at the level of what was required from the painter who worked at the level of what was manageable.

I write in the mornings, in the intervals the weather or Madame Brémond or the body’s current arrangement imposes, when the walk to the motif has been made imprudent by one or another of these external authorities, and I write without much affection for writing because words are the account of a thing and not the thing, yet an account has its use when the thing cannot presently be reached, and after the collapse in the rain last week some account is due, if only to myself, since I have been refusing the matter for several years and the body, which lacks imagination and therefore sometimes sees more plainly than the mind, has now decided to phrase its objection in unmistakable terms. There is a disorder in the sequence of things lately. One begins at the mountain and is brought back to the bed. One thinks of the Large Bathers and finds instead the wet field at the edge of Aix, then the studio, then the father, then Pissarro, then the mountain again. I let the sequence break as it wishes. The important point is that it returns.

The unfinished canvases stacked in the studio are not, as others will eventually say because others always require neatness, the pathetic residue of an old man who could no longer finish what he began. They are the proper evidence of a painter who has understood that a serious motif does not conclude merely because the market, the Salon, the critics, the dealers, or the body would prefer conclusion to continued demand. The motif continues to ask. The mountain remains in its place north of Aix and presents in each session a relation between plane and depth, weight and appearance, colour and structure, that comes closer to being said and then withdraws by the slightest and most maddening degree. The unfinishedness belongs less to incapacity than to the fact that what is being attempted exceeds the single answer. I am not ashamed of that. On the contrary.