Cézanne in Provence is an unusual exhibition in more than one respect, so ‘obvious’ that people feel they have already seen it, although before today it existed only in collective imagination.
An artist who died a century ago, celebrated in a museum where he discovered painting as a child, and some 120 major works now scattered throughout the world are brought face to face with their native region for the first time ever.
As Denis Coutagne reminds us, Cézanne asked Provence to give him the almost carnal material that he needed in order to paint the presence of nature with which he was grappling – and it is indeed to Cézanne's Provence that this exhibition is dedicated.
Major renovation work on the Musee Granet in recent years has enabled it to devote 4,500 square metres to the exhibition. Twelve of its rooms have been used for a thematic hanging of over 85 paintings and more than 30 watercolours assembled from prestigious public and private collections all over the world: Austria, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and the United States.
The exhibition opens with an evocation of the family house of the Jas de Bouffan where the young painter covered the walls of the Grand Salon with huge panels. Some of the works which are now dispersed have been reunited here. At the Jas, he painted his first outdoor landscapes – the avenue of chestnut trees, the basin, the winding road – and portraits of his friends and family including The Artist's Father Reading L’Evénement, 1866.
Rooms 3 and 4 are devoted to his watercolours, astutely hung to heighten a panoramic vision. Cézanne gradually came to see watercolour as a genre in its own right, which he used to catch the essence of a motif, bordering on abstraction in his masterly use of the blank paper like a burst of light.
Next come paintings of L'Estaque, a small fishing village in the Bay of Marseilles which was then in the early stages of industrialisation, as shown by the tall factory chimneys. “It's like a playing card: red roofs against the blue sea,” he wrote to Pissarro in 1876. The site was in a way the birth of Cézanne as a painter of Provence; if the Sainte-Victoire is the pinnacle of his artistic adventure, it was at L'Estaque, between 1869 and 1885, that he laid the foundations and ruminated on his ideas.
Rooms 6 and 7 group the paintings executed in Bellevue and Gardanne in 1885-87, a pivotal period in the painter's life and work as he tested himself against new themes, in particular sweeping panoramas, open landscapes with the Sainte-Victoire outlined in the background. Here he belongs to the lineage of the great Italian landscapists – he who never made the trip to Rome – painting “Poussins from nature”. There was no sea at Gardanne and he focused on the structure and complex geometrical pattern of the village dominated by a rising movement, condensing and amplifying a line of research that Braque, Picasso and Derain were to take up after him.
Trees, forests and roads make up a separate section. Cézanne was interested in rocky geological structures which give both a rigorous approach to forms and a chaotic vision of the towering stones.
With two versions of The Large Pine from St Petersburg and Sao Paulo, here presented like a diptych, the painter explores the transparency and opacity of nature, its geometrical structures and its unfathomable depths. In one, the tree thrusts its branches out of the canvas; in the other, it shrinks into the confined space of the frame.
Room 9 exhibits portraits of friends and family at Le Jas de Bouffan: Cardplayers concentrating on their game, Peasants caught somewhere between the real and the ideal, and his wife, Madame Cézanne in the Conservatory, of whom he is reported to have said that she posed like an apple.
From 1890, Cézanne became interested in two wide open spaces in which he found some of his most characteristic motifs. Château Noir gave rise to some of his most powerful works; he loved this wild place and the strange house with its Gothic references and tragic atmosphere. At Bibémus, the quarries which supplied the stone for the city of Aix, Cézanne painted what Rewald called “a palace open to the sky” while the majestic outline of Montagne Sainte Victoire recalled his capacity to organise the world.
