Lecture 44: Renoir, Pissarro, and Cézanne
but an essential part of the painting’s structure, because they intersect with
the daringly placed pine tree that vertically bisects the canvas.The pine tree is too close to the front of the picture to be its focus; it causes
our eyes to shift from side to side. The right side of the painting is more
open, with a broader expanse of valley, foothills, and sky. The secure
horizontal of the viaduct subdivides this side into two equal parts; its line
continues more subtly into the left side. The left side is much denser, with
the compact stand of pine trees at the edge merging with the mountain. Such
a description makes the painting sound almost geometric, but although it has
a mathematical constituent, it is not rigid but compellingly organic.Having established his deep space, Cézanne then took care to reconnect the
illusionistic distance with the picture surface. For example, the branches on
the upper left side of the center tree nestle into the contour of the mountain,
picking up its rhythm, while the branch halfway down the left side seems to
be À oating in space. Cézanne has released it from the tree and allowed it to
À oat like a green cloud, so that it, too, mediates between near and far. The
corresponding branch on the right side seems to meander down to the valley
À oor, where it deposits its leaves among the ¿ elds. Such inventions are the
hallmark of Cézanne and are about picture-making, not mere representation
of the land.Another site near Aix painted by Cézanne was the Quarry at Bibémus
(c. 1895). This abstract composition is complex and sorts itself out only as
we follow the faceted planes of the stone walls and allow our eyes to step
among the green accents of trees and bushes up to the top of the painting,
capped by a sliver of sky.Many people value Cézanne, like Chardin in the preceding century, for his
still life paintings above all else. And by common consent, Still-Life with
Apples and Oranges (c. 1895–1900) is among the greatest. Cézanne’s fruits
and other objects do not obey the laws of physics or gravity; they obey
the higher law of painting. This incisive composition, in which the richly
patterned tapestry is balanced by the plowshare of the white tablecloth, is the
¿ eld on which his fruits are disposed, their vibrating contours not necessarily
adhering to their bodies. The fruits are anything but “still”; they are in motion