Cézanne in Provence [antikvár]

The Spirit of Provence The spirit of Provence slumbers under the olive trees; the vigorous countryside embraces it, the odor of the pines exhales it, the sun celebrates it____Yet one day I found this spirit, which is scattered pell- mell in a thousand hidden places in the red earth, the cliffs, the luminous pines, the plains and the hills—one day I suddenly discovered it as I was looking at the paintings of Cézanne. It sprung from them puissant and whole, in its unique splendor, which is at once rural and mystical, for the spirit reigns in superb reality over the entire oeuvre of this painter dedicated to lucidity. The Provençal soul its faith are also communicated to us by Paul Cézanne, who initiates us into his observations, and who reveals this soul and this faith to us in the kind of divine illumination with which his landscapes are suffused. The tortured or tranquil shapes of the rocks, the red blood which he lets passionately flow over the parched soil, the heavy masses of the horizons, the flaming sea, the reveries of the rivers, the gentleness and innocence of the lines which interweave with rough tenderness in his paintings, the harvests desiccated by the sun, the river from which bathing children emerge, and finally, the air, the air that remembers, that thinks, that knows, that wishes all of these noble forms he calls to life evoke in us something akin to a religious feeling, for they give us the sense that, as in bibhcal times, words will spring from the trees and the rocks, that everything is awaiting the redeemer, that the world yearns for a lord, that the Provençal soul would descend into one of us.' Thus ran the poet Joachim Gasquet's words of praise for one of the most beautiful and historically significant regions in the south of France, and for the artist who lent it undying expression. The majestic calm of Cézanne's depictions of the gently rolling hills and bizarre rock formations, the broad plains and sunbaked plateaus of Provence struck Gasquet with the force of a revelation. Provence exerted a magnetic attraction on Cézanne throughout his life. The landscape in the vicinity of his parents' house, in particular, but also the seacoast near Marseille, the villages around Aix-en-Provence, the formations of Mont Sainte-Victoire provided him again and again with key motifs on his quest for The Sea at VEstaque valid pictorial expression. These motifs, in turn, permit us to trace 1895-98 a stylistic development that ranges from the dark-hued, heavily