The first painting that meets your eyes, when you enter the major Cézanne exhibition at Tate Modern, is “The Basket of Apples” from 1893, a notable still-life filled with the usual props: the wine bottle, the tipped-up basket laden with oranges and apples which spill out over an undulating tablecloth draped over a wooden table and a dish with a carefully stacked tower of what seem to be bread rolls or perhaps savoiardi, set to one side for balance. The immediate feature that caught my eye in this painting, was a pink line, the line of a stripe on the tablecloth; we have a tea towel at home that it reminded me of - a familiar fragment of domesticity. This line, it’s nothing special really, a soft daub of paint, a simple brushstroke…a simple coloured line. You’d think it would not be worth considering; after all, it’s the apples that always get spoken about. Apparently, this work is loaded with “more apples than any other painting by Cézanne” — point made. Yet, upon closer inspection, this line is not as innocuous as all that — what in Cézanne ever is? Has there ever been a painter whose commitment to the brushstroke was so complete? This is not said in awe, rather it’s an obvious statement of fact; the evidence and historical anecdotes bear this out.
It’s an odd line, this pink line. For one thing it should “tuck in”, dissolve into the shadow of the fold that sits at the top of its reach yet tuck in it doesn’t; it sits proud of the shadow, floating as if liberated from the laws of optical physics. As it is part of the logic of a painting, such laws are always only reference points, rather than absolutes to a painter. Cézanne made a wilful choice to put it there, to let it appear in this way, after the consideration that followed the action of execution; it couldn’t be an afterthought - with him missing a tidy up that never happened: the painting looks too well worked, too specific, too felt and dealt with for that. Like all the best Cézanne paintings it seems to stare straight at you, to push you in the shoulder, even. What a wilful brushstroke it is. For one thing, it’s not a singular stroke: it’s been adjusted; blurred on its edges; it leans to create the perspective of the cloth on the table; it yields in its weight and situation also, to add that sensitively observed reality of a cloth moving in and out of the light, the colour softly dyed into the fabric. Into this soft pink a more subtle warmer, coral colour, almost indistinguishable but still there, quietly switches temperature. That line clearly took a little more time to make than it appears to have taken.
As in all Cézanne paintings, time is difficult to pin down. Are we looking at a particular moment in the day? We should be, the subject matter is a clue: a still-life, though not as prone to the environmental challenge of a landscape or the physical one of a portrait, is still a revealing motif for a moment in the day as colours can tell us if lamplight or daylight lit the scene. Cézanne took notoriously long sessions to resolve his paintings (wax fruit having to be used for the duration of a painting, replacing regular fruit which would rot during the time they were needed to work from). Yet, these concerns for localised depictions of atmosphere or light are eschewed in favour of much more synthetic outcomes - Cézanne controlled time, rather than being a slave to it. Therefore, his paintings seldom have markers of time; sunlight seems willing to wait for him, it sticks around patiently, and never parades its gaudier effects. Nothing is hurried, everything is pondered over without appearing ponderous.
That pink line: its duality: depicting a detail of the fabric, yet simultaneously existing as an autonomous pictorial element in the taut plastic logic of the painting. Its nuance betraying a scrutiny and a synthesised reaction to detail, to form — all processed to become a new reality, an artificial yet supra-real one. The way it lifts from that shadow is like a trumpet call to the synthetic. So many artists just go with the flow of rendering forms in controlled ways to provide illusory realities. Such approaches can seem banal and a trifle trite when compared to Cézanne’s. What are artists looking at? Seemingly not looking at all, by comparison to Cézanne. This was always a great contribution of his to art: the act of a probing, investigative looking which underpins all his work. Cézanne is fully tuned into the mechanics of painting; he looks at the world, intensely, to load up and saturate his visual memory — from there on in it’s the painting that calls the shots, not the scene. He never simply renders a scene. His art is not made in service of the motif, rather the motif serves Cézanne. The power balance shifts from motif to artist. Consider these two realities: the reality of the table, bottle, cloth and fruit and the second – unfolding- reality of the painting which takes shape on the easel. At some point between these two realities there is a sweet spot of experience. A space that an artist as great as Cézanne makes his own. This space contains the meeting of these two realities. Remember, the motif is already a moment of reality already set in time – it’s complete, static, fixed. Yet the painting is a developing one, a reality shaping itself through- and indeed as a result of- time. Now regard this space as a membrane like division between the form in sight and the painting being made of it. A membrane in which exists all the actions and experiences of perception and reaction. It’s a membrane somehow containing time. Better painters can expand this space, suspend this time, yet still create a sense of it being instantaneous, instinctive, reflexive...in the moment. Yet, they are never hurried or in a hurry, and little if anything is left to chance.
Cézanne’s work provides a sort of litmus test for a painter: the way decisions are made in his paintings, the way he always commits to the decision and never sees it as a subordinate act serving only to reinforce a presented illusion of form. As a painter there is a choice: either one makes paintings on this (his) side of the fence, or one ignores the challenge of such a synthesis of seeing into making and remains blissfully ignorant of this challenge. Surely the former is the road to take. Cézanne reminds us that, time and time again, it’s painting first, subject-matter second. If we remove the subject-matter and work purely with the paint from scratch as an abstract painter, the challenge remains of how does one get to the content; what new non-representational “form” should it take? This is still fertile ground: content… it’s always about content.