Aix-en-Provence: Cézanne’s Atelier (#697)

There are museums where we go to see paintings.

And then there are places where we go to meet the painter.

Cézanne’s atelier in Aix-en-Provence is one of those places.

It sits above the city on the hill of Les Lauves, a modest building surrounded by trees and an overgrown Provençal garden. Paul Cézanne bought the land in 1901 and had the studio built for himself. From 1902 until his death in 1906, this was where he came to work, particularly in the mornings. It became the setting for the final, extraordinary years of his life as a painter.

You arrive expecting art. Instead, you find a room.

And somehow the room tells you more about Cézanne than another gallery filled with Cézannes might have done.

The Climb Up the Hill

The atelier is not in the grand center of Aix. You have to leave the cafés and fountains behind and make your way uphill.

That seems appropriate.

Cézanne had a complicated relationship with Aix. He was born here in 1839, left for Paris, returned, left again, and returned again. Paris gave him access to the great artistic arguments of his time, but Provence gave him something more fundamental:

His subjects.

The ochre rocks of Bibémus. The trees and fields around Aix. The family estate at Jas de Bouffan. And, above all, Mont Sainte-Victoire.

Aix was not simply where Cézanne happened to live. The landscape around it became part of the language through which he learned to see.

By the time he built the atelier at Les Lauves, Cézanne was in his sixties. He was no longer a young painter trying to convince Paris that he mattered. He was increasingly respected by younger artists, although still far from universally understood.

He had money. He had recognition.

What he wanted now was something simpler.

A place to work.

The Room

The studio is upstairs.

It is large, high-ceilinged and flooded with the carefully controlled light Cézanne needed. Large windows and a north-facing glass wall helped provide the steady illumination essential to his work. There is even a tall opening through which large canvases could be moved.

But architecture is not what makes the room memorable.

It is the objects.

A table. A ladder. An easel. Bottles. Pots. Jugs. A plaster cupid. Skulls.

The familiar objects that Cézanne arranged and rearranged as subjects for his still lifes remain here. The studio preserves his furniture, working materials and many of the models that populated his paintings.

Suddenly those paintings hanging in museums around the world become less remote.

That pot was here. That bottle was here. That table was here. Cézanne stood here.

And that changes things.

We are accustomed to encountering great artists after history has tidied them up. Their paintings are framed, catalogued, insured and illuminated perfectly on immaculate museum walls. Guards stand nearby. Visitors whisper. Labels tell us what we are supposed to know.

But nobody creates art like that.

Art begins in rooms.

With dirty brushes. Half-finished canvases. Objects moved from one side of a table to another. With frustration. With repetition. With somebody looking at the same thing for a very long time.

That is what Cézanne’s atelier restores.

Not Cézanne the monument. Cézanne the worker.

Learning to See

Perhaps that is the most striking thing about visiting the atelier.

Cézanne looked. And looked again. An apple was never simply an apple. A mountain was never simply a mountain.

He was interested in what happened between the eye, the object and the canvas.

Perspective could shift. A tabletop might seem to tilt. Objects could appear simultaneously solid and unstable. Color could create volume without relying entirely upon traditional drawing.

He was not simply recording what he saw.

He was trying to understand how seeing works.

This is one reason his influence became so enormous. Picasso and Braque would push these questions much further into Cubism. Generations of modern painters would abandon the idea that a painting needed to behave like a window through which we looked at reality.

Cézanne helped open that door.

Yet standing in his atelier, all of that art history suddenly seems almost too grand.

There is nothing grand about the room.

There is simply an easel facing the light.

Sainte-Victoire

And then there is the mountain.

Mont Sainte-Victoire dominates the Cézanne story.

He painted it repeatedly - not because he had run out of subjects, but because it was never the same mountain twice.

Morning changed it. Cloud changed it. Season changed it. Distance changed it.

And Cézanne himself changed.

That may be the real lesson of repeatedly painting the same subject. The subject remains there while the observer changes.

A short distance from the atelier, the landscape opens toward Sainte-Victoire. Cézanne went out into this countryside carrying his painting equipment, returning again and again to the mountain and the landscape surrounding Aix. Today, the nearby Jardin des Peintres preserves one of the celebrated viewpoints toward Sainte-Victoire.

Standing there after visiting the studio, it is tempting to search the mountain for a Cézanne painting.

But perhaps the opposite happens.

You begin searching Cézanne’s paintings for the mountain.

The Last Years

There is something poignant about knowing that this was Cézanne’s final studio.

Here he worked on some of the paintings of his last period, including portraits of his gardener Vallier and the monumental Grandes Baigneuses.

He was still experimenting. Still dissatisfied. Still looking.

That may be what I like most about the place.

Cézanne was becoming one of the most important painters in the history of Western art, yet he apparently never reached a point where he believed the problem had been solved.

There was always another canvas. Another arrangement. Another look at Sainte-Victoire. Another attempt.

There is something reassuring about that.

We tend to imagine mastery as arrival - the moment when someone finally knows exactly what they are doing.

Cézanne suggests something quite different.

Mastery may simply mean becoming increasingly comfortable with the fact that you will never completely arrive.

The Empty Easel

Eventually you come back to the easel.

There is nobody standing in front of it now.

Cézanne died in 1906. The studio eventually became a museum and remains preserved as one of the most intimate places associated with him. In 2012 it received France's Maison des Illustres designation.

Yet it does not feel particularly like a museum.

Perhaps because the most important exhibit is absence. The painter is gone. The paintings are gone.

Most of them now live thousands of kilometers away in museums in Paris, London, New York, Philadelphia and elsewhere.

But the things he looked at remain. The jug. The bottle. The plaster figure. The table. The window. The light. And the empty easel.

You walk back down the hill toward Aix, toward the cafés and fountains and plane trees and the bustle of the Cours Mirabeau.

But you carry something of that quiet room with you.

It is easy to leave a great museum thinking about great paintings.

It is harder to leave Cézanne’s atelier without thinking about the act of making them.

About looking carefully. About returning to the same subject. About trying again.

And perhaps that is why this small studio on a hill above Aix is so moving.

You don't really go there to see Cézanne's art.

You go there to see where Cézanne learned to see.

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