Forest Interior, Paul Cézanne

Résumé du document

Paul Cézanne painted the landscape Forest Interior between 1898 and 1899. This small painting depicts the interior of a forest, at a nameless location. Cézanne regularly painted landscapes in Aix en Provence, like the Mont Sainte Victoire which he painted over and over again in an effort to create a "harmony parallel to nature". Unlike pure impressionists, he is not only trying to retrace the impression from an instant through the depiction of light and in a rather superficial way; he is trying on the contrary to reproduce the visual experience of watching and interacting with the landscape. The originality of the painting stands out even more if we compare it to another depiction of a landscape in the XIXth century in France. Rousseau's Forest of Fontainebleau, painted in 1855. In Forest Interior the composition is simple and the viewer is aware of the different brushstrokes that stand out of the painting; Cézanne and the viewer are both aware that this is the flat surface of a painting; however, the painter offers us a scene that is at once close and deep.

Extraits

[...] However, he offers us a deep and dense landscape in which he creates harmony. He enables us to see and to conceptualize an essential and eternal moment. The forest is the womb of life, and we can it breath, see it as it is. He thus rejects the notion of painting what he knows and instead paints something between what he sees and what he feels. He allows us at the same time to reconcile the visual experience with intellectual reason. [...]

[...] However, the painting's depth also pulls us inward. The use of lighter colour in the foreground allows a shallow space, contrasted with the darker colours of the background, between the trees, where the dark hues/ values of green, brown and black give the impression of a deeper space. Also the foreground seems more because of the application of brushstrokes in the same sense, in an almost regular way on some rocks. For the trees on the other hand, the brushstrokes seem more cut, messy and fragmented. [...]

[...] Court, Cézanne et la vérité de la peinture, Etudes 2006/11, Tome 55, p. 507-516 Cézanne, Rochers dans la Forêt, circa 1894-1896, Metropolitan Museum of Art. Neil Cox, Cubism, Phaidon R. Court, Cézanne et la vérité de la peinture, Etudes 2006/11, Tome 55, p. 507-516 R. Court, Cézanne et la vérité de la peinture, Etudes 2006/11, Tome 55, p. 507-516 Merleau-Ponty, Cézanne's Doubt in Phenomenology of Perception R. Court, Cézanne et la vérité de la peinture, Etudes 2006/11, Tome 55, p. 507-516 http://www.philamuseum.org/exhibitions/312.html?page=4 Neil Cox, Cubism, Phaidon R. [...]

[...] We can see the contrast with Rousseau's painting. As a work of large size, Forest of Fontainebleau represents a remarkable scene, a specific one. Everything in the painting claims this specificity. We can see the different sheep, white or black, we can count them as well as we can count the trees. A man leads those sheep to a specific place, at sunset, a specific time of the day, during what seems to be the end of summer. On the contrary, Cézanne's forest cannot be identified. [...]

[...] After all, the forest allows us to breath through its own breath. Alternately, we could interpret the forest as the womb of life: we see this in the painting's warm depth, closed to the outside world. We can see here and there some patches of colour that stray from Cézanne's basic palette of brown, orange, green and grey. In a tree on the left is a red patch colour. Is this a flower? Or a bird? And on the right, we can see a patch of blue, maybe some water. [...]