The Experience of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire Painting

Friday, February 14, 2003

11:56:48 AM

This past Wednesday evening, my sister and I attended the L’invitation au voyage exhibit currently on display at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal. Rather than get into a general account of my experience of this exhibit, on loan from the Hermitage Museum in St-Petersburg, which I am doing elsewhere anyhow, I want to speak specifically of a Cézanne painting which I saw there, before my memory starts playing tricks on me.

The painting was called Mont Sainte-Victoire, from the late nineteenth century, though I fail to remember the date exactly. A strange thing is that I remember almost nothing from it except that I had a powerful experience before it.

I walked into one of the rooms and was faced immediately with a painting. At first, I perceived it, I saw a painting and walked towards it. I saw the colors, the forms, and then realized it was a Cézanne. I recognized it as Cézanne and saw the art historical implications flash through my head, i.e. what it means to see a Cézanne, what it means to be a Cézanne painting in a museum.

I knew of his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, knew that the region was very dear to him, was almost a sacred or religious site to Paul Cézanne. I began crying. I had cried before while viewing a Cézanne painting, and in fact, at the Museum of Fine Arts I have only ever cried before Cézanne paintings, and specifically ones in which nature is depicted, say, landscape paintings, or ones with forests (I think the other one was his Déjeuner sur l’herbe). I have had shivers run through my spine before other paintings and painters, Riopelle, Dali, but Cézanne, for some reason, and in his landscapes particularly, speaks more closely to my emotions, to my psyche, to some deep abyss in my inward dimension.

I began to feel melancholic, but quickly changed my mind when I began noticing that the tears were creating an obstacle to my viewing, not physically in the sense of making the act of seeing difficult, but the overwhelming feeling of despair, of despondency, or just plain sadness is what it was, made it difficult for me to contemplate the painting with any objectivity, and so I heard Immanuel Kant’s voice in my head and tried indifference.

The proper term, rather than indifference, would be disinterestedness. I made an attempt to see the painting without interest, and it helped greatly. I believe that this was when I saw Cézanne as just another human being, like me, like these people in the museum alongside me. A nice amount of disinterestedness, I believe, along with other things, allowed me to not be moved by the painting. I was moved nonetheless, but not in a dramatic, histrionic fashion. I saw the painting for what it was, and this, I am beginning to understand, and perhaps falsely, but nonetheless: I think this was what Kant meant.

There was definitely something monumental about this Mont Sainte-Victoire. I may have seen one of his Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings before at the same exhibit in which I saw the Déjeuner sur l’herbe. I first saw the painting as powerful, as sublime, but then began seeing it as a painting, an object before me. I went in and out of seeing it and seeing myself seeing it. It was alienating when I saw my sight before it, saw my own eyes as objects perceiving another object. I saw through the eyes of Picasso and other painters who saw this and other Cézanne paintings before me. It was definitely dialectical, metaphysical. I felt interest. My tears were interested tears. I appropriated the painting to my emotions, to my feelings of sadness and despair. Despair at what? At life, at being alive while Cézanne is dead, at seeing the painting outlive the painter. And I was a painter, a living painting, prostrated before a work of art. The impulse of crying felt theatrical, even artificial. This is not how art normally moves me. And though there was ample incentive to keep crying, for I do not cry often any more and I felt the need to, and once you begin tearing up, it is almost a necessity to give in to the swelling lamentation.

I did not give in. I cut it short at its inception, before it took over my body. I remained a fool before fool’s gold nonetheless, but I did not falsify my experience of the art object through any pretence or affectation. I tried a new manner, viewing it as-is, and it was a small, humble thing, a little canvas with little import. Ah, but it does not, cannot end there! The canvas now which I saw with disinterested eyes has kept its tranquil power, its serene immensity! I fear that tears, had I given into them, would have led to a type of forgetfulness or oblivion, that I would not be sitting here now capable of relating small nuances about the experience, that throwing myself into the tumults of sublimity would obtain in the end a sort of blanket of smog through which the crystal of experience would vanish into inaccuracy and possibly falsification or an ailing remembrance. I cannot, however, state with any level of certainty that I am not now falsifying or correcting that experience of being before one of Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, for it was such a thing, like I said, dialectical & metaphysic, that cannot be expressed with utmost precision afterwards. I can look back, but those half-tears are still there. I am still prone to sublime feelings of helplessness and insurmountable immensity. But at least I did not deify Cézanne, and that has humbled the both of us.
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