End-of-week treats #12: 'Roger very nearly lost his senses'
Bits from Cezanne, John Rewald, Jon Fosse, William Kentridge, Virginia Woolf, Sheku Kanneh-Mason, TS Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Eimear Walshe, Aimé Césaire and Rilke, always Rilke
Virginia Woolf once recounted the time her sister, Vanessa Bell, persuaded John Maynard Keynes, of all people, to lend them a small Cezanne he'd just bought. It was Pommes from 1878, almost A4 size, at 19x26.7cm. Their friend Roger Fry wanted to copy it.
“Nessa left the room and reappeared with a small parcel about the size of a large slab of chocolate. On one side are six [sic – there are actually seven] apples by Cezanne. Roger very nearly lost his senses. I've never seen such a sight of intoxication. He was like a bee on a sunflower. Imagine … us all gloating upon these apples. They really are very superb.”
I’m sorry I’ve been so quiet of late. A series of pieces — and a concert I did in Paris at the end of May (more on which later) — have had me in their grip. I feel like I’ve been steeped, like a teabag, in the works of William Kentridge, Katie Paterson, Heman Chong, Nhlanhla Mahlangu, Dmitri Rataud, Fiona Banner, Jane and Louise Wilson, the Surrealists (again) and, well, all of painting, for this here sprawler about it still being the dominant medium, under the polemic headline “Have we reached peak painting?” (Here’s two things people don’t necessarily understand about journalism: first, the writer never writes the headline; second, if said headline is a question, as here, it’s only because the piece can firmly answer it. Which in this case was, of course, a resounding “Of course not! Painting cannot peak! Nor has it ever actually died!”).
Sometimes I find research for pieces overlapping. Or at least, maybe it’s that phenomenon where you hear a word once and then you can’t stop hearing it everywhere? I did this preview of Copyists, a new show at Centre Pompidou Metz, which totally overlapped with research for that painting piece but also for a few on Cezanne, the first of which is now finally online. They are pegged to the forthcoming Cezanne celebrations taking place all summer across my hometown, Aix-en-Provence.
Anyway, this week’s treats are all snippets from what I’ve been reading — passages and pieces I’ve found indelible these past weeks.
“Honey cakes at Fouquet’s”
Reading John Rewald’s 1996 masterwork, The Paintings of Paul Cézanne: A Catalogue Raisonné (honestly, if I had a spare £295, I’d get a copy), I came across this gem from the entry for Madame Cézanne à l'Eventail, 1878-88, in which he cites Gertrude Stein, writing (about herself in the third person) in her 1933 book, The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas (clearly, Stein was a trickster).
Between 1903 and 1914, Stein and her brother Leo, shared a household near the Jardins du Luxembourg in Paris. Through frequent visits to the fabled dealer Ambroise Vollard, they amassed one of the most incredible collections of paintings by Manguin, Bonnard, Picasso, Renoir, Daumier, Matisse, Toulouse-Lautrec and, as is evident here, Cezanne, before he passed away:
"Before the winter [of 1904] was over, having gone so far Gertrude Stein and her brother decided to go further, they decided to buy a big Cezanne and then they would stop. After that they would be reasonable. They convinced their elder brother that this last outlay was necessary, and it was necessary as will soon be evident. They told Vollard that they wanted to buy a Cezanne portrait. In those days practically no big Cezanne portraits had been sold. Vollard owned almost all of them. He was enormously pleased with their decision... There were about eight to choose from and the decision was difficult. They had often to go and refresh themselves with honey cakes at Fouquet's. Finally they narrowed the choice down to two, a portrait of a man and a portrait of a woman ... and finally they chose the portrait of the woman. Vollard said of course ordinarily a portrait of a woman always is more expensive than a portrait of a man but, said he looking at the picture very carefully, I suppose with Cezanne it does not make any difference. They put it in a cab and they went home with it."
“Practically theological”
This is a stonking great piece of writing by Peter Schjeldahl, a review of a 2021 show of Cezanne’s drawings at MoMA. It starts with the most perfect opening line:
“Some of us don’t like the inarguably great artist Paul Cézanne as much as we know we are supposed to.
Then carries on just as perfectly – not that I’d side with his take, but boy can the man write:
I, for one, have struggled with him all my art-loving life. Others, as I’ve confirmed in recent conversations with Cézanne devotees, are astonished and appalled to hear anything with even a trace of negativity said about him. “Cézanne Drawing,” at the Museum of Modern Art, with some 280 works on paper (too many? Not really, because quantity intensifies the works’ qualities), has a cumulative impact that is practically theological for both believers and skeptics, akin to a creation story, a Genesis, of modernism.”
“So what’s my problem? Partly it’s an impatience with Cézanne’s demands for strenuous looking. I tire of being made to feel smart rather than pleased. (Here I quite favor the optical nourishments of van Gogh, Gauguin, and Seurat.) But my discontent is inseparable from Cézanne’s significance as a revolutionary. How good an idea was modernism, all in all?”
“Whatever date or piece of the world that he tore from the earth or from a book, he took it with him, engraved, buried inside of him”
More reading on Cezanne and on the age-old tradition of copying Old Master works brought me to this quote from Joachim Gasquet’s 1926 book, Cézanne (my translation; read the French below*):
When he walked through the Louvre, he knew, down to the year, the provenance of each canvas and in which church, which gallery, one might find copies of them. He knew the museums of Europe admirably well. How? He, who had never visited them, had hardly travelled at all? I think it was that he only ever needed to read or see something once to remember it forever. He looked, he read very slowly, almost painfully; but whatever date or piece of the world that he tore from the earth or from a book, he took it with him, engraved, buried inside of him, in a way that nothing could ever take away from him.
“Writing is an act of listening”
Nobel laureate Jon Fosse did an interview with the New Yorker recently pegged to a short story, Elias, that he published in the same issue. This, about his process:
“To me, writing is an act of listening. I listen, of course, to what I have already written. And then to something unknown, somewhere out there. The writing is this listening, to write is to listen. I don’t plan anything. Writing happens.” “My job is to paint a picture, to write a kind of story, not to explain it.” “As a writer, I am writing exactly what is there, out there, what it means I don’t know. If I knew it, I ought not to have written it. I don’t see any point in writing riddles. Life is enigmatic in itself.”
“Writing Septology that way [without fullstops] just felt right. It provided the novel with the right flow. I learned something from writing that way that I perhaps used when I wrote Vaim.” It wasn’t that I set out to write without periods, but you have to follow the dictates of the writing in each and every way.”
“I never intend anything. I am sure that when I am writing with intention the writing will suffer. It isn’t about my intentions, or my plans, my ideas, but about the intention of something that’s already there and that I, so to speak, have to bring to the visible world.”
“To grow magnificently”
Have you watched William Kentridge’s series on Mubi, Self-Portrait as a Coffee-Pot? Midway through episode four, which you can also find in the beautiful book about the series that Hauser and Wirth has published, Kentridge tells this story:
“We planted a tree when I was nine years old in the garden of the house that I now live in. And three years ago it was struck by lightning and it died. And it was shocking. The tree is meant to live for 100 years, 200 years. If the tree could only survive those 58 years, where did that leave me?”
“We grow our tree inside us. From when we’re born we know at some point we’re going to die. As we’re growing, so too we’re growing our own death, The feat of a premature mortality is the fear that this tree inside us is stunted, is still a sapling, hasn’t reached its full growth of leaves and flowering, but we know that it’s inside us the whole time. Our hope is to keep growing the tree, not in the expectation that we will ever outlive it, but to give it a chance to grow magnificently.”
“I think Max is already a thousand times more interesting than anyone I’ve ever met, and I want to tell you about him.”
I’m not sure I’ll ever get over this piece by Archie Bland about his infant son.
“Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up, if you still want to see things.”
Research for a short preview of a forthcoming Wim Wenders at 80 retrospective, titled W.I.M., at the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn yielded this interview he gave ages ago, wherein the journalist Vicki Goldberg quotes Wenders, then only 58, quoting Cezanne:
“Still he travels in search of the stories that places have to tell and the dwindling evidence of reality in the face of the image onslaught. At the end of his film Reverse Angle [which Wenders described as his “first diary film”] is a prescient quote from Cézanne: ‘Everything is about to disappear. You've got to hurry up, if you still want to see things.’ Mr. Wenders added a line to Cézanne: ‘I hope it's not too late.’”
“Be humble now”
I’ve had this (from Rilke’s poem Memories of Summer in The Book of Pilgrimage) at the top of my daily notes for weeks now:
“Be humble now, like some low-growing thing that reality will ripen.”
“Focal just means ‘word’”
This year is the centenary of the exquisite corpse: that Surrealist word game which became a drawing game, and has never lost its power. I’ve been writing about this and mistranslations and linguistic oppression and and meme culture and the seriousness of word play and the politics of nonsense – I’ll let you know when the piece is out. In Venice last year, one of my favourite pavilions at the biennial was Eimear Walshe’s video installation, Romantic Ireland, at the Irish pavilion. I keep thinking about this, from a piece Walshe wrote for Frieze a while ago:
“My father called me his gassún (young lad) because cailín (girl) didn’t make sense. He spoke very little Gaeilge (Irish), but he approached the language – and gender itself, for that matter – with the crude and transgressive attitude of the country-and-Irish novelty musician Richie Kavanagh, whose hit song Aon Focal Eile (1996) charted number one for eight weeks in Ireland when it was released. The first syllable of the Irish word focal is pronounced like the English ‘fuck’, leading the song to be banned by the BBC. Our neighbours across the water didn’t understand that focal just means ‘word’.”
“These fragments I have shored against my ruins”
Like, I’ve known TS Eliot’s The Wasteland a long time. But for that same Surrealism piece, I went back and read it several times afresh, and oh my word. Also, “shanti, shanti” lands so differently — so beautifully — now that Sayaka and Kayano are in our lives. It is what I’ve heard Shaha say to quieten them since they were little. It feels like family.
I sat upon the shore
Fishing, with the arid plain behind me
Shall I at least set my lands in order?
London Bridge is falling down falling down falling down
Poi s’ascose nel foco che gli affina
Quando fiam uti chelidon—O swallow swallow
Le Prince d’Aquitaine à la tour abolie
These fragments I have shored against my ruins
Why then Ile fit you. Hieronymo’s mad againe.
Datta. Dayadhvam. Damyata.
Shantih shantih shantih“It just came from the heart.”
Not sure I’ll get over this either any time soon, but for altogether different reasons. It’s the outrage, the utter unacceptability of it all. Charlotte Higgins interviewed 26-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason about his new book, The Power of Music, in which he recounts what happened when he was asked, in 2023, whether he thought Rule, Britannia! should be part of the Last Night of the Proms. He said no, he didn’t think it should. The racist vitriol he was immediately subjected to, for voicing that quiet, thought-through opinion: there is a lot that makes me angry these days. This is one of those things.
You know how much I love his playing. The grace of this musician, his pointed choice of tunes to interpret, his elegant stage presence, his boundless creativity, his depth and subtlety.
When Higgins asked him how he coped with the abuse, he said practising — “exploring something wonderful, beautiful and interesting” — had helped.
“The tidal wave of hate, he says, was ‘disproportionate to the intensity of the comment I made. It just came from the heart. I didn’t want to attack anyone with it.’”
“All that, directed towards this gentle, unconfrontational young man. How did he and his family cope, I ask. “I spoke to lots of other musicians who reached out,” he says. “I find practising and playing always helpful. If there are things I am struggling with, that’s the one place I can always be. Exploring something wonderful, beautiful and interesting.”
That really locks in the utter seriousness of a life dedicated to art, doesn’t it. Beauty not just as a luxury but as a tool for survival. But also, how infuriating the idea that it has to be a tool for survival – that “beauty for beauty’s sake” is too often an exclusive/exclusionary concept, too often inaccessible to many.
“The simplicity of this work is overwhelming”
More Rewald, on Cezanne’s Le Joueur de Cartes, 1890-92 (#709 in the catalogue raisonné, p445):
“The simplicity of this work is overwhelming. A man in a brown coat and brown hat sits at a light gray table against a background of exactly the same color, holding in his hands some cards in the contemplation of which he is totally absorbed. The monumentality of the figure and the silent intensity of the man provide this small painting with the power of an icon.”
“The map of spring is always to be redrawn again”
Another read for my Surrealism piece, Aimé Césaire’s 1939 epic, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land – by turns confounding, confronting, unbearable, beautiful.
I would rediscover the secret of great communications and great combustions. I would say storm. I would say river. I would say tornado. I would say leaf. I would say tree. I would be drenched by all rains, moistened by all dews.
and
all I would need is a mouthful of jiculi milk to discover in you always\ as distant as a mirage --- a thousand times more native and made golden by a sun that no prism divides --- the earth where everything is free and fraternal, my earth
and
in the glance of disorder there is this swallow of mint and broom which melts always to be reborn in the tidal wave of your light (Calm and lull oh my voice the child who does not know that the map of spring is always to be drawn again)
Notes
*“En parcourant le Louvre, il savait, à une année près, la provenance des toiles, et dans quelle église, quelle galerie, on pourrait trouver leurs répliques. Il connaissait admirablement les musées d’Europe. Comment ? Lui, qui ne les avait jamais visités, n’ayant presque pas voyagé ? C’est, je crois, qu’il lui suffisait de lire, de voir une chose une fois, pour s’en souvenir à jamais. Il regardait, il lisait très lentement, presque douloureusement ; mais la date, le morceau du monde qu’il arrachait à la terre ou au livre, il les emportait, gravés, enfouis en lui, sans que rien désormais les en pût déraciner.” Joachim Gasquet, Cézanne, Éditions Bernheim-Jeune, 1926.
3, 4, 8 especially but all riches 🩷