Paul Cézanne, The Red Rock, c. 1895, oil on canvas, 91 x 66 cm (Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris)
[0:00] [music]
Dr. Steven Zucker: [0:04] We’re in the Orangerie in Paris, and we’re looking at a late Paul Cézanne, “The Red Rock.” This is one of my favorite landscapes by Cézanne.
Dr. Beth Harris: [0:13] What makes it one of your favorites?
Dr. Zucker: [0:15] Well, you know, he loved painting rocks, quarries, and the forest, but this is so outrageous. You’ve got this huge, abstract shape in the upper right corner, which is an overhanging rock ledge, but it is so unexpected and so weighty, and abstract.
Dr. Harris: [0:30] You said weighty, but it has no bottom, so it feels to me like it hovers in mid-air.
Dr. Zucker: [0:35] It’s true. Even as I said weighty, I was thinking, “We know it’s heavy, we know it’s massive, but actually in a pictorial sense, maybe not so much.” This is a painting where Cézanne has perfected these short, stippled brushstrokes, which create this wonderful sense of the buzz of a very hot afternoon.
[0:53] If you’ve been in a semi-arid environment like the south of France, or maybe the desert in the western United States, you can hear the insects.
Dr. Harris: [1:00] You’re right. It feels very much like a very hot afternoon. I also sense the leaves rustling a little bit in the dry, hot wind.
Dr. Zucker: [1:09] He’s drawn us into this landscape. He’s given us this ocher path with these alternating bands of shadow. We’re not that far away from classical landscape of the 17th and 18th centuries.
Dr. Harris: [1:20] Our eye does travel down that path. We can almost feel ourselves walking through the space.
Dr. Zucker: [1:25] That’s right. But then something happens that upends that more traditional, recessionary space, which is, if you look at the curve of the pathway, it starts in the center and it’s fairly large. Then, it recedes and gets narrower as our eye moves into space, and bends ever so slightly to the right.
[1:43] But then, you’ll notice that there are the same colors that pick up in a similar arc, but now up in the trees. Is that a rock that’s seen through the trees, perhaps? Optically, it plays fast and loose with the recession that we had been comfortable with a moment before.
Dr. Harris: [1:58] Well, there’s lots in the painting that does that. The violet that makes for those horizontal shadows that you just mentioned is carried up through the landscape. We’re not meant, I think, to read space in the traditional way here.
Dr. Zucker: [2:11] I think Cézanne is not only questioning the classical landscape, he’s also questioning the Impressionist landscape. Remember, he had shown in the 1874 exhibition and then comes back down to the south of France and begins these series of investigations.
[2:26] Cézanne here has given us a space into which we can walk, and at the same time, he is simply emphatically refusing to give us that space. That rock comes up and forward. Those trees and that sky create deep space but also resist deep space. There’s just this sense of completely turning all the traditions of landscape on its head, not necessarily knowing where he’s going, by the way.
[2:51] This is really exploration. Exploration that is also just really beautiful. This is a painting that is clearly creating the densest possible field of color and form. And that sense of density, that focus on the paint itself, on the surface and on the two-dimensionality of the canvas, seems to me irrefutable.
[3:13] Look, for instance, at the center where those warm, rich orange-ochers are rising up, and the way in which they’re overlaid by the greens and those black-purples.
Dr. Harris: [3:27] It’s very abstract.
Dr. Zucker: [3:28] It is incredibly abstract and incredibly dense. And the paint itself is forthright.
Dr. Harris: [3:33] That’s true.
Dr. Zucker: [3:34] It is about paint, and dismantling the expectations of traditional landscape.
[3:40] [music]