Cézanne and his ‘Perspectival Game’

Last autumn, I tentatively made my way through Carlo Rovelli’s Helgoland. The theoretical physicist’s outline of the strange and beautiful story of quantum physics doesn’t unequivocally explain its subject, but rather allows you to understand why you don’t understand quantum physics. To someone who had already tried and failed to reach that seemingly unambitious point, this felt like a big step. I might now feel confident enough to tell people just why the extraordinary world of quanta - that is the entirety of the world and universe that we live in - is absurd, unintuitive and utterly irrational. On the other hand, I’m now also burdened with a lucid ignorance that pervades everything that I encounter. Paying my first visit to Tate Modern’s Paul Cézanne exhibition was a case in point. Professor Rovelli writes:

 
"The world fractures into a play of points of view that do not admit of a univocal, global vision. It is a world of perspectives, of manifestations, not of entities with definite properties or unique facts. Properties do not reside in objects, they are bridges between objects. Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet. The world is a perspectival game, a play of mirrors that exist only as reflections of and in each other."

Cézanne, Still Life With Apples (1893) 

 
Leaving aside the fact that uncontextualized explanations of the world of quanta can come across as a stoner’s musings - ‘Reality’s not what you think, man!’ - the bottom line here is that any object - be it ourselves, an atom, an apple, a viaduct, a landscape - can only be conceived of in relation to another object. An apple isn’t an apple until it is viewed by ourselves. Conversely, our own properties, our own existence, are not valid until we are viewed, or come into contact with other objects, such as the apple. This isn’t mysticism, nor is it an analogy; it is what quantum physics proves to be our literal reality, the reality of the universe.
 
That said - and before I go on to try and stretch out those thoughts about apples further - it does lead to a lovely analogy. Cézanne is indeed the bridge between two properties, or rather movements. That is a realist depiction of art, and a modern one. He is the node that joins Post-Impressionism to Cubism, the causeway that links Romanticism to Modernism. Without Cézanne there is no Picasso, no Matisse. And yet he learns his trade from artists like Pissarro. He takes their ideas and flattens them, rids them of any conventional perspective, and in doing so creates a Big Bang in the world of pictorial art, igniting and exploding how we depict what we see.

 
Take the painting Still Life With Apples. Simultaneously, there’s the sense that you are looking at something that is depicting the real, but also that - with just a shift of the eye, or the slightest turn to the side, or even, a mere change in cognition - you have been cast headlong towards the abstract. It is a subtly dizzying experience. The word ‘uncertainty’ pulses and then pushes its way through to the front of your thought process, and with it Heisenberg’s famous principle, one that Rovelli was allowing me to understand: the principle, which forbids, at any specific moment, the exact determination of both the position and the momentum of a particle. That is, it is possible to measure either where a particle is or how fast it is moving, but not both simultaneously. 

This back and forth seemed analogous to what I was experiencing with the Cézanne. I was all too conscious of the effort to try and steady myself through focusing on the red blushes of each apple, or the grey-blue pot that is on the cusp of dissolution into the softer blue of the wall or the various table-cloths. But with that focus I lose the form; the colour becomes independent of the shapes delineating the objects. It makes me, in a low-key way, anxious. Instead, I choose to back away from analysis - from measurement - and attempt to just be with the painting. I try, despite its stillness, to watch it move; to lose myself in the relationship - the only thing that quantum mechanics declares as real - between my thought process and the object. I back away, both dazzled and unsettled. 

Cézanne, The Bathers: Les Grande Baigneuses (1894)

I try and carry this approach - to just be with the paintings - into the other rooms, to escape what still seems, frustratingly, to be analogy. Seeing so many of these paintings together is a real privilege. I love the way the exhibition groups things by subject. A room full of still lives, and those apples and table-cloths depicted over and over again, and the realisation that the green jug in Still Life With Apples is the very same that is featured in Still Life With Jar, Cup and Apples. The former usually resides in Los Angeles, the latter in New York. Ordinarily, a whole continent would separate them; here they are cheek by jowl. Likewise, one single room houses nine of the artist’s Bathers paintings, a smorgasbord of naked bodies drying off in the hot French sunshine. In particular, the National Gallery’s bathers finds more room to breathe here, the relative gloom of its permanent home giving way to the fresher light of the Tate. Its Prussian blues and sun-blanched greens are suddenly as lively and vivid as Monet’s Water Lilies. 

And then, of course, there are the landscapes. If the soft sky-blue of the tiny door in Pissarro’s Côte des Bœufs at L'Hermitage is the colour that my sensibility most associates with the French countryside, Cézanne’s numerous depictions of Mount Sainte-Victoire is the vista that my Francophile wanderlust yearns towards: heat, olive groves, lavender fields, blue skies and sunlight. Standing in the room that contains around eight variations of this mountain is a thrill and an instruction. And it was here, that once again, I found footholds shifting and then reversing.

It’s the Philadelphia Mount Sainte-Victoire that blazes most fiercely at first, its lustred greens, blues and golds drawing in and then fixing your gaze. And those rogue splashes of mauve settling on the sides of the peak. It feels lusher and more fecund than the other takes on the mountain, almost offering a little bit of shade and perhaps even some moisture from the ferocity of the mid-afternoon heat on the other walls. I love the way that some of the green foliage escapes and melds into the sky. And the sense that there is a storm approaching, or even the aftermath of one.

 
 

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1902)

Yet, moving away to the adjacent wall and the Baltimore painting, you are suddenly exposed to the heat of the sun and the view of the mountain from the quarry. The green of the trees still offers shade, mauve and rose still clamber up the mountain, and a vibrant zigzag of blue hints at an unlikely glacier. But the ochre of the sandstone rocks turns up the temperature. There is less distance. Or, with the greater size of each object, each shape, there seems to be.  

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1895)

The turn-of-the-century clock then ticks towards 3pm, and you return to the artist’s vantage point in the Philadelphia painting, and stand in front of the Musée d'Orsay mountain. The heat has muted the sharpness of the landscape, and the viaduct that was earlier hard to trace is now visible in the middle distance. The greens of the copse in the foreground of the painting are lighter, the mountain shimmers with the mauve dominating, and suddenly my sensibility favours this view. Is it the cold outside that transports me, perhaps? 

 

Cézanne, Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1890)

 
At once, the Philadelphia painting seems almost sickly in comparison. It is the Orsay painting that draws you closer too. Right at the centre, a horizontal band of gold suggests a wheat field, and a shadowy vertical slash behind the house with the red roof suggests a solitary poplar tree. Others won’t see these things. But their own individual encounters will provide things that pass me by. Whatever, Paris trumps Philadelphia. For now. 

Detail from Cézanne's Montagne Sainte-Victoire (1890)

And that was it. You stand in front of one landscape and, recalling the last, your relationship shifts. The moment, the temporal glance, the node between two objects - myself and a painting and its individual mood, its individual details - are all that exist. “Objects are such only with respect to other objects, they are nodes where bridges meet.” Meaning, properties, reside only in the relationship. Indeed, a further visit to the exhibition, skewed the preferences again. Then it was a sober, cleaner Detroit mountain that gave me pause.

 

Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire (1904)

On that particular day, my mood favoured the abstract. And the softness of the colours, once again - as with Les Grandes Baigneuses - conjured up Monet and his Water Lilies. This depiction is almost throwaway, seemingly rushed. But it still changes everything. Look at those dabs of green foliage, like in the Philadelphia painting escaping into the sky. I go back to check and realise that it could be Cézanne collapsing the perspective again. Or, as we are slowly learning, its just that the relationship between me and the object at a particular moment is all that matters.

I felt - tentatively, and yes, laboriously - that I might be onto something. Yet, later in Helgoland, Rovelli placed a caveat on all of this, and my blushes were not spared.   

  
"It is with sadness that every so often I spend a few hours on the internet, reading or listening to the mountain of stupidity dressed up with the word quantum? Quantum medicine; holistic quantum theories of every kind; mystical quantum spiritualism - and so on and on, in an almost unbelievable parade of quantum nonsense.
 
"Worst of all is the pseudo-medicine. Every so often I receive an alarmed email from a relative of one of its victims: My sister is being treated by a quantum medic. What do you think of it, Professor?' I think the worst that it is possible to think; try to rescue your sister immediately. When it comes to medicine, this is the kind of situation in which the law, I believe, should be involved. Everyone has the right to seek to cure themselves as they see fit. But no one has the right to cheat their fellow citizens with the kind of quackery that can cost lives."

 
Am I in danger of falling into that trap? Well, at least ‘quantum gallery-going’ is not, like medicine, doing any harm to others. The only danger that I’m causing is, perhaps, trying to fashion the analogous into the real. I don’t know enough about quantum physics - I barely know anything - yet somehow, all explanations of quantum physics, Rovelli’s included, seem to operate or function as analogy. Language doesn’t seem an adequate tool to describe something so bizarre. Nevertheless, I think the thought about the ‘relationship’ between the viewer and the piece of art - its uniqueness, its temporality - is provocative. It is certainly one that is hinted towards whenever you compare or return to paintings that have the same objects or landscapes at their centre. Again, the privilege of getting to see the work of an artist in one place leaves you with a thrill. 

It wasn’t always the case. When I first encountered Cézanne, at the time when art began to chime with a nascent sensibility, I found him bland, awkward, and overrated. Simply put, I did not get him. I gravitated to Monet and then breezed right past Cézanne to Picasso and Matisse. But you fill in gaps: you read, you listen to others, and you keep looking, and the reactions change. He’s not overrated, you’re just not ready. He’s not bland, you’re just not looking properly. And though he’s still gloriously awkward - don’t you just want to reach out at each of those apples and stop them from falling onto the floor? - you start to appreciate that this is infinitely more interesting than easy, comforting or straightforward. Which is certainly something that Professor Rovelli would appreciate.