Cézanne and his Sainte-Victoire

Far from being an isolated place, on the contrary, Aix-en-Provence is a place of passage and vacation for many artists.
They are dozens, not least of them, like Victor Hugo or Prosper Mérimée, to have paid tribute to the streets and the colorful atmosphere of the city with a thousand fountains.
They scrutinized each door medallion, caressed the caryatids, the glance prisoner of this city-museum.

In the name of this unparalleled interest in a millennial city famous for what it had been, none of them looked up, none of them looked far enough.
Yet it was there.
At each street corner, it is visible, accompanying the walker through the city.

The Sainte-Victoire mountain has always looked at the surrounding Aix countryside, and no one will be able to ignore it for a long time, since a certain Paul Cézanne came into the world one day in January 1839.

 

 

Rooted in his Provencal land, it was to her that he always returned, and as soon as possible, because, as he wrote from Talloires on 23 July 1896 to his friend Solari, the sculptor:
"The lake is very well with large hills all around... (...) it's not worth our country, when you're born there, it's fucked up, nothing is better."

Aix-en-Provence, the city-museum, the county city, does not interest him.
It is towards nature that he escaped, as during his college years when with his inseparables, when time was not measured, they ventured into the foothills of Sainte-Victoire.

"For a long time I have remained without power, without knowing how to paint the Sainte-Victoire," he wrote, "because I imagined the concave shadow, like others who do not look, while, look, it is convex , it flees from its center, instead of being compressed, it evaporates, becomes fluid, and participates in the air's breathing.”

He places it first in the background of his pictures, behind chestnut trees, bathers, as if it intimidated him.
Then he comes closer, tames it and ends up placing it in the center of his canvases.

Thanks to it, his way of painting evolves, the forms are simplified, what he once designed with precision is suggested by his brush.

Fascinated by this demanding muse, he solves one by one the contradictions inherent in his desire to objectively represent the reality of nature while remaining faithful to fluctuating sensations.

The face to face between Sainte-Victoire and his palette is transformed into a sublime epic.

To capture its constantly changing light, its infinite palette of colors ranging from ocher to sky blue, he depicted him on 87 paintings, 44 oils and 43 watercolors.