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Cézanne and the Hard Facts of Time

By Jason Farago

June 30, 2025

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The story’s main image: a brushy, semi-abstract painting of a quarry. The rocks are rendered in dusty orange, with yellow, pink and gray accents. Scattered trees form a rough circle around the composition; their trunks are narrow slashes of dark brown and black, and their patchy canopy appears in various shades of dark and light green. At the top of the frame, more visible on the right side of the picture, there is a light blue sky.

The city is hot and hectic, and the changes come fast and furious. There is only one thing for it: Touch grass.

Modern art was born in the metropolis: on the boulevards, and in the brothels, of 1860s Paris. But it ended the century far from the capital — down in the French countryside, where Paul Cézanne broke apart the seen world into a crazy quilt of sensations.

I need to get personal here. Cézanne was the first artist I ever truly loved. When I was a teenager, his short brushstrokes and colliding perspectives gave me the courage to see the world in my own way.

For decades, I thought I knew him. And then, rather recently, I met a less familiar Cézanne: an artist who cast my youthful confidence into doubt.

A still-life painting of fruit arranged on a table with a bowl, pitcher and tablecloth. The bowl is white and contains some of the fruit; the pitcher is painted with floral motifs; and the tablecloth, also white, is bunched up in the middle of the table, exposing the edges, rather than stretched flat across it. The table is brown and tilted diagonally, with the left side raised, at a steep enough angle that it looks like the objects on the table should be rolling or falling off to the right. The background is lavender on the left side and brown on the right. The two sides are divided by a tan drape.

One of the biggest Cézanne shows in years has just opened in his hometown Aix-en-Provence. It includes more than a hundred of his bathers, mountains and, especially, still lifes.

These are the Cézannes we all know best. My first loves. In his still lifes, he lavished attention on ripe peaches and rust-gold apples — though not with a mind to verisimilitude.

The fruit were massive, and appeared ready to roll off the tabletop. The surface tipped up. The edges were misaligned.

The result was a new sort of picture. For all its harmony, everything was dense, slow, a bit strange.

A second still life of fruit on a table, with a white cloth folded in the middle and a white bowl holding fruit. A knife with an ivory handle lies on the tablecloth, and there is a glass standing near the back of the table. The glass blends into the background, which is dark blue fading to light blue at the top of the picture, where there are some leaf shapes.

For six centuries, ever since some scientifically minded Florentines had developed rules of perspective that made art look more like life, painters had put a premium on convincing illusions. At Cézanne’s breakfast table, starting in the mid-1870s, that all came to an end.

More important than copying or simulating reality was being true to your experience of reality. Your marks, your style, your hand, your eye: These now had primacy, and the world outside was secondary.

It was a change in artistic avocation propelled, not least, by new media. Photography surged in popularity in the 1880s. The Lumière Brothers, working up in Lyon, would shoot the world’s first motion picture in 1895.

A third still life of fruit on a white tablecloth on a brown table. Beside the fruit, on the right side of the picture, there is a tall potted plant, with large, dark green leaves stretching out from a cluster of small, light pink blossoms. The table appears to be situated in a corner. The wall at the table’s back edge is turquoise; the wall to the right is dark blue.

Painting was going to have to do something different. And what Cézanne understood is that the eye is not impassive — not a camera with its shutter open.

No: The eye flits and darts, looks inwards as well as out.

And rather than recording the perceptions of a single moment, the artist compounded numerous perceptions into disjunctive, irregular spaces.

A fourth still life of fruit, some of it in a white bowl, on a table. There are two crumpled cloths in this image — one white with a pink border, the other light blue with dark floral motifs. There are also three pots of different sizes set on the table — one white, one blue, and one green — as well as a wine bottle. There are rattan straps wrapped around the bottle and one of the pots.

Before Cézanne, before modernism, a critic could rag on a still life or a landscape with appeals to visual fidelity.

This apple should have a heavier shadow.

These two don’t overlap quite right.

Those rattan straps on the bottle and ginger pot: Why are you painting them like snakes?

From here on out, those criticisms make no sense. A “convincing” depiction was now just a facile replica. Painting, after Cézanne, becomes a series of strategies to render visible — to viewers, to yourself — whatever truly matters to the artist.

A painting of a man in white bathing suit standing with arms akimbo against a blue and gray background and looking down as if in thought.

To a 16-year-old, this was everything. From Cézanne, I got to Cubism, and then to abstract painting. Cézanne taught me how to read Virginia Woolf, with her own idiosyncratic perspectives and spatial ambiguity.

I was learning, year by year, a modern poetics: a theory of art, music, literature predicated on a perpetual break with tradition.

A cubist painting in gray and brown, with some touches of white and lots of straight black lines, as well as a few curved ones, criss-crossing one another. At the bottom of the picture, in the middle, are the words “Ma Jolie” in black.

“The father of us all,” said Picasso, who painted this picture of a woman a few years after Cézanne’s death.

My adoptive father, too. Cézanne had given me the fractured lens through which I could understand an accelerating world.

Back to the painting of the man in the white bathing suit.

But lately I have been wondering about modernism’s confidence in change. Its egocentricity. This century — do you mind if I say this? — has shown that exalting your own voice over established principles doesn’t always end well.

Was there something baked in modernism — in the credence it afforded to each artist’s and author’s singular vision — that led to a larger breakdown in shared meaning? Was it all more hazardous than I thought?

Back to the story’s main image: the painting of the quarry.

There is, in fact, another Cézanne. A Cézanne for summer, or the summertime of your life — when you are no longer so certain you are the center of the world, and the individual vision runs into trouble.

In his mid-50s, the artist turned his attention from the kitchen table to an exhausted limestone quarry beneath Mont Sainte-Victoire.

An old black-and-white photograph of a man in a dark suit and hat standing and painting at an easel outdoors. There is a brush in his right hand and a palette in his left, and behind him there is a rock wall.

Day after day, in the late 1890s, Cézanne scrambled up its rocky slopes to discover a landscape of near-lunar desolation.

Eventually he would rent a simple stone cabin on the premises: a storage unit and occasional crashpad.

Back to the main painting of the quarry.

The Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, owns one of the best of these lesser-known pictures of rock formations. “Bibémus” — that’s the name of the painting, and the name of the quarry — was painted outdoors, in 1895 or so.

Look here, at the top of the picture, tipped with little vertical streaks of beau blue: sheared edges of cut limestone amid the red clay.

Above, the ridgeline undulates, almost like the back of a woman asleep. It is just barely articulated. There are some slight black verticals that signify tree branches, but the ridgeline coheres almost wholly through color contrast.

As Cézanne said, “There is no line.”

Now look down. These clumpy bushes in the foreground appear no closer to us than the ridgeline above. Cézanne refuses all the old optical tricks that the artists of the Renaissance first taught us: scaling, shading, softening.

A century previously, these red stones were chiseled out to build the facades of Aix. Now the underbrush was taking over. Cézanne would render the rocks and the brush with the same short touches, building up the quarry, patch by little patch, out of color alone.

But how sheer is the rock face we are looking at? How high is the quarry, how deep? I have no idea — and that’s the point.

A second view of the quarry, this one made in brighter colors, with more discernible small and mid-sized rocks and fewer trees. The large rock formations in this picture have sharper edges, and the trees are concentrated along the ridge near the top of the frame, where more of the blue sky is visible, as well as some white clouds.

In these rock paintings, he’s trying to wrestle Bibémus down to the size of a dining room. Perspective in the quarry seems to have been not multiplied but eliminated.

Yet it’s not quite working. The red stones aren’t apples, yielding to his idiosyncratic perspective. When Cézanne tries to make Bibémus adhere to his own internal vision, the rocks don’t quite obey.

Individual genius comes up against a timescale beyond human history — and a reality that is, quite literally, rock-hard.

A painting of a field of pink, red, yellow, purple, and white flowers. A person stands on the right side of the composition; on the left are two tall trees. The horizon line falls near the middle of the picture. Above it is a light blue sky full of white clouds.

Cézanne was hardly the first painter to reckon with the matter of landscape and time.

The Impressionists — like Monet, who painted this landscape — had been reimagining painting as a record of fleeting sensations for over 20 years.

A painting of a mountain in soft gray, pink and white rising in the background above green hills and a valley with some yellow and brown buildings in the middle ground and some green and yellow trees or bushes in the foreground.

But Cézanne’s own sense impressions led somewhere far different. To something heavier. More classicized. It looked away from the fleeting impression, and towards a truth in painting that was as stable as gravity.

A second painting of the mountain, this time as seen from the quarry. The mountain, still gray, appears in cooler shades, with a bright blue sky behind it. Below it, the rocks of the quarry are sandy orange; they are lined with green trees in the middle ground and foreground.

And for all the specificity of Cézanne’s gaze, there was something less individualistic going on, as he made the landscape harder and weightier. Something I couldn’t see when I was younger.

A third view of the quarry itself. A large rock formation rises like a tower on the right side of the picture. There are trees all around, but one stands tall and solitary on the top of the ridge, in the center.

The blocky, resistant orange patches have “a primal, beginning-of-the-world quality,” as the curator John Elderfield argues in an authoritative essay on the quarry paintings.

No hikers. No railways. This most modern of painters, writes Elderfield, was making the south of France into a “landscape in a time long past.”

“In order to paint a landscape well, I need to discover its geological foundations,” said Cézanne while he was painting the quarry. He was being literal.

A photograph of a page from an artist’s sketchbook. There are several faint drawings of faces and one somewhat clearer, head-to-toe drawing of a man in a hat. There are notes jotted all over the page; near the middle is a circular brown stain.

He enjoyed a close friendship since childhood with a geologist from Aix called Antoine-Fortuné Marion. Sunday after Sunday, artist and scientist would sit side by side in the Provence landscape, discussing paint and stone.

There is a record of it in one of the sketchbooks. Overlaying a sketch of a soldier and some tender headstudies is a list (not in Cézanne’s handwriting; Marion’s, we assume) of strange words.

Triassic. Permian. Carboniferous. Devonian. Cézanne was teaching himself stratigraphy — the relatively new science of quarrying to reveal the deep structure of time.

Another sketchbook page, this one featuring a drawing of a group of rocks, lightly outlined in greens, yellows, blues, and browns.

That’s the secret to Cézanne. That scrambled rhythm, that sense of being both in a specific day and in a world long before human timekeeping.

In these deserted landscapes — dug out by human hands, over centuries, now bare of human life — he found the complement to modern egocentrism. His scrutinizing gaze came right up to the face of sedimentary indifference.

A present-day color photograph of the Bibémus quarry. A large, jagged rock formation looms over the left side of the image. Below, a person stands at a railing and looks up.

Not quite everything solid melts into air. The younger me loved Cézanne for its euphoric hit of the new. And the way it told me, as tourists like to hear, that my view was special, unique.

Back to the second view of the quarry.

But I am older now. I have descended into the quarry. And I find myself growing more attached to what Cézanne’s gaze couldn’t transform.

In those patchwork quilts of red clay and blue limestone, Cézanne brings into view the limits of human senses, and human minds.

The sight is vertiginous, though not necessarily cruel. And as one of 7 billion co-authors of a new geological epoch, I have come to appreciate, in Cézanne, the indelible reminder that every age will eventually join the fossil record.

A fifth still life, with apples and pears on a light-brown table. One of the fruits sits in a shallow white dish, on a bunched and loosely folded white tablecloth with a pink stripe. Behind the bowl to the right are some dark leaves; slightly to the left is a human skull.

Modernism, in all its tragic beauty, is a language that reconciles the fleeting and the eternal.

That shows us, like nothing else can, how nothing lasts and everything matters.

If we are masters of the universe, it is just for a geological millisecond. We are gods and we are mayflies. We are both. There is no line.

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