Paul Cézanne
The Sainte-Victoire Mountain
1902
Start over without repeating yourself
Rare are the places whose name alone immediately brings to mind an artist. Montagne Sainte-Victoire, near Aix-en-Provence, is one of them.
In less than forty years - from 1870 to
her death in 1906 -, Cézanne painted her
more than 80 times, in oil and watercolour.
A native of Aix, he has certainly passed his childhood
in Provence and knew perfectly
the region. But how to explain this
obsession for this tireless depicted landscape-
is lying throughout his career?
​
Cézanne repeated that every painter should have for
master nature. Not to "copy" it - its landscapes
are in no way attempts at reproduction
photographic sense of the term - but to "achieve
sensations". In other words, what he was looking for was the restitution of what he felt himself in front of the spectacle of nature. And to carry out this quest which has
occupied almost all his life as an artist, he needed
of a subject that he knew perfectly, sufficiently
in any case to be able to concentrate on its
more sensations than on any reality
objective. He therefore made the Montagne Sainte-
Victory the heroine of this visual adventure. painted-
ture after painting, year after year, he posed
his easel around the Provençal massif.
But of all these representations, none
looks like really to another. By
that he sometimes changed his point of view,
but above all because little to little, he
discovered things that he didn't have
understood so far. So one day he
for example wrote to have realized that
"the shadow of the mountain was convex when he believed it to be concave". A subtlety that is more subjective feeling than topography, but that he would never have grasped without her incredible perseverance.
Mount Sainte-Victoire , 1887
Mount Sainte-Victoire , 1895
What we can take away:
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Driven by our legitimate desire to raise new challenges, we are generally reluctant to do things we have already done. However, iteration is a great way to learn, discover, and therefore progress. Starting something over again is an opportunity to apprehend the situation from a significantly different angle, and thus to enrich oneself a little more each time.