From Brushstrokes To Books

Reviewing The Letters of Paul Cézanne, Colm Toibin highlights the many writers who took inspiration from the French painter’s innovative style:

Cézanne was a voracious reader, familiar with the contemporary French novelists as with classical literature. While his life inspired Zola, the work itself began to intrigue novelists and poets. The brush strokes with the look of textured sentences, and Cézanne’s ability to paint a section of the canvas in great rich detail and then leave other sections undernourished or even blank, would interest writers such as DH Lawrence (“Sometimes,” Lawrence wrote, “Cézanne builds up a landscape out of omissions”) and Hemingway.

In a deleted passage in Hemingway’s story Big Two-Hearted River, he wrote: “He wanted to write like Cézanne painted. Cézanne started with all the tricks. Then he broke the whole thing down and built the real thing. It was hell to do … He … wanted to write about country so that it would be there like Cézanne had done it in painting … He felt almost holy about it.” Some of the most beautiful and perceptive writing about Cézanne’s work was by the poet Rilke.

“The artist,” Cézanne said, “must avoid thinking like a writer.” By this I understand him to mean that the painter must avoid narrative in a picture, or taking sides, however briefly, for one tone against another, or offering moral truth or even ironies, or allowing mere feelings to interfere with a picture, including a portrait. It is perhaps for this reason that writers, who much of the time believe also that writers must avoid thinking like writers, have been so interested in Cézanne, and why his work and the legend of his life, as dramatised in these letters, have endured.

(Image of The Card Players by Cézanne, 1892, via Wikimedia Commons)