by brad clompus
At this moment I am one with my canvas.
We are an iridescent chaos. — Cézanne
My habit of looking at Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire (https://philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/71967.html) began decades ago at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. When I was eight, tagging along with my father as we cruised the gallery crammed with Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works, I lingered near the painting perhaps ten seconds: Another great view . . . real or made up? Yet it rooted in me. Several years later, on family trips to central Pennsylvania to drop off my sister at college, I found similarly charismatic landscapes. The Appalachian range I stared at through the car window wasn't as imposing as Cézanne’s mountain with its triangular form and skewed, sharp peak. My local mountains were repeating ridges with rounded narrow crests like bunched blankets, mint green in early spring, shades of brown and gray come fall, rather than Cézanne’s slate, lilac, and dusky blue tints. An attachment was forming; I envisioned some kind of refuge in those Pennsylvania ridges, where I might wander their slopes without any destination, elusive and unknown.
After I went away to college, I’d come home for holidays and revisit the museum. Familiar with its layout by then, I could quickly navigate the labyrinth of rooms, give due respect to Monet, Rousseau, Seurat. But Mont Sainte-Victoire was my lodestar; I’d stand before it transfixed, expectant. Around this time, I took my first walks in the Appalachians—beginning with day hikes, then weekends, and eventually, two weeks on the Appalachian Trail. The latter could be tedious, exhausting—the trail often clogged with skewed stone wedges and broken slabs lodged haphazardly in the ground, so you had to keep your eyes trained on the path to avoid breaking an ankle or worse. Mostly I was tired and aching, yet at random points I’d become aware of compositions made by close ranks of trees, moss-felted boulders, ragged parallel gray ledges. And through gaps, I could gaze down the mountain wall onto a valley adorned by the little straight lines, squares, and ovals of farm structures, or grazed pastures ascending partway up the adjacent slope, then yielding gradually to the opacity of woods. I would stash away these vistas and keep walking.
Cézanne painted variations of Mont Sainte-Victoire more than sixty times, from the late 1870s until his life ended in 1906. Some of the versions (including the one I saw in Philadelphia) seem to embody a condensation of multiple views. Maybe when Cézanne stood outside his home in Aix-en-Provence as Mont Sainte-Victoire lorded the world before him, he swiveled his head and absorbed a procession of details in flux—the greens, browns, and rusts of forest, meadow, and farm. The painting seems to be arrayed in horizontal thirds; meshed rocks/trees in the foreground; a mosaic of wild and tamed spaces in the middle; mottled gem of mountain and variegated sky at top. At first, everything looks solid, albeit fractured. Landscape elements jumble across the canvas in rough lozenges, rectangles, and cubes. There are hints of rooflines, fields, a road plowing in from the right. Though endowed with density and weight, these forms also have an unsettled quality. Are they colluding or clashing? Assembling or coming apart? Perhaps Cézanne was obsessed with trying to solve this puzzle.
Day by day as I hiked the Appalachians, I breathed the rhythm of rock, tree, and brush shifting in light, in shadow. By my mid-twenties, I was writing poems that responded to mountain prospects—some I’d experienced, others imagined:
From the fire tower, the ridge
would knoll and bump forever
to the south, its parapets leaning
down in tattered, migrating fog.
Bristling weaves of massed trees
hid every hawk, every crow
in dissembling weather.
I aimed to avoid naïve nature idealization or bland recounting of terrain. A writer friend who derided nature as a subject would mock my attempts: Oh, look at the pretty mountains. Though this made me wince, I had to concede her broader point—that mimesis and exultation could carry you only so far. However, Cézanne shows how to reconfigure the natural image, to destabilize what otherwise might lapse into static ornament or cliché.
In the upper third of the painting, above and perhaps beyond the mountain’s peak, off-white brushstrokes and unpainted areas may allude to clouds in formation and/or dissolution. These are far from the full-bodied cloud studies by earlier painters like John Constable, who strived to faithfully reproduce what they saw. Also hovering above the mountain are green rods shaped like Bacilli and irregular patches of varying intensity that could be read as echoes of distant forested hills. Yet these objects float, detached from geology—conjectural, fugitive. Even the painting’s core, that tilted hunk of mountain, strata of sapphire or fluorite, has lighter zones that seem to dissolve even as they mirror the sky’s ephemeral hues. How is mountain not sky, sky not mountain?
And this, in turn, may suggest a subterranean uncertainty about the entire landscape. Cézanne reminds us that baked into the monumental are seeds of evanescence. In the Appalachians, I could sit on a boulder surrounded by a nearly impenetrable matrix of oak and maple, a lavish repetition of fern glades, and sense that here was a vision one could hold forever—yet it was always slipping away, morphing. Turn your head and all may shift, subtly or boldly, from the scale of a caterpillar to a rockslide. Sometimes while hiking, for a flash I was merely another detail in the sketch, without fantasies or regrets, no past or future taunting or beckoning. Only land rising and falling, dense thickets of young trees and tangled brush reframed into an open dome of old forest where boulders, stumps, and creatures mutely imitated one another. Cézanne is the first artist I knew who could enact such dramas on canvas, such ravishing transience.
Recently, I was back at the Philadelphia museum, joined by my thirteen-year-old son. He scanned Mont Sainte Victoire quickly.
“Very cool,” he said, before moving along to the next painting.
“Wait,” I said, “let me tell you a little about this one.”
I spoke of Cézanne’s verging toward Cubism and his departure from what earlier landscape artists had done. My son nodded politely—the painting hadn’t entered him.
A few months later, though, we were hiking in a park near Boston. He gestured to a tight cluster of trees pinning a slope, remarked on their vertical patterns outlined by the slanting light. Suddenly, the light dimmed and he noticed that the trees looked slightly different, altered in a way, and he fished for words to describe that change.
When we return to the museum, I’ll try to reconnect him with the Cézanne painting, point out how the peak fades in places, becomes translucent, a companion to sky. It could be the right time.
Brad Clompus lives in the Boston area. His poetry and prose have appeared in such journals as Cimarron Review, Denver Quarterly, Nashville Review, North American Review, Post Road, Tampa Review, and West Branch.