Tree Trunk with Flowers (Tronc d'Arbre et Fleurs)(Paul Cézanne)
Vollard recounted how Renoir returned from a trip with Cézanne to LEstaque with a magnificent watercolor which Cézanne had abandoned among the rocks after having slaved over it twenty times. Yet, if Cézanne did not value the works, others did; avant-garde collectors began to acquire them in the artists lifetime.[1] Though Cézanne appeared to have had little regard for his watercolor paintings, viewing them as solely preparatory sketches, he constantly worked in the medium through out his career. They are an important aspect of the artists oeuvre as they are both his most careful studies of the natural world and his most delicate, poetic paintings, possessing a graceful quality that might otherwise not have found an outlet in his artistic production. These watercolors are done with blocks of color in short strokes of the brush, but the medium renders the pigments more transparent than in his oil paintings. In the decomposition of forms into planes of colored light the watercolors herald the Cubist movement, as the poet Guillaume Apollinaire noted, while the painter Robert Delaunay admitted to the influence of Cézannes late watercolors on his own work. The inclusion of several Cézanne watercolors in the Sonderbund exhibition of 1912 affected painters of the German Blaue Reiter movement and in particular Paul Klee and August Macke who both responded to Cézannes use of blocks of transparent washes.
Cézanne concentrates here on the lower trunk of a tree and the ground and foliage immediately surrounding it. The tree is not outlined in pencil and painted with light, strokes of brilliant color, the highlights emphasized by the white of the paper. At the same time it is almost abstract in conception; Cézanne has isolated the base of the tree and the sun-splashed surroundings, trying to catch the effects of the light flickering through the leaves above. The painted area follows the upright shape of the paper but the work is clearly not intended to be finished further; this is a study set apart from any place or context. It dates from the last five years of the century, a time when the artist was increasingly isolated from the world and when his studies from nature, of trees, rocks, and plants are painted with sparing line and color. This delicate study exemplifies the poet Rilkes description of Cézanne watercolors when shown at a Bernheim-Jeune exhibition in 1907: extremely light pencil outlines, on which an accident of color falls like an accent, almost like a confirmation a series of strokes wonderfully arranged and of a sureness of calculation: as if a melody were playing.[2] NOTES
PROVENANCE: Ambroise Vollard, Paris; Vollard estate; Robert de Galea, Paris; Martin Fabiani, Paris; Pierre Loeb, Paris; Jon H. Streep, New York until circa 1975; John & Paul Herring, New York; Private Collection, Switzerland until 1991; Private Collection, Netherlands until 1996; Private Collection, Connecticut 1999.
LITERATURE: John Rewald, Paul Cézanne The Watercolors (A Catalogue Raisonné), Boston, 1983, n. 519 (illustrated).
[1] Cézanne Watercolors, Exhibition catalog, Knoedler & Co, 2-April 20 April 1963 introduction by Theodore Reff, Columbia Univ. in collaboration with Chanticleer Press, New York, 1963, p. 14
[2] Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926), letter to Paula Modersöhn-Becker (1876-1907), dated 1907, cited in Cézannes Watercolors, op. cit. p. 15.
EXHIBITIONS: Paul Cézanne, Exhibition, The Hague, Geementmuseum, June-July 1956, no. 82; Zurich, Kunsthaus, Aug Oct 1956, no. 13; Munich, Haus der Kunst, Oct Nov 1956, no. 105.