The Vase of Tulips FWN 826 1890 59.6 cm x 42.3 Art Institute, Chicago
Cezanne gave this painting of tulips and fruit to his good friend and art companion, Victor Chocquet. Victor was amongst the few people with whom Cezanne remained a close friend for all their lives: more than that really – they shared a love of art, and they loved to share their understanding of art. They delighted in each other’s company. Victor had that gift of being able to listen deeply; both were passionate about the dynamic spirit of art that was developing around them. Victor was a tax officer; later in life his wife Marie inherited a farm in Normandy, and he was able to retire. He would spend his days in the Impressionist Exhibitions and galleries explaining to the visitors how to appreciate this new dynamism. He was a fervent advocate of Impressionism with a gentle and serene manner.
And it’s a gentle and serene painting: an abundance of flowers and beautifully balanced colours bursting out of the vase, on a simple wooden table, with decorative legs, and three pieces of fruit. Nothing more, nothing less: sufficient unto itself….nearly. Just one thing remains – not just our attention, but also our intention. In the dynamic of the different dimensions, we are invited to participate.
I love to gaze at the colours in the table: warm colours, opened up with the airiness of hints of blue; matched by the same combinations of colours in the lower half of the vase. If I concentrate my gaze on the deep green of the vase, it reminds me of those crystal balls within which you can see a scene of water and foliage. It’s lovely how the white petals reach out to the golden delicious apple at the back of the table and fuse together the vase, apple and petal: there is no edge. The diagonal of the tabletop is angled to stretch the surface area of the table, so much so that the horizontal top of the table furthest away appears to ‘bow’, (as in bow and arrow) but it is in fact straight. We look down onto the tabletop, while the vase is viewed straight on: solidly supporting its abundance.
Cezanne paints the vase from the angle of looking straight on, and he paints the tabletop from an angle up above, looking down onto the table. This sets up an interplay, a dynamism, between the tabletop, the vase and the viewer, as our eyes continuously adjust to the dynamic interplay. We are thus invited to participate not as viewer, looking at an object: not understood in terms of separate ‘objects’ but rather as an ‘event’. It is still quite hard for us to respond positively to the invitation to participate with a painting as an event rather than a viewer and a painting on the wall - to sit with it and realize a certain harmony in which we, and all the things around us, participate. It was, I suspect, even harder for Cezanne and Victor as they tried to comprehend what was happening.
We find ourselves so often still embedded in a culture based on a narrative of separation, which brings forth a world where we separate subject and object, mind and matter, self and world, them and us, humanity and nature, into mutually exclusive categories, instead of healing this Cartesian split and embracing a narrative of interbeing, where we see nature everywhere and understand the wholeness of nature as a living process in which we participate.
I reckon Cezanne painted this in the Spring of 1890. The Cezanne family went to the Jura for some months during the summer and autumn of that year as they visited Hortense’s family after the death of her father. Hortense wrote to Marie Chocquet suggesting that Victor and Marie join them in Switzerland next year.
By next year, a new generation of young writers, artists and critics began to emerge who were to recognize the dynamic spirit of this new artistic expression, and Cezanne’s contribution. The outspoken art critic and political activist, Felix Feneon wrote: ‘long neglected, the Cezanne tradition is being diligently cultivated’. And an article entitled ‘Paul Cezanne’ was published in the series ‘Les Hommes d’aujour’dui’ ‘The Men of Today’ by Emile Bernard, with a portrait of Cezanne by Pissarro on the cover. Victor and Cezanne were not to continue their conversations about this new dynamic spirit: Victor sadly passed away in April 1891; but I’m sure that Victor would have felt a certain fulfillment in knowing that his passion and understanding of the dynamic creative spirit was being taken up by a new generation.
And in our time, this passing on of the creative dynamic of the evolutionary spirit appears in many forms, in diverse disciplines and in unexpected ways. All we have to do, is hold the intention to participate.
Here’s an example I like, in words and re-cognition:
“The ‘systems view’ understands life as networks of relationships. We can find network patterns at the scale of individual cells, organs, organisms, communities, ecosystems or the biosphere as a whole. The qualitative emergent properties that make life worth living and sustain life as a whole are not located in one or many organisms, they are distributed across all the scales as systemic properties of a living and transforming whole in which every participant counts and we all co-create the future.”
D Wahl, Designing Regenerative Cultures, p. 84.