Interpretive Resource

After the severe criticism he received for works exhibited in Paris in 1874 and 1877, Paul Cézanne retreated increasingly in the 1880's from the art capital to his native Provence. While he felt very isolated from the center of avant-garde activity in Paris, he was deeply moved by the "configuration" of his native landscape, rich in ancient history and extraordinary scenery.

In 1870-71, Cézanne made his first extended visit to the tiny coastal village of L’Estaque, about thirty kilometers from his home in Aix-en-Provence, to escape conscription into the French army during the Franco-Prussian War. His mother had a small house there with superb views of Marseilles, its Mediterranean harbor, and the coastal mountains. In 1883, Cézanne rented a house in the village. For the rest of his working life, visits to L’Estaque provided a welcome relief from his ordinary working environments, with both the sea air and superb scenery rejuvenating him many times. The breathtaking views of the bay moved him in particular. He wrote to his friend and teacher Camille Pissarro:

"It is like a playing card. Red roofs on the blue sea. The sun is so terrifying that it seems as though the objects are silhouetted, not only in black and white, but in blue, red, brown, and violet. I may be mistaken, but it seems to me the very opposite of modeling."

Convinced that Impressionism was on the wane, Cézanne was searching for a way not to dissolve form and eliminate local color, as he felt Claude Monet had done. To capture the intensely colored rocky terrain, sea, and sky of Provence and, at the same time, suggest the timelessness of the landscape was no easy task, and Cézanne constantly complained about the difficulty of his intentions.

The Art Institute’s The Bay of Marseilles is one of several equally important views of the sea from L'Estaque Cézanne made in the middle and late 1880's. He divided the canvas into four zones—architecture, water, mountain, and sky. Each is rigorously separated from the next and has its own, distinct character. The sky is painted airily, with broad strokes of viscous paint loosely applied over a white ground. The city of Marseilles, its jetty clearly discernible in the background, is reduced to a few rectangular patches of paint along the left side of the mountain range, which gently increases in height from left to right. Although Cézanne lavished his most concentrated pictorial energies on the representation in the foreground of the town, with its cube-like habitations punctuated by chimneys of varying sizes, it is the great blue expanse of the Mediterranean itself that is the true subject of the picture. Filling the center of Cézanne’s banded composition, the sea’s solidity is profound. No boats are allowed access to its weighty waters, and one can scarcely imagine waves disrupting its dense, planar surface.

All the elements in this landscape—water, sky, land, villages—are motifs found over and over in Impressionist paintings. Like an Impressionist picture, the colors in The Bay of Marseilles are bright, the scene filled with sunshine. Yet, we are worlds away from, for example, Monet’s many depictions of the Mediterranean coast at Antibes dating from the same period—in which images of great immediacy and vivacity seem to shimmer in the dappled, fragrant atmosphere. Cézanne was not interested in the illusion of light, or of distance or form for that matter. His comparison of the bay at L’Estaque to a "playing card" is telling; in the Art Institute’s canvas, he drew each plane forward—from the sky and mountains to the sea and village—deliberately contracting the space, an effect heightened by the emphasis on contour. The resulting, highly compacted structure is locked tightly in place, like a puzzle, its parts related through a complex grid of horizontal, vertical, and diagonal lines. As Cézanne wrote the artist Emile Bernard, "Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth...Lines perpendicular to the horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air." Cézanne’s use here of strong, contrasting colors to create a sense of volume and space both strengthens the composition and infuses it with vitality.

If it were to be judged as a successful rendering of water—that is, as a seascape—The Bay of Marseilles would fail, just as Cézanne’s portraits fail at accuracy of likeness and his bathers fail at sensuality. Cézanne's view of the scenery at L’Estaque is, in the end, elemental and eternal. The painting records an almost existential encounter between art and nature. As is true of any painting by Cézanne, neither the world of appearances nor that of art is allowed to triumph: his images are at once abstract and totally dependent upon visual reality.