About this work
The grey-white limestone peak of Mont Sainte-Victoire — the grey-white limestone mountain rising above the surrounding valley and plains of Provence — commands the canvas with quiet authority. The mountain occupies only the upper third of the composition, yet it remains set apart from the houses and the largely undifferentiated treatment of foliage in the foreground by Cézanne's use of the same range of blues to depict both mountain and sky. This blurring of boundaries between peak and atmosphere is the painting's central tension: the composition divides into two clearly separated fields — the lower field of the valley and the upper field of the mountain and sky — yet the two refuse to stay apart. The late period is defined by more saturated colors, less stable compositions, and a clear division of forms into smaller parts; Cézanne creates his forms with discrete patches of intense color, developing his compositions by considering the elements as geometric shapes imbued with color. The result is a surface that hums with simultaneous stillness and motion — solid enough to feel geological, open enough to feel like weather.
Cézanne established a studio with a view of the mountain in nearby Les Lauves in 1902, and it was from this hilltop perch that the late series was born. Unlike Monet, who tried to finish landscape paintings in single sessions to capture the moment, Cézanne returned to Mont Sainte-Victoire repeatedly to accumulate a deep idea of the subject — a process that resulted in literally timeless paintings, not obviously reflecting a certain time of day, season, or weather condition.
The series was driven by Cézanne's determination "to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of museums."
The Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings have been discussed in the grandest terms and are considered to represent Cézanne's transformation into the highest mode of his artistic ideals.
This emphasis on geometric forms paved the way for Cubism — the mountain becoming, in the hands of successive artists, the prototype for everything that followed in modern painting.
This print asks for a wall with room to breathe around it — a living space where natural light shifts through the day, because the painting responds differently to morning blue and evening ochre. The work is simultaneously "timeless" and "quiet" as well as "turbulent" and "ecstatic," which makes it equally at home in a spare, contemplative interior or a room anchored by warm stone and wood. It speaks directly to the viewer who wants more from a landscape than scenery — who senses that Cézanne was trying to convey the eternal, interior structure of the scene before him, reaching beneath what the naked eye could see. Hang it where you'll live with it for years; like Cézanne
