Still Life in Motion

Cezanne

Still Life With Onions and Bottle

1895-1900

Oil on Canvas

http://www.art-palazzo.de/cezanne/images/cezanne-onions-bottle%206.jpg

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Excerpt from A Farewell to Arms:

"The room was long with windows on the right-hand side and a door at the far end that went into the dressing room. The row of beds that mine was in faced the windows and another row, under the windows, faced the wall. If you lay on your left side you could see the dressing-room door. There was another door at the far end that people sometimes came in by. If anyone were going to die they put a screen around the bed so you could not see them die, but only the shoes and puttees of doctors and men nurses showed under the bottom of the screen and sometimes at the end there would be whispering."

Hemingway, Ernest. A Farewell to Arms. New York: Scribner, 1929.

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Both Cezanne's work and Hemingway's prose give rise to the same type of feeling...they are both a still life implying motion. They are simple in their parts, but so complex in their entirety. They are both implying something that is not completely given in the picture or by the words. They are secretly pointing to the past or a story. Cezanne's painting, especially, almost tells the story of someone who's just left the room. There is a motion felt, but not exactly depicted in the painting. Hemingway describes a room that feels very still. However, in the next few sentences he describes the quiet motion that sometimes goes through it. The "simple true sentences" that Hemingway describes in A Moveable Feast are certainly present in this passage. The dimensions that Hemingway hoped for are there too. I have learned to think of Hemingway's prose and, in some ways, Cezanne's work like putting together a tent. I remember when I used to watch my dad set up the tent when we were going camping. He would spread the tent out, and then set out all the poles beside it. Everytime he put a pole through the loops in the tent it would expand until finally, to my amazement, I could run around inside of it. Hemingway's sentences and Cezanne's brush strokes are the simple poles that make the tent expand. They give rise to true art with dimension. There is no elaborate, embellished framework for these two artists, but there is also no doubt that they create art that we can explore.

Ernest Hemingway: A Moveable Feast

Simple True Sentences

In A Moveable Feast Hemingway says:

"I was learning something from the painting of Cezanne that made writing simple true sentences far from enough to make the stories have the dimensions that I was trying to put in them. I was learning very much from him but I was not articulate enough to explain it to anyone. Besides it was a secret."
Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York, Scribner, 1964.

I think it is very interesting to speculate about what Hemingway really learned from Cezanne. Maybe he learned that writing simple, true sentences was enough to make a beautiful piece of art. He also said that Cezanne taught him a lot about creating a "verbal landscape." Hemingway was trying to create with words what Cezanne created with paint, but I wonder who had the harder job of it. I wonder if Hemingway ever felt that he achieved the same effect that Cezanne did. Both men were trying to interpret their surroundings in a clear way. However, that did not always mean that they were trying to depict exact reality. It would be enlightening to ask each man what his true aim was. Maybe we would be in for a few surprises.

In Focus on Paintings: Cézanne's Montagne Sainte Victoire

Being Outdoors

Cezanne Montagne Sainte-Victoire above the Route du Tholonet

Cezanne had a notable stance on painting outdoors and experiencing nature. In a letter to Emile Zola dated October 19, 1866 Cezanne says:

"But you know all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as good as those done outside. When out-of-door scenes are represented, the contrasts between the figures and the ground is astounding and the landscape is magnificent. I see some superb things and I shall have to make up my mind only to do things out-of-doors."

Art in Theory, 1815-1900: an Anthology of Chaging Ideas. Ed. Charles Harrison. Paul Wood. Jason Gaiger. New York: Wiley-Blackwell, 1998. Image: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2008/09/03/timestopics/CEZANNE_395.jpg

Hemingway also had a personal relationship with nature. Many of his subjects center around an experience in the outdoors. Fishing, hunting, and bull-fighting are a few of his favorite topics. He also traveled a lot in his life time, and many of his novels reflect his experiences in a variety of different cultures.

Gertrude Stein

A poem entitled Cezanne by the author, one of Hemingway's friends, Gertrude Stein:

"The Irish lady can say, that to-day is every day. Caesar can say that
every day is to-day and they say that every day is as they say.
In this way we have a place to stay and he was not met because
he was settled to stay. When I said settled I meant settled to stay.
When I said settled to stay I meant settled to stay Saturday. In this
way a mouth is a mouth. In this way if in as a mouth if in as a
mouth where, if in as a mouth where and there. Believe they have
water too. Believe they have that water too and blue when you see
blue, is all blue precious too, is all that that is precious too is all
that and they meant to absolve you. In this way Cézanne nearly did
nearly in this way. Cézanne nearly did nearly did and nearly did.
And was I surprised. Was I very surprised. Was I surprised. I was
surprised and in that patient, are you patient when you find bees.
Bees in a garden make a specialty of honey and so does honey. Honey
and prayer. Honey and there. There where the grass can grow nearly
four times yearly."

http://oldpoetry.com/opoem/35402-Gertrude-Stein-C-zanne
image: http://wings.buffalo.edu/english/faculty/conte/syllabi/377/Images/Ray_Stein.jpg

Passage on Stein from A Moveable Feast:

"The way it ended with Gertrude Stein was strange enough. We had become very good friends and I had done a number of practical things for her such as getting her long book started as a serial with Ford and helping type the manuscript and reading her proof and we were getting to be better friends than I could ever wish to be. There is not much future in men being friends with great women although it can be pleasant enough before it gets better or worse, and there is usually even less future with truly ambitious women writers."

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York, Scribner, 1964.

Musee de Luxembourg

The Tuileries

Many of the Cezanne paintings that Hemingway would
have seen in Paris were housed in the Musee du Luxembourg. The works are now in the Musee d l'Orangerie which is located in the Tuileries garden by the Louvre. Hemingway loved to go the the museum to study the impressionist painters (especially Cezanne). He also liked to go to the Luxembourg gardens. He says:

"the best place to go was the Luxembourg gardens where you saw and smelled nothing to eat all the way from the Place de l'Observatoire to the rue de Vaugirard. There you could always go into the Luxembourg museum and all the paintings were sharpened and clearer and more beautiful if you were belly-empty, hollow-hungry."

This quote also sheds light on Hemingway's statement that hunger was a good discipline.

image: http://upload.wikimedia.org

Similar Subtleties

Cezanne

Apples

1877-1878

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Exerpt from The Sun Also Rises:

"While I had him on, several trout had jumped at the falls. As soon as I baited up and dropped in again I hooked another and brought him in the same way. In a little while I had six. They were all about the same size. I laid them out, side by side, all their heads pointing the same way, and looked at them. They were beautifully colored and firm and hard from the cold water."

Hemingway, Ernest. The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner, 1926.

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When compared, Cezanne's painting and Hemingway's prose have striking similarities. It is almost obvious that Hemingway had Cezanne (or at least his technique) in mind while he was writing this description of the trout. Both artists have taken one object and placed them in some sort of pattern. Very simple, in both cases. Then the emphasis is placed on color, but very subtely. Hemingway simply says that the fish were "beautiful colored." Cezanne uses the minimal amount of red, yellow, and green to create a beautiful still life. When I look at Hemingway's prose in comparison to this painting, it helps me understand how a visual artist and a writer can share the same technique and, ultimately, the same vision.

Hemingway's Hunger

In A Moveable Feast Hemingway says:

"Hunger was a good discipline. I learned to understand Cezanne much better and to see truly how he made landscapes when I was hungry."

This is an interesting quote because I think that Hemingway was hungry in more ways than one. When he went to Paris, his artistic hunger flared. So did his physical hunger. In fact, a lot of artists were surviving on minimal amounts of money. In Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell says that "poverty is what I am writing about, and I had my first contact with poverty in this slum. The slum, with its dirt and its queer lives, was first an object-lesson in poverty, and then the background of my own experiences. It is for that reason that I try to give some idea of what life was like there." For these artists, poverty and hunger provide experience. Hemingway gains a new insight. He can see more clearly. Yes, he is hungry- but hunger is a discipline. Eating very little caused him to have an insatiable desire that had to be maintained and tolerated. It was the most simple and minimal form of surving. That did not mean, however, that Hemingway did not flourish. Cezanne's paintings are a combination of simple brushstrokes that come together to create a spectacular whole. By holding back and using what was essential to creating his painting, Cezanne made something unique. Hemingway understood this when he was hungry because he was also experiencing something extraordinary with the most minimal elements when he learned to control and tolerate his desire.

Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner, 1964.
Orwell, George. Down and Out in Paris and London. London: Penguin Books, 1933.

Faces

Cezanne

Top Left: http://www.avignon-et-province.com/photo- cezanne/img/photo-cezanne.jpg

Top Right: http://www.cedargrove.k12.nj.us/south/mediawebpage/images/martin/cezanne.jpg
Bottom Left: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/2006/01/27/arts/cezanne.4450.jpg

Chronology of Cezanne's Life

Paul Cezanne (1839-1906):

1839 January 19: Paul Cezanne born in Aix-en-Provence
1849-52 Attends Ecole St Joseph in Aix-en-Provence
1852-58 Attends College Bourbon in Aix. Beginning of friendship with Emile Zola
1858-59 Works at drawing academy at Aix
1859 Father aquires house, Jas de Bouffan
1861 First residence in Paris
1863 Exhibits at the Salon des Refuses
1870 Stays at L'Estaque with his mistress Hortense Fiquet. Submits Portrait of Achille Emperaire to Salon, but it is rejected
1872 Birth of Cezanne's son, Paul. Lives near Pissarro at Pontoise. The two artists work together
1873 Moves to Auvers-sur-Oise, meets Dr Gachet, who later befriended Van Gogh
1874 Cezanne shows three pictures int he first Impressionist Exhibition
1875-86 Lives intermittently at Aix, L'Estaque, Gardanne, Pontoise, Paris and elsewhere. Several visits to Zola at Medan
1877 Exhibits sixteen pictures at the third Impressionist Exhibition
1886 Cezanne marries Hortense Fiquet, mother of his son Paul. Louis-August Cezanne, the artist's father, dies, leaving him a substantial legancy
1889 Renoir visits Cezanne in Provence
1890 Invited to exhibit in Brussels. Travels with his family for a holiday in Switzerland
1894 Visits Money at Giverny
1895 First one-man show at Vollard's gallery in Paris
1896-99 Residence in Paris and Aix
1897 Death of Cezanne's mother
1899 Sells Jas de Bouffan to settle father's estate. Rents apartment in Aix. Paints portrait of Vollard
1901 Plans the building of a new studio overlooking Aix
1904 Exhibitions of Cezanne's work in Brussels and Paris
1906 Exhibits in Paris at the Salon d'Automne. October 15: collapses while painting outdoors, and has to be carried home. Dies on October 22, aged sixty-seven.

The Great Masters. London: Quantum Publishing Ltd, 2003.

Faces

HEMINGWAY

Top Left: http://static.guim.co.uk

Bottom Right: http://francy59.altervista.org

Bottom Left: http://www.icicom.up.pt/blog

Hemingway's Biography

http://100091191.files.wordpress.com

Biography of Ernest Hemingway from the Official Website of the Nobel Peace Prize:

"Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961), born in Oak Park, Illinois, started his career as a writer in a newspaper office in Kansas City at the age of seventeen. After the United States entered the First World War, he joined a volunteer ambulance unit in the Italian army. Serving at the front, he was wounded, was decorated by the Italian Government, and spent considerable time in hospitals. After his return to the United States, he became a reporter for Canadian and American newspapers and was soon sent back to Europe to cover such events as the Greek Revolution.

During the twenties, Hemingway became a member of the group of expatriate Americans in Paris, which he described in his first important work, The Sun Also Rises (1926). Equally successful was A Farewell to Arms (1929), the study of an American ambulance officer's disillusionment in the war and his role as a deserter. Hemingway used his experiences as a reporter during the civil war in Spain as the background for his most ambitious novel, For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940). Among his later works, the most outstanding is the short novel, The Old Man and the Sea (1952), the story of an old fisherman's journey, his long and lonely struggle with a fish and the sea, and his victory in defeat.

Hemingway - himself a great sportsman - liked to portray soldiers, hunters, bullfighters - tough, at times primitive people whose courage and honesty are set against the brutal ways of modern society, and who in this confrontation lose hope and faith. His straightforward prose, his spare dialogue, and his predilection for understatement are particularly effective in his short stories, some of which are collected in Men Without Women (1927) and The Fifth Column and the First Forty-Nine Stories (1938). Hemingway died in Idaho in 1961."

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1954/hemingway-bio.html

A Matter of Technique

Mountains in Provence

c1885 Oil on Paper

http://www.dl.ket.org/webmuseum/wm/paint/auth/cezanne/land/cezanne.mt-provence.jpg

Excerpt from my essay about Hemingway and Cezanne:

Not only do Hemingway's novels directly reflect the visual influence of Cezanne's work (like the trout lined up as Jake is fishing in The Sun Also Rises), but they come together with a similar technique as well. Cezanne's Mountains in Provence, for example, showcases a minimal and light brushstroke. However, when the strokes are placed together they create something whole and extraordinary. It is simple upon first glimpse, but the landscape is made beautiful by the complexity of the simply brushstrokes working together to create a whole. The reader's eye is also responsible for extracting some of the complexity out of the painting. That is the way that The Sun Also Rises works as well. Hemingway uses small bits of dialogue and a section of narration here and there. They are simple bits, but they work together to create a whole. However, if the reader is not willing to invest time and effort into placing the parts together and striving to understand them, some of the rewards of the text are lost.

Doing the Country Like Cezanne

Cezanne's Banks of the Marne (Villa on the Bank of a River). Oil on Canvas. 1888. Between 1888 and 1890, Cezanne began to paint various river scenes. The River Marne was one of his favorites:

http://www.oceansbridge.com/paintings

In a letter to Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas dated August 15th 1924 from Paris, Hemingway says:

"I have finished two long short stoires, one of them not much good and finished the long one I worked on before I went to Spain where I'm trying to do the country like Cezanne and having a hell of a time and sometimes getting it a little bit. It is about 100 pages long and nothing happens and the country is swell, I made it all up, so I see it all and part of it comes out the way it ought to, it is swell about the fish, but isn't writing a hard job though?"

Hemingway, Ernest. Selected Letters 1917-1961. Ed. Carlos Baker. New York: Scribner Classics, 1981.

The short story that Hemingway refers to in this letter is The Big Two-Hearted River. He describes the fish:

"The river was there. It swirled against the log spires of the bridge. Nick looked down into the clear, brown water, colored from the pebbly bottom, and watched the trouts keeping themselves steady in the current with wavering fins. As he watched them they changed their positions again by quick angles, only to hold steady in the fast water again. Nick watched them a long time.

He watched them holding themselves with their noses into the current, many trout in deep, fast moving water, slightly distorted as he watched far down through the glassy convex surface of the pool its surface pushing and swelling smooth against the resistence of the log-driven piles of the bridge."

http://www.olearyweb.com/classes/english10012/readings/twohearted.html

Changing Times

Cezanne's Paris in the 1850's

http://www.leegallery.com

Hemingway's Paris in the 1920's

http://upload.wikimedia.org

The Purpose of My Blog

This blog is designed to give an overview of Ernest Hemingway's life and his interesting connection with Paul Cezanne's art. It is also designed in a conversational, informal way. I am not aiming to create a comprehensive biography of either man. Instead, I would like to foster a fun atmosphere to learn about intriquing aspects of the two artists' lives and, especially, the connection Hemingway felt with Cezanne's work. If anyone has any insight or perspective that differs from my own, please feel free to write about it on this blog. Ultimately, I hope this allows you to learn about Hemingway and Cezanne in an interesting and informative way.