Mountains in Provence. L'Estaque 1880

Editor: So, here we have Paul Cézanne’s "Mountains in Provence, L'Estaque," painted around 1880. It’s an oil painting, and the scene is really dominated by these greens and browns…it feels almost like a patchwork. What do you make of it? Curator: It’s fascinating how Cézanne flattens the space, isn't it? He is playing with a visual vocabulary that disrupts Renaissance perspective. Look at how he renders the houses, almost like cubes – devoid of familiar sentiment. Do you see echoes of earlier landscape traditions, perhaps in the way he uses colour to denote distance? Editor: I guess the blues of the mountain in the background feel like atmospheric perspective… Curator: Indeed, but there’s something else at play here. Cézanne is interested in the *idea* of a mountain, of a house, reducing them to their most basic forms. He is after permanence, and that is something that has echoes in religious icon painting where objects become vehicles for transcendental thought and spiritual introspection. Notice that nothing here really fades: even the backgrounds feel tactile, permanent. This piece shows a rupture with Impressionism and nods towards cubism and other radical departures. Do you feel the echoes of symbolism in this visual language? Editor: It makes me consider what is permanent versus fleeting in the landscape. What memories stick, what fades. Curator: Precisely! And isn't it amazing how this pursuit of the permanent and essential resonates through time, impacting everything from Van Gogh's expressive brushstrokes to Picasso's geometric explorations? It encourages one to meditate on how we can abstract from life and distill it into art, carrying within it a resonance far beyond a single location or vista.