This book originates from the Cézanne exhibition which took place at the Kunsthalle in Tübingen from January 16 to March 12, 1993. The exhibition was organized by G. Adriani, director of the Kunsthalle and editor of the exhibition catalogue, entitled Cézanne. Die Gemaelde (Koeln: Du Mont, 1993).
Through the discussion of the exhibition and of the works it included, we have been able to recover Cézanne's artistic and spiritual itinerary, as well as the significance of his artistic production, thereby realizing the goals of the exhibition itself. Cézanne's art brings to a close the development of European painting up to Impressionism, while at the same time anticipating its dissolution and the transition to the modern art of our century. He accomplished this transition, which is crucial for 20th-century art, through a long process of stylistic investigation and of profound spiritual maturation that eventually culminated in the maturing of his own poetics. What we have intended to demonstrate, however, is that although the much-debated principles of his poetics were formulated at the end of his career as a painter, they had already been articulated in his works of the years 1875-1885, a decade of fundamental importance for the development of his own artistic language.
As Reff, Gowing, Rubin, and others have demonstrated, we cannot argue that the famous statement "all nature must be interpreted in terms of cylinders, spheres, or cones" cannot be understood in the Platonic sense of pure ideal forms or of stereometrical bodies through which all objects must be rendered (as in cubism or abstract art). On the other hand, however, it is equally true that we cannot interpret this statement simply as a suggestion of ways to represent the convexity of objects. Rather, it should be read as an indication of the direction in which Cézanne's pictorial language was moving.
Whereas the ultimate principle, the "parole", of such language is colour, through which the artist establishes a dialogue with objects or with nature, the "langue" which constructs it is rooted in a continual faceting of form through speckles of colour almost geometrical in shape. Such speckles are juxtaposed and organized according to the principles of modulating shades of colour in order to reproduce spatial depth, and of gradating the transition between two primary colours by using such complementary colours as orange and green, which Cézanne could use with extraordinarily intense results. The two opposite principles of Cézanne's poetics thus come to light: first, the close imitation of nature, a principle that Cézanne called "optique", which could be realized through the relentless observation of the "sensations colorantes"; secondly, the organisation of such sensations, a principle which he called "logique". These two principles merge in what Cézanne terms the "réalisation" of the work of art, which results as much from accurate observation, as from the adoption of a very precise method in constructing a work of art. The unity of these two opposite moments may be found in the process of "reading nature" (one of Cézanne's "opinions" that Larguier and Bernard have passed on to us), which comprises both the act of contemplating the divine spectacle of nature and that of interpreting it.
Consequently, the work of art that reads nature autonomously through the artist's sensations and also interprets it autonomously through the artist's "réalisation", results at once both from the abandon to the reality it represents and from the absolute agency of the artist in his absolute abandon, in the realization of his work of art. Rilke has rightly interpreted this as the conceptualization of the work of art as absolute, a conceptualization which was crucial for him, for modern art as whole, and ultimately for Heidegger's philosophy as well. In the absolute abandon to nature, which he accomplished through the autonomy of his own artistic practice and language, Cézanne succeeded both in achieving the extreme beauty of pure ideal forms (according to the logic of the "reading eye") and also in releasing his own sensations from reality itself.
As a result of our analysis of Cézanne's works, the complete intellectualization of the work of art, which Nietzsche feared as the doom of modern art, emerges on the contrary as an expansion of sensibility, as a liberation and a development of artistic language which, far from spelling the death of art, opens up the possibility to find ever new answers to the original mystery of human existence through a conceptualization of art as culture ("colere").