Cistern in the Park of Château Noir

Cistern in the Park of Château Noir (c.1900) at MoMA shows Cézanne's obsessive investigation of the overgrown grounds of the estate east of Aix that he had been using as a studio base. The Château Noir's park — a semi-wild enclosure of pine forest and tumbled rock where old stone structures were being gradually absorbed by vegetation — gave him a subject that combined the geometric and the organic in an almost theatrical way. The cistern, a water-storage structure of solid masonry, was being invaded by the surrounding growth, its geometric form made ambiguous by vegetation and the dappled light of the forest canopy above. This dialogue between stone and growth, geometry and organism, was among Cézanne's most productive formal investigations. The park at Château Noir also provided the forest interiors that were among the most complex of his late landscape paintings, and the cistern paintings belong to the same concentrated exploration of the estate's enclosed, overgrown world. MoMA's two late Château Noir canvases are among the finest examples of his fully achieved late style available in New York.

The cistern's geometric stone structure is rendered through Cézanne's systematic colour-plane analysis, its surface built from modulated touches of grey, ochre, and green that simultaneously describe material and light. The surrounding vegetation is handled with the directional overlapping strokes of his late landscape work, enveloping the structure in a texture of foliage that creates complex spatial layering. The overall composition has the dappled, enclosed quality of an overgrown park rather than the open clarity of his mountain landscapes.