La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves
Paul Cézanne·1904
Historical Context
La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue des Lauves, from around 1904 and held at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, is one of the monumental late Cézanne views of his most celebrated subject — the mountain southeast of Aix-en-Provence that he returned to throughout his career and obsessively in his final years from the Lauves studio he had built specifically for the purpose. The Sainte-Victoire series represents one of the most sustained single-subject investigations in the history of painting: a mountain repeatedly seen under different conditions until its geological and optical essence is laid bare. The Pushkin's late example shows the method at its most radical.
Technical Analysis
The late Lauves views push Cézanne's constructive colour method to its most abstract expression — the mountain resolved into broad planes of warm and cool colour patches that achieve structural clarity through purely chromatic means. The dissolution of conventional outline in favour of colour modulation anticipates Cubist simultaneity.
Look Closer
- ◆The mountain in this late Lauves view fills more of the canvas than in the earlier Bellevue views — Cézanne has moved closer and the mountain has grown in compositional importance.
- ◆His late tile strokes run consistently at a diagonal across both sky and mountain — the sky and rock unified by the same applied mark.
- ◆The mountain's summit plane is painted in cool blue-grey — its geological mass made airborne by the atmospheric colour Cézanne applies to its most distant face.
- ◆The foreground is barely described — just rough ochre marks suggesting scrubland — all focus pulled toward the middle and far distances.
- ◆This Pushkin version, like others from the Lauves studio period, has the quality of sustained concentrated looking rather than outdoor sketching — a meditative record of repetitive observation.
 - BF286 - Barnes Foundation.jpg&width=600)
 - BF1179 - Barnes Foundation.jpg&width=600)
 - BF577 - Barnes Foundation.jpg&width=600)
 - BF534 - Barnes Foundation.jpg&width=600)
