Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir

Mont Sainte-Victoire and Château Noir (1904) at the Artizon Museum in Tokyo brings together two of Cézanne's most sustained late subjects in a single composition. The Château Noir, an unfinished Gothic-influenced manor northeast of Aix, and Mont Sainte-Victoire, the limestone massif southeast of the city, were the two dominant preoccupations of his final decade. By 1904 his late style was at its most advanced: the mountain broken into planes of color that barely cohere into recognizable geological form, the Château's stone glimpsed through the trees with only its essential geometric masses visible. The Artizon Museum, formerly the Bridgestone Museum in Tokyo, holds several significant late Cézannes that represent the concentrated Japanese interest in his work. The combination of Château Noir and Sainte-Victoire in a single canvas is significant: the man-made structure, dark and historical, set against the eternal geological mass of the mountain, creates a meditation on the relationship between human construction and natural permanence that had run through Cézanne's landscape work from the earliest Jas de Bouffan paintings.

Cézanne renders the mountain and château with the systematic planar approach of his late style — the forms broken into planes of color that built the landscape through tonal and chromatic relationships rather than conventional perspective and modeling. His brushwork in the late Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings is characteristically open, leaving areas of the canvas bare, the white support contributing to the luminous quality. The relationship between the architectural forms of the château and the natural forms of the mountain creates the composition's formal investigation.