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(jazzy music)
Male: We're in the l'Orangerie in Paris
and we're looking at a late Paul Cezanne,
The Red Rock.
This is actually one of my favorite
landscapes by Cezanne.
Female: What makes it one of your favorites?
Male: He loved painting rocks, quaries
and the forest.
This is just so outrageous.
You've got this huge abstract shape
in the upper right corner,
which is an overhanging rock ledge,
but it is so unexpected and so weighty
and abstract.
Female: You said weighty, but it has no bottom,
so it feels to me like it hovers in midair.
Male: It's true, and even as I said weighty,
I was thinking we know it's heavy,
we know it's massive, but actually
in a pictorial sense maybe not so much.
This is a painting where Cezanne has perfected
these short stippled brushstrokes,
which create this wonderful sense of the buzz
of a very hot afternoon.
If you've been in a semiarid environment
like the south of France, or maybe the desert
in the western United States, you can hear the insects.
Female: You're right.
It feels very much like a very hot afternoon.
I also sense the leaves rustling a little bit
in the dry, hot wind.
Male: So, he's drawn us into this landscape.
He's given us this ochre path with these
alternating bands of shadow.
We're not that far away from Classical
landscape of 17th and 18th centuries.
Female: Our eye does travel down that path
and we can almost feel ourselves walking
through the space.
Male: That's right, but then something happens
that upends that more traditional recessionary space
which is if you look at the curve of the pathway,
it starts in the center and it's fairly large,
and then it recedes and gets narrower
as our eye moves into space, and bends
ever so slightly to the right.
But then you'll notice that there are
the same colors that pick up in a similar
arc, but now up in the trees.
Is that a rock that's seen through the trees, perhaps?
But optically it plays fast and loose
with the recession that we had been
comfortable with a moment before.
Female: There's lots in the painting that does that.
The violet that makes for those horizontal
shadows that you just mentioned is carried
up through the landscape.
We're not meant, I think, to read space
in the traditional way here.
Male: I think Cezanne is not only questioning
the Classical landscape, but I think he's
also questioning the Impressionist landscape.
Remember, he had shown in the 1874 Exhibition,
and then comes back down to the south of France
and begins these series of investigations.
Cezanne here has given us a space into which we can walk.
At the same time, he is simply, emphatically
refusing to give us that space.
That rock comes up and forward.
Those trees and that sky create deep space
but also resist deep space.
There's just the sense of completely turning
all of the traditions of landscape on its head;
not necessarily knowing where he's going, by the way.
I think that this is really exploration,
but exploration that is also really beautiful.
This is a painting that is clearly creating
the densest possible field of color and form.
That sense of density, that focus on the paint itself
on the surface and on the two-dimensionality
of the canvas, seems to me irrefutable.
Look, for instance, at the center where those
warm, rich orange ochres are rising up
and the way in which they're overlayed
by the greens and those black purples.
Female: It's very abstract.
Male: It's incredibly abstract
and incredibly dense.
The paint itself is forthright.
Female: That's true.
Male: So it is about paint and dismantling
the expectations of traditional landscape.
(jazzy music)