Travel and Adventure by Various Travel Authors

By Karen Kenyon

"I am deeply in love with the landscape of my country." — Paul Cezanne

Cezanne's name is carved above the gate to his studio in Aix-en-Provence in southern France, and when I first stepped over the threshold to the tangled garden in front of his atelier, I knew I had entered a sacred space. A few visitors sat amid the lush greenery reading, writing or resting at a couple of tables.

The olive tree just by the garden was supposed to be destroyed when the studio was built, but Cezanne had a builder construct a barrier around it to protect it: "It knows everything about my life and gives excellent advice," he said.

The two-story building with its coral-peach door is just a few steps away, and once I was in the 13-foot-tall room, with one wall all north-facing glass, I was also back in time. Cezanne had surely just stepped out to walk a little more uphill and paint again his beloved mountain, Montagne Sainte-Victoire.

Everything is exactly as he left it. Bowls of fruit sit on tables along with glass bottles, pitchers, a coffee maker and vases. His black coat hangs on a nail, as do his paint-covered smock and his black derby hat. His palette is nearby, still smeared and globbed with paint. The special ladder he used to create "The Bathers" leans against the wall.

Sainte-Victoire, which he painted more than 100 times, is no longer easily visible since trees have grown to block the view. A giant slot has been cut into the wall beside the windows so that large finished paintings could easily be taken out that way.

This Atelier de Lauves (named for the street) has not changed since Cezanne's death because James Lord, an American writer, stepped forward in 1952 and saved it from developers. Along with a group of 114 other American donors, he turned it into a memorial museum.

It was just a bit farther up the hill that Cezanne was taken ill in 1906. He had left the studio with his paints and easel and planned to paint Montagne Sainte- Victoire once more, but a fierce rain storm felled him. He passed out and was found by villagers who brought the 67-year-old painter back to his home. Cezanne tried to paint again the next day, but he had to be put to bed, and he died 10 days later from pneumonia. A few years earlier he had said, "I am old and ill, but I have sworn to die painting."

Cezanne never strayed far from his native Aix-en-Provence with its red earth and tile roofs, the green of the pines and plane trees, and the clear blue of the sky and the nearby Mediterranean Sea. Even when he lived in Paris for a while he did not try to fit into Parisian life but wore his Provencal clothing — rustic and crude-looking, with a favorite red belt — and he made no attempt to soften his Provencal country accent. He once said of the landscapes of his youth, "What love and truth there is in me comes from their tranquil passion."

The hotel where I stayed during my visit overlooked the main street of this university town of 140,000. The wide thoroughfare, Cours Mirabeau, is lined with two rows of green leafy plane trees that resemble those along the Champs Elysees in Paris. Legend has it that carved angels are under all the moss that grows on a warm bubbly fountain that was just across the street. Aix has thousands of fountains, springs and baths. The thermal springs are, in fact, what drew the Romans here in 123 B.C.

From my second-floor window I could watch the light flickering through the leaves, making patterns on the earth and pavement — much like the ones that must have inspired the patchy short brushstrokes Cezanne developed while working with Impressionist Camille Pissarro in the outdoors as plein-air painters.

Art writer Robert Hughes refers to the colors of Aix as "blazing light, red earth, blue sea, mauve twilight, the flake of gold buried in the black depths of the cypress."

Cezanne's boyhood friend, Emile Zola, wrote, "When this dried-out country gets thoroughly wet it takes on colors ... of great violence, the red earth bleeds, the pines have an emerald reflection, the rocks are bright with the whiteness of fresh laundry."

Today Aix is proud of its famous son, however antisocial and withdrawn he may have been and despite his having been ignored or tolerated for most of his life. Despite his exhibition in Paris in 1895, when he was recognized as a significant painter, the city of Aix refused to show his work. He had thrown away old classical ideas about perspective. He would show objects on a table — apples, peaches, a pitcher, a cherub — yet not all were depicted with the same perspective or viewpoint — some were tilted or on various levels.

Since 1936, however, his paintings have been on display at the Granet Museum. Picasso said Cezanne was "the father of us all," and his fascination with shape influenced the development of Cubism. Art historian Roger Fry wrote that he was "the first wild man of modern art."

His much-painted mountain lies just west of the town. It is easily visible from the Lauves atelier and from the road leading into and out of Aix. Cezanne's obsession with the mountain seems to have to do with his desire to find form and structure in nature. The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Not since Moses has anyone seen a mountain so greatly."

Back in the town, it's possible to visit other Cezanne sights. Studs embedded in the pavement mark places that were significant in his life, including the home of his birth at 28 Rue de l'Opera and the art school he attended from 1857 to 1862 at the Granet Museum. Today one room of the museum is devoted to Cezanne's work (nine paintings are always on display), including his painting of "Madame Cezanne" done in 1886 and "The Bathers" (1890) .

The family manor home, Jas de Bouffan (Habitation of the Winds), slightly east of town, is also open to visitors. Cezanne's father, Louis-Auguste, purchased the home in 1870, and Cezanne used the top floor as his studio for a time. He painted 36 oil paintings and 17 watercolors of this home and its surroundings.

Two cathedrals here are also linked to Cezanne's life — Church of the Madeleine, where he was christened, and where his parents were married five years later, and Saint- Sauveur, where he attended Mass and brought coins to give to the poor. In the end, it was also where his funeral was held.

IF YOU GO

From Paris: TGV trains leave several times a day from Gare de Lyon in Paris. The three-hour trip costs between $80 and $130 each way.

Cezanne at the Web Museum: www.ibiblio.org/wm/paint/auth/cezanne

Paul Cezanne's studio: www.atelier-cezanne.com/aix-en-provence/html; www.paul-cezanne.org

Granet Museum: www.museegranet-aixenprovence.fr

Aix-en-Provence Tourism: www.aixenprovencetourism.com

Karen Kenyon is a freelance travel writer. To read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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