Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839-1906) Edge... Lot 102

Paul Cézanne (Aix-en-Provence, 1839-1906) Edge of Lake Annecy, 1896 Watercolor. Height 23.7 cm, width 47.5 cm. Provenance : - Ambroise Vollard, Paris. - Martin Fabiani, Paris. - Mouradian et Valloton, Paris. - Collection of Mr. and Mrs. K., Touraine. Exhibition : - "Cézanne, Renoir, Rouault", 1963, Isetan Museum, Tokyo, n°14 of the catalog. - Cézanne", 1971, Hyogo Museum of Modern Art (Kobe, Japan), n°21 of the catalog. A 1896 watercolor by Paul Cézanne depicting the Annecy lakeshore. Painted at the same time as the picture held in the Courtauld Institute of Art collections. Bibliography: -John Reald, "Catalogue raisonné des aquarelles de Paul Cézanne", New York, 1984, work described on p. 202 and reproduced under n°474. - Antoine Terrasse, "Les aquarelles de Cézanne", Flammarion, 1995, Paris, p. 21 and following. The reflection of Mount Sainte-Victoire in the waters of Lake Annecy No one before Cézanne had rejected the Western tradition with such insistence. His proposals for paintings for the Salon were all rejected and his violent disagreement with the official culture led him to turn to the future Impressionist painters. He participated in their first exhibition in 1874 and, eleven years later, painted his masterpiece: La Montagne Sainte-Victoire vue de Bellevue (Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia, 1885). From 1877 on, Cézanne explored a new constructive and synthetic phase marked by the overcoming of Impressionist influence. The subject disappeared in favor of color. Abstraction and the search for a totally autonomous pictorial space animated his creation. In this quest, watercolor plays the role of vector. He uses this technique to get closer to the representation of space and light. Experienced in this technique, the travelling artist, sometimes dissatisfied, does not hesitate to tear up his watercolors. The precious works preserved prove that they rarely relate to his paintings. They are not what one might call "preparatory studies". They are works in their own right, where his immense technical skill in the art of brushing transparent washes offers an essential manifestation for understanding the artist's genius. Paul Signac wrote about him: "watercolor is a laboratory experiment where he breaks down the relationships and passages of the elements to reconstitute the pictorial modulation of his volumes. When he painted Lake Annecy in 1896, with its overwhelming composition, it was always Provence he was thinking of (London, Courtauld Institute of Art, P.1932.SC.60). He expressed his nostalgia to his friend Philippe Solari: "the lake is very nice, with big hills all around... But when you are born there, it's gone, nothing tells you anymore...". At the request of his wife Hortense, the painter went to Talloires, on the shores of Lake Annecy, where he produced about fifteen watercolors. Of a rare purity, these works, which were not painted again in the studio, forcefully distilled the dream of mountains and light that struck the eye of the master of modernity. He wrote to his young friend Joachim Gasque: "It is a temperate zone. The altitude of the surrounding hills is quite high. The lake, in this place constricted by two gullies, seems to lend itself to the linear exercises of the young misses..." The few spots and, above all, the liquid and colored lines of our watercolor testify to the silent power of the grandiose nature, as if the lake of Annecy was inscribed in the mirror of its dear Sainte-Victoire mountain.