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MONT SAINTE-VICTOIRE

A WALK IN CÉZANNE’S SHADOW

Montagne Sainte-Victoire: A Walk in Cézanne’s Shadow by

Lost in a crevasse of distant memory is the moment I first saw an image of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. It was, perhaps, 1970, a time when I first began my serious looking at art. Paul Cézanne’s mountain “of fire and light” lay, very small and flat, on a tipped-in plate in one of those small Skira volumes on French art which fitted neatly into my duty locker in the Navy barracks, Newport, Rhode Island.

In that same lost canyon of time is the moment I first thought to hike (climb seems too serious a word for a peak of this caliber) the great man’s limestone muse; the seed thus planted would take over five decades to bear its fruit.

The morning of May 23, 2024 was clear and slightly cool in the graveled parking lot overlooking the Barrage de Bimont, the tall dam spanning the canyon on the northwest flank of the mountain. A great Umbrella pine cast some refreshing shade as I stood and looked into the distance at the peak, already bathed in bright sunlight.

This dam and the small lake it holds were not present when Cézanne took his sketching walks in the 1880s and 90s. Completed in 1951, the Barrage is the second dam on the Infernet River (also called the Cause) which is the main diet of the Bimont. The earlier and smaller dam, a bit farther downstream, was designed and promoted by Francois Zola, the engineer father of the great novelist Emile Zola, Cézanne’s oldest and closest childhood friend 1. In truth, the first builders of dams in this area were the Romans around the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, some of whose ruins are visible in a ravine in nearby Le Tholonet 2

I threw on my backpack and walked briskly down the sloped approach to the dam and across its concave crest. At the far end I immediately took a sharp left and entered the pines, looking for the signs of the trail, Le Sentier Imoucha, an out and back type, 5 kilometers each way, marked by balisé, small blue rectangles painted on rocks and less frequently on tree trunks; not so easy to follow, I soon realized. Approximately 4 hours were needed to make the round trip.

I imagined Cézanne setting out along a path similar to this one, carrying his paintbox, brushes and supplies. I had only a Lumix digital camera (with a Leica lens), and was on the lookout for what might be likely vantage points that Cézanne had used. The rising path began as an idyllic walking surface of pine needles, leaves and scattered small stones. I moved ahead easily under the boughs of the tall pines, with the rising sun filtered by soon-to-be-scattered white billowy clouds.

1A bronze plaque on outer wall of the Lycée Mignet (ex-College Bourbon), Rue Cardinale in Aix testifies to their companionship during the years 1852-58. As boys, Cezanne and Zola explored the countryside outside Aix, including approaches to Sainte-Victoire. They may well have been accompanied by their schoolmate, Antoine-Fortuné Marion (1846-1900), who had a broad interest in the natural world and who would eventually become Professor and Director of the Natural HistoryMuseum in Marseilles. Cezanne’s bust-length portrait of Marion is now in the Kunstmuseum, Basel, Switzerland.

2Provenance & Beyond, https://www.beyond.fr/a/about-provence-beyond.html, an intimate and an encyclopedic site on the world that is Provence.

Mont Sainte Victoire seen from the SW near the Barrage de Bimont, Provence. Author’s photograph ©.

Paul Cézanne, The Montagne Sainte-Victoire With A Large Pine, ca. 1887, The Courtauld, London (Samuel Courtauld Trust) © The Courtauld

Taking a fork that moved off to the right I increased my pace and soon found myself on a narrow gravel road. After 500 yards I stopped. The balisé had suddenly disappeared. I looked at the map I had picked up the previous afternoon in Vaurvenargues and realized (a) it wasn’t a very good map; and (b) I was supposed to be much farther to my left over toward Le Tholonet. I scanned the slope with my small field glasses but saw no hiker moving who might give me a clue to the Imoucha. I pressed on, ascending the lower NE flank of the mountain, occasionally stopping to scan the thickly wooded, and increasingly distant, slope to my left. At this point I could have cut down and across the ravine under a partially cleared track below the high-voltage pylons striding up from the nuclear power plant at Gardanne, about 20 miles southeast.

Most of Cézanne’s many views of St. Victoire (over 80 paintings and drawings) concentrate on the southwestern exposure, though I wondered if he lived today might he have picked out the massive cooling towers as interesting subject matter? It is possible. After all, he often painted the chimneys of the Provençal houses scattered among the foothills and pine forests below the peak, treating them with equal finesse. In 1878 while living in L’Estaque he included a very tall smokestack in the foreground of a bay view landscape, La Mer l’Estaque derriere les arbes

Édouard Manet, Argenteuil, 1972, Musée des Beaux-Arts, Tournai

And let’s remember that the Impressionists often included the massive smokestacks at Argenteuil in their Seine River landscapes; as early as 1872 Monet had painted the towering chimneys, and Manet’s 1874 canvas, Argenteuil includes a chimney spire lined up dead center in the far background like a needle, giving the sailboat mast a precise and definitive scale. Another chimney partially obscured by other masts, rigging and tackle, belches a filmy black smoke into the light blue summer sky. Gustave Caillebotte, much later (1888) focused directly upon the factories and towers in a dour composition of blues and violet grays, perhaps a comment on how much modern industry had changed the sleepy village in the span of just 15 years.

The Impressionists’ interest in the transformation of their world3 was not exclusively water and light, it often focused on their quickly changing built environment. Perhaps these massive squat giants of today inspire in us a similar apprehension, though speaking not so much of aesthetic transcendence as of environmental dangers, impending obsolescence, and, by extension, our own transience.

3In the 19th century Paris proper saw an explosive increase of population from just over 500,000 in 1801, to over 2.7 million by 1900. [Baron

1860s reorganization expanded the borders of the city, skewing these figures as a straight line increase). Cf. The Rise of The Paris Red Belt, by Tyler

U. of Calif. Press, Berkeley, 1990.

Paul Cézanne, La Mer l’Estaque derriere les arbes, 1878; Musée Picasso, Paris

Gustave Caillebotte, Factories at Argeneuil, 1888, Private Coll.

Hausmann‘s

Stovall,

I decided not to cut through the thorny maquis4 and the track began to curve back and up toward the mountain, which was a positive sign. I followed on for another quarter mile until the track ended in a small open patch on a hill. At the left side was a trail, narrow but visible, winding its way through the thickets and which generally appeared to climb steeply up a ridge and toward the Imoucha, which I was (fairly) sure was just on the other side.

After about fifteen minutes of climbing a less-used and bushy path, with some scrambling over rocky outcrops, I crested the ridge and voila! There was the Imoucha coming up from the left. I turned right and headed up the hill and soon saw one of the confidence-restoring balisés. Checking my watch I calculated that my little divigation had cost me about 30 minutes, though I was hardly on a strict schedule, so I brushed it off as fun and resumed the ascent toward my ultimate goal, the peak with the Croix de Provence fixed proudly to its utmost crag .

I was now high on the southwest ridge and noticeably closer to the peak than any drawing or painting of Cézanne seems to show. His trails were most certainly not my trails [obviously, as the Barrage did not exist and therefore any trailhead off its face didn’t exist), and in any event the older Cézanne was more interested in portraying Sainte-Victoire than climbing it.

At this point the height of the ridge obscures the actual peaks so it is more of ones following the trail - and ignoring the frequent little culs-de-sac spurs - which has long sections of rocky defiles and steep step-ups (more on those in the descent section), root entanglements, boot-polished rocks and jutting trailside bushes, all of which call for a certain deftness of step. The bedrock white limestone now became the trail surface. No more pine needles here above the tree line.

Montagne Sainte-Victoire has two summits. The highest point and true summit is the Pic de mouches (1,011 meters). However, the most notable is the western prominence (946 meters) crowned by an iron cross almost 60 feet high, the Croix de Provence. It was erected in May 1875 and given a blessing by the Archbishop of Aix and 3,000 faithful attendees. The cross was my destination, and that of most everyone I met on the trail.

About a half mile below the summit the east side of the mountain falls away in great concave walls of stone - the Baou Roux and the Baou Cézanne, polished and stained with rainwater runoff, the massif proper trailing off into the hidden distance like the backbone of a giant beast above a landscape sprinkled with farms and vineyard villages whose red-tiled roofs and lovely Provençal names run and fall, tripping off the tongue: Puyloubier, Pourrières and Pourcieux among them.

The trail now began a more earnest and elevated pitch, with switchbacks headed toward the peak and the Croix. I could see off to the north the nearby village of Vauvenargues5, nestled in the small valley of the Cause, as I headed into the last half mile of the trail.

4The hardy and tough scrub of the Maquis lent its name to the armed French Resistance fighters of WWII. Throughout the region, as on the D10 near Vauvenargues, there are small white obelisks and memorials to those partisans who were killed in the struggle against the Nazis.

5My buddy Wolf Schulz and I had driven the D17, D57, D623, D23, D10 loop around the mountain the day before and we had stopped for an impromptu outdoor lunch on the patio of a closed café, just a stone’s throwfrom the gates of the local Château, which looms over the ville from a lovely elevated prospect beneath great spreading pines. We hoisted a glass and toasted its most famous, and now permanent, resident, Pablo Picasso, who is buried in one of the gardens just beyond the locked iron gates. As art collectors and dealers who have both owned and sold the works of the great master, this was a very special homage for both of us.

Only a few hundred yards below the peak is the small but impressive Priory, a 17th century stone retreat with large arched gate and courtyard, its inner chapel now serving as a traveler’s rest stop. I availed myself of a seat on the outset foundation by the gate and had a long drink of water as I surveyed the trail I had just walked. Off to the left a bit was the lake behind the dam, and the low hills trailing toward Aix and its cathedrals, clearly visible under a now cloudless blue sky.

The chapel and priory have served as a hermitage since the 13th century, though the present structures were built over a span of years in the 17th century. A chronology posted inside the Priory states that over 48,000!! mule trips were needed to carry up the stones and supplies. At the low wall forming the south side of the courtyard above a sheer drop of a thousand feet, I felt my slightly aching feet and realized just how much of an effort by man and beast were spent in building this refuge. There were no hermits or priests present on this day but there was an impressive herd of piebald and calico chamois, sullenly lounging on the boulders and rocks. In the still air of the courtyard their odor and that of their urine was biting and acrid so I moved on through the building to the last steep pitch toward the summit.

Irregular and bouldered switchbacks tilt up toward the Croix, now black against the sky, its arms outstretched above all of Provence. Coming up the last bit and nearing the large concrete block base of the cross you suddenly get the 360-degree view of it all, and also the wind gusts which, even on this ‘balmy’ day, had a little kick to them that made me happy it wasn’t blowing hard. I donned my lined Marmot windbreaker and settled in for lunch: half a chicken sandwich, an apple and some local cheese, the last of the Vauvenargues dejuner. A few other hikers were tucking in as well, seated on the cross base and taking in the stunning expanse. Far off to the northeast lay Alpes-de-Haute-Provence and the prominent crags of the regional park at Sainte-Baume, and perhaps those around Brignoles. I wondered if Cezanne had painted views from the summit, though as mentioned, his devotions concentrated on the great mass viewed from the lower foothills.

At about 2 pm a few light clouds had suddenly appeared and the temperature on the peak slid down about 5 degrees, both signs that the time to descend was imminent. One last look around and a couple of selfies later I began picking my way down the pitch.

As I exited the Priory I passed several groups of hikers heading up, including two couples with two small dogs, and then came upon the goats, now browsing on the leaves of stiff thorny bushes either side of the trail. Their balance on hind legs was remarkable and they seemed uncurious as I passed by within a few feet. They had seem us all many times before.

After an hour of picking my way down the trail my knees began to throb a little from the seeming endless jolting ‘steps’ which required, as mentioned before, a watchful eye and quick feet to avoid slipping or twisting an ankle. I began to think wistfully about my hiking poles, tucked snugly in the boot of my car, about 6,000 miles away in California. Sticking faithfully to the Imoucha this time I finally entered the tree line about 2:30pm, but instead of the hoped-for relief of a pine needle carpet, my bootsteps found only more limestone, stretching like broken dragon’s teeth ever onward and unabated until at last I reached the overlook near the dam, by which time my knees were feeling, like they were, well, on their last legs.

At three o’clock I took I turned around for a last look at the mountain and snapped a parting photo of the peak, very proud under its new cloud protectors. I thanked the gods for this special trek to the altar of a great artist and a pilgrimage come true after more than 50 years. In my backpack I had the hard proof of my Provençal journey, a heavy triangular limestone boulder from the very top of Montagne Sainte-Victoire. Angular and blocky, it was much like a stroke of paint on a late Cézanne canvas, and a fitting reminder of the artist’s mountain, where his artistic struggles advanced a unique and modern vision of our natural world. FRED PAGE/PAGE ART INC fred@page-art.com www.page-art.com

Paul Cézanne, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902-1906, Philadelphia Museum of Art