Thursday 25th April 2013

Where does the time go? I’ve been back from the Côte for weeks but in blog land I’m still there.

Last Friday Genevieve Suzy of the magazine world came round to my home; she doesn’t know if she can go on with Hastings, where she’s got one of the best houses. The renovations are killing her. I said she should only desist if one of the best houses in Hastings was not her absolute object which of course it is. Lesser considerations such wise investment of funds should be swept aside. Genevieve had champagne in her handbag; at 55 minutes notice, I managed Heston’s lapsang smoked salmon on toasted pain de mie and an improvised smoked tomato sauce for spagetti.

Then on Saturday Robert Nevil gave a talk to the Colchester Pony Club – more later. Perfectly astonishing. In the ’30s the Club had socialistic tendencies and after the War did innovative things with glass – oh yes! the hidden depths of the Pony Club!

But I must round up the Côte: we took a bus trip to Aix en Provence. The guide soon grasped that Val was an authority. Before a statue of a grim-looking medieval woman she had to defer. ‘Margaret of Anjou,’ Val proclaimed. ‘The She-Wolf of France.!’ Grasps from the crowd at the racism! Never such thrill. ‘Just to think. All this could have been ours.’ Val swept Aix. Marg of Anjou married Henry VI of England who was intermittently insane allowing his Queen an entry into the power world where she mongered ferociously. However, overplaying her hand in the Wars of the Roses, she ended up getting posted back to France to live as a poor relation of the King – so not quite in a position to lay claim to Aix.

Val surged on through Aix – ‘Look at that giant order,’ he warbled, so grand and commanding. See graph below if you’re so wretched you don’t know what an order is.

At Cézanne’s studio, I graphed his old macs until told to desist. Actual items seen in the paintings were on view, such as vases and a plaster statue of an upright baby, unremarkable until placed in the furnace of Cézanne’s imagination. The whole room grey as the artist required – a neutral background for colour to flourish. Huge window to the north but no outlook.

Later we bused to Mont St Victoire much painted by Cézanne.  To graph it without telephone wires it was necessary to take over someone’s garden. The owner expressed surprise but not displeasure. A thoroughly sinister mountain, huge, a bare limestone spur of mysterious colour thrusting out of an otherwise not mountainous and green landscape.

How to place Cézanne? A heavyweight, of Old Master stature now, obscure in his day, the smaller the scale the more powerful the result. Les Grand Baigneurs just trying too hard. Not quite Poor Little Rich Gay but a vast improvement on Van Gogh.

Well done, Cézanne, for bashing on and becoming one of the great artists of all time.