Cézanne and the poetics of metonymy

Abstract

Throughout Cézanne's personal and creative life, water and bathing served as emblems of an idealized unity between nature and mankind. The aquatic pastimes of his youth in Aix found reflection in Cézanne's early adult letters and poems that harp on his nostalgic yearning for bathing in the Arc River. Although later, in his paintings, this lifelong fascination with water and its eternal forms took on a more sophisticated shape, water's proximity to poetry remained consistent in Cézanne's mental categories. The suggestive poetic quality of water ultimately would bring Cézanne to innovative forms of painterly expression, not surprisingly in works depicting water and bathing. Moreover, in applying the poetic principle to his painting, Cézanne inadvertently exposed what would emerge as one of the basic laws of the modernist aesthetic, namely the transcendental quality of the fine arts: music gives birth to poetry, poetry to painting. Music and poetry helped Cézanne to understand the meaning of nature to man, the desire to return to and dissolve in nature's eternal flux, and he was able to express this discovery in a single artistic medium.