THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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canvas, merely confirmed, by the fact that they were so worthless and mendacious as paintings, the wistful Hades of the arrived feast day. And on the other hand it was
confirmed by the merciless art with which a sparing, rigorous painting in the manner of Marées sought to present, or rather to conjure up the other world beyond
hardship. In Greek pictures full of noble gestures, solitary grace, with posed orange groves, with supposed statuary figures plucking and offering golden fruits, with
precious buildings of repose and yet, as is obvious, with theatricality here too. This disappeared only when really genuine painting did not merely cultivate, in a naive
fashion, the greatest technical rigour, but above all when it simplified its objects, i.e. restricted them to those in which even in the bourgeois world a positive image of
Sundayness was still possible. This occurs above all in Cézanne, with resignation and restriction to a rustic little world and to a greatness of nature seen in equally
simple­monumental terms. Only in this way did a tranquillity of Sunday which remained highly laconic become both materially concrete and monumental. This even, if
not predominantly, in the portrayal of plucked fruits, and further in the reserved landscape paintings and their Dorically maintained Elysium. The Epicurus of a ‘Déjeuner
sur l'herbe’ is at an end, the Gardens of the Hesperides which have become academic are not observed: instead there appears in the picture the most substantial corpus
of repose that is known in the nineteenth and especially in the twentieth century. Cézanne transforms even his still lifes into places in which things are rigorous and
sedentary, in which happy ripeness has settled. What has been plucked in these pictures, the apples, lemons, oranges, are not fruits any more, although they are painted
as such with extreme care and precision, they are witnesses to a heavy contentment, brought from Hesperian landscapes on to the tablecloth of the feast day. Here
everything is still life and nothing, for Cézanne condensed whole worlds of repose into these small creations, statuary ones in which harvest has occurred, in which an
Elysian Ceres puts her hands in her lap. Cézanne's heroic figures and landscapes are also just as reassured, just as ordered in the restriction to mere detail, thoroughly
architectonic. Nudes lie built in stone or rise like pillars into the air, stand between the trees, in Byzantine rows, or built into a background of foliage (‘Les Ondines’) as
into a niche. The masterpiece ‘Grandes Baigneuses’ bends the trunks which frame the picture right and left into Gothic arches, leaning on them rise standing nudes, they
turn into reclining ones towards the middle and the ground, a Sunday space par excellence fills the arch itself­beach, meadow, water, village landscape, high clouds.
Things and people