Cézanne and the art of the meltdown
(On apples and creative conversation)
Last week, I went to an exhibition of work by one of the greatest artists the world has seen. He’s the artist Picasso described as “the father of all of us”. He’s the artist Matisse described as “a kind of dear god of painting”. Matisse borrowed money to buy one of his paintings. Picasso owned four. Monet had fifteen.
In the exhibition at Tate Modern you can see more than 80 of his works. You can also see a letter he wrote to his friend Camille Pissarro. “I almost forgot to tell you,” he writes towards the end of it, “that I was sent a certain rejection letter. It’s neither,” he adds, “new nor surprising.”
Well, that’s something to cheer us up. Paul Cézanne, perhaps the artist most admired by the greats of nineteenth and twentieth century painting, was used to racking up the rejections! After dropping out of law school (well, the law faculty of the University of Aix-en-Provence), he applied to the École des Beaux Arts in Paris. He was rejected. Later, he applied again. He was rejected again. He applied to the Salon de Paris every year from 1864 to 1869. Every year, he was rejected. The only time he snuck in was in 1882 when his friend Antoine Guillemet became a member of the Salon jury and passed Cézanne off as his student.
I am not going to turn this into a TED talk about “growth mindset” or a podcast with super-successful celebs about how the secret to everything is failure. It isn’t. For every person who gets a book deal, an exhibition at the Tate or to star in a West End play, there are thousands who wanted to, and didn’t. It would be lovely if persistence was a sure-fire route to success. It would be lovely if any writer who could match J K Rowling’s twelve rejections could know they were on the path to record-breaking sales. That, unfortunately, is not how it works.
Still, there’s nothing like a bit of failure-on-the-route-to-success to perk us up.
There’s also nothing like great art. When I walked into the first room of the exhibition, and saw the first painting, I gasped. There they were, some of those famous apples, with a bottle of wine and some mini baguettes. The perspective is skewed. There’s a basket tipped at an angle that seems to defy gravity. There’s a piece of cloth so artfully rumpled that it looks as if it has been starched into peaks. It shouldn’t work. It almost doesn’t work. But when you stand in front of it, it takes your breath away.
Cézanne, clearly, was not afraid to try new things. He faced rejection and ridicule, but he was the one who created the bridge between nineteenth-century impressionism and twentieth-century cubism. In his fifty-odd years of painting, his work changed almost beyond recognition.
He was a pioneer. He was a revolutionary. But he was so shy that he refused to hire models for his paintings of nudes. And he was haunted by his inadequacies. “I want to tell you,” he wrote to his son Paul, “that as a painter I am becoming more clairvoyant to nature, but that it is always very difficult for me to realize my feelings. I cannot reach the intensity that unfolds before my senses, I do not possess that wonderful richness of colour that animates nature.”
May we all have inadequacies like Cézanne’s.
When was the last time you had a meltdown about your work? For me, it was on Monday. Yes, Blue Monday. I am nothing if not suggestible. I talked to a friend who gently told me I was being ridiculous. I realised, almost before I started talking to her, that I was doing the thing I do: castigating myself for not having succeeded at something I hadn’t even tried to do. I should add it to my LinkedIn profile and get some endorsements. Highly skilled in self-flagellation.
We all have our weak spots and this is one of mine. It’s one of the recurring themes (I now realise) in my book, The Art of Not Falling Apart. For years, for example, I was furious with myself for being single. It took a therapist to point out that I was probably single because I liked being single, and seemed to be having a lovely time. I was even more furious when I realised he was right.
I am not a therapist, but one of the things I love about coaching is helping people spot the things we often find it hard to spot for ourselves. Sometimes these are patterns. Sometimes they’re habits. Sometimes they’re shrieking voices in our head that come from our mother, our father or the bully at school. They’re voices that are usually outdated, but weirdly fresh in our heads. I will never forget the way my cheeks burned as I sat in a puddle in school assembly and my teacher’s tone of voice when she sent me home in tracksuit bottoms she’d found in a cupboard. When you’ve wet yourself in public, giving speeches is a breeze. At least you get to go home in your own clothes.
I decided to train as a coach during the pandemic because I missed human beings. As a freelance writer, I’ve had years of working at home on my own. It’s boring. The writing isn’t. “I’d have to admit,” says novelist and poet Paul Kingsnorth in his book Savage Gods, “that writing has always felt more real to me than life. More real and more interesting. The patterns you can make from what you see out there are better than what you actually see out there, because they are yours.” When writing is going well, it’s something like this. But there’s an awful lot to be said for sparky interaction with real, live humans, too.
Coaching is all about creative conversations. I love helping people tackle their blocks and hearing about the progress they have made. I’ve recently coached a doctor, a scientist, a journalist, an entrepreneur and a chief executive who has had a block about writing and is now well into a novel. I am not about to be the next Gareth Southgate. I can’t talk tactics, defence and the off-side rule. I can ask questions and I can listen and there seems to be an alchemy in that.
Cézanne’s friend and biographer Émile Bernard called his working process “reflection with a brush in his hand”. I love that. The unexamined life, as Socrates suggested, may not be worth living, but thoughts, as Gandhi said, mean nothing without action. Let’s make this the year when our vague hopes for something different are converted into deeds.
Welcome to new subscribers!
I seem to have had a flood of new subscribers since the weekend. I have absolutely no idea why. Would someone be kind enough to tell me? Anyway, lovely to have you here.
Coaching
New year, new start, new you etc. If you’d like help in clarifying your work or life goals, and would like to find out how coaching might help, do drop me an email at me@christinapatterson.co.uk . You can find out more about my coaching here.
Podcast
I recently completed the second season of my podcast The Art of Work, which follows two seasons of Work Interrupted. There are now 50 podcast episodes to listen to. My most recent guests include classicist Mary Beard, T S Eliot prize-winning poet Joelle Taylor, internationally renowned cellist Steven Isserlis, bestselling writer Kathryn Mannix, winner of the Global Teacher Prize Andria Zafirakou and former Twitter VP Bruce Daisley. If you’re looking for inspiration, you’re sure to find some here.
Sky News
I have managed not to mention politics! It’s all just too grim at the moment. But I’ll be talking about politics (and our broken country) on the Sky News press preview on 11th and 25th February, and on 4th and 18th March, at 10.30pm and 11.30pm. You can find out more about my journalism and broadcasting here. (I also do media and presentation coaching, in case you feel the need for it.)
Outside, the Sky is Blue
I can’t believe it’s nearly a year since my book came out! It will be out in paperback on 1st March, but it’s currently half price on Amazon, just £8.49 for a beautiful hardback, so feel free to snap a copy up…