Published in LiP Magazine
[http://www.lipmagazine.org]

View the full version of this article on the LiP website

CÉZANNING WITH IMPUNITY

by Greg Hischak
03.06.01

"I WAS RAKING HAY when I heard them across the field," Eduard Masson, another victim, recalls. "I was caught in the open and tried making for the trees along the canal." Masson rubs his squashed fingers across the convulsive, blockish features of his face.

"Planes began exploding all around me as mass and horizon flattened into broad diagonal brushstrokes, and I was thrown against a wall."

We nod our heads. In the attack's aftermath, opacity, perspective and coloration no longer seemed to hold visual propriety for Masson and the other distorted townspeople of Aux Sur Mange.

"Cézanne," one of the officers accompanying us mumbles under his breath.

"It was only by hiding behind the Renoir in the bedroom that I managed to save myself," M. Duroux, the town's mayor explains to the indifferent authorities.

In the days following the event it became obvious that this had been no catastrophe au naturale. The attack was quickly attributed to visual insurgents operating in the quaint Provence backwaters around Aux Sur Mange and the response of the local police was predictably negligible. Day-patrolling the major arterials, they questioned those who looked less than representational, but took no real offensive action. Meanwhile the press corps dispersed to various bunkered studios in the hills for footage while we stayed on to calm the stunned populous.

M. Duroux stated it point blank: "Do you think we are blind? Aux Sur Mange has been Cézanned. Just look around and you see his influence." We were grimly aware that what M. Duroux said was true. Provence was a blank canvas—a no man's land caught between academia and breakaway modernists. Little did we know, however that this sorte would be just the beginning.

As though their misery was not enough, that next week the flattened fought-over landscape of Aux Sur Mange was again overrun—this time by Cubists.

An unidentified bather recalls: "We heard their trucks circling all night. In the morning we saw easels set up along the ridge above town. Shortly after breakfast they began their assault."

Cubists were no Sunday dilettantes. The most cut-throat of the half dozen post-impressionistas marauding the countryside, the Cubists deconstructed the pitiful inhabitants of Aux Sur Mange where they stood regardless of age or sex.

"Haven't we suffered enough?" the surviving elders pleaded as the goateed ruffians downed thick cups of espresso and proceeded to break the women and children down into base geometric shapes.

"My beautiful Yvonne, so young, so precious—simultaneously perspectivized," M. Renauze wailed, cradling in his arms the lifeless form of his daughter in both three quarter and full-frontal view. Her childlike features flattened into a multiplicity of planes, ruthlessly distorted and left unrecognizable—the trademark barbarism of Cubists.

Several ragged and partially flattened refugees escaped to the foreshortened hills south of town. Seeking out places that they hoped would be hard to draw, they huddled under trees and behind rocks. While, the art community debated and politicians mumbled flaccidly' about creative expression, block grants and limited military involvement, the despairing survivors of Aux Sur Mange waited for the ruthlessly abstracting hoards to pack up their canvases and move on.

"They're all under the spell of Cézanne," the refugees respond when asked about the Cubists. Still others call out from the shelter of the surrounding woods:

"They're all bums and bandits defacing the world."
"Yes, defacing it in his image!"

We ask whose image they referred to.

"Cézanne’s image!"

"He was mad you know…went crazy in one of those wars.

"He rolled his eyes back as a child and they stuck."

"It's because none of them know how to draw in the first place."

"Chromatic Cleansing."

Squatting around a small fire that failed to produce any directional light, a tattered angular refugee demands of us: "And what are doing to help?"

Without any remnant of clear visual narrative, they were indeed a broken community.

"The Final Graphic Solution," M. Duroux whispers, his haggard Cubist-damaged face resting close to the fire as the others shake their heads in agreement.

"The cast shadows are going out all over Europe."

As dawn approaches Duroux points a withered ill-defined finger toward the flattened townscape below.

"Look at our poor village. All our houses are squashed on top of each other. The cows don't get smaller as they move away from you. Nobody looks nice; the women have terrible skin color, and you can't get a piece of fruit to stay on the table. How does one continue to believe in a God when the very planes upon which we live conspire against us?

"Picasso…Braque."

"Delaunay, Balla…Legar….

"Legar…

"Monsters."

"Rendering with impunity," Duroux spits into the last embers of fire.

"The horror...the horror."

"Rousseau will save us!" somebody shouts and M. Duroux spits again.

"Merde. Rousseau will save no one, not even himself, he's a dreamer. He can't even draw a lion. Someone who can't even draw a lion is not going to save you.

Caught in the onslaught of modern art, huddled in the cold angular dawn, all that the refugees of Aux Sur Mange could do was pose and wait, hoping against hope for another movement to wash over them—something that would make them look nice again.

"Wyeth maybe," a young woman suggests, turning her pitifully disfigured features away from our gaze.

"Art movements are all alike," M. Duroux declares. "It's not about subject—it's all about glory and big oversized coffeetable books. That's really what it's all about-big oversized cofftetable books."

On an opposite ridge across the valley a lone Cubist, alerted by the uproar lowers his thumb and draws a bead on M. Duroux. Perched behind his easel, the marksman slowly extends his brush to the waiting canvas. Beside us, a scream breaks the first light of morning calm as Duroux raises a hand to his distorting face, his perspective rapidly disassembling into blocky cascading angles of gray-brown sienna.

Ashamed and powerless, we turn away.

"We are just a simple people," Duroux sputters flatly before turning toward the shadowed ridge to wail with his dying breath: "Leave us in peace and stop painting us!
[ L i P ]

EMAIL THIS ARTICLE TO A FRIEND. CLICK HERE.

Reproduction of material from any LiP pages without written permission is strictly prohibited | Copyright 2002 LiPmagazine.org | info@lipmagazine.org