Maitreyabandhu

Paul Cézanne: Montagne Sainte-Victoire (c. 1887)

Cézanne in the Studio

In a rage with everything, exhausted 

and defeated by working on the mountain, 

he takes an unfinished canvas, leans it 

against the wall and folds his arms.

Hortense will be bringing Paul tomorrow 

but he can’t think about that just now. 

That pink, is it a quarter-tone too high? 

He paces away, holds up a forefinger, 

squints and tilts his head, but can’t decide. 

Leave it for now. Counting the distance 

with his eyes, doing the arithmetic,

he knows everything leans; the plate’s ellipse 

is broken, back flipped up. He checks 

each particular like Marie telling her rosary

…this, that, this, that… That pink… 

No. To restrain is not always to improve. 

He swears at the thought, allows himself

a smile, swears again but more gently,

then, catching the paint off guard,

sees the whole beyond its sum of parts.

Paul Cézanne: Self Portrait with Palette (c. 1890)

Salt

There might be a word for canvas left bare

here in the shadowing, here at his throat –

a granular light, frost-showing weave 

stippling his beard and salting his gaze.

And now his coat, his waggoner’s cloak 

– the statuesque Picasso would quote –

is speckled and glittered, or is it blistered

and spotted with red? O say is it hurt?

Along the edge of his workman’s vest

something brightens under the dirt

that pinpricks the contour of a black lapel 

where graze-like, star-like leavings show.

Paul Cézanne: Still Life with Fruit Dish (1879–80)

At the Vollard Shop

Bonnard stands to the far right in Maurice Denis’ painting, 

in front of Denis’ wife who catches her husband’s eye 

at the Salon de la Société Nationale, 1901. 

He wears an overcoat, carries a cane and gazes in profile 

at the painting inside the painting, Cézanne’s 

Fruit Bowl, Glass and Apples, the hub around which 

the suited men revolve – Redon cleaning his glasses, 

bearded Vuillard and the rest. The colours of the painting 

inside the painting stay inside the painting, for the world

is beaver-black and frockcoat, stovepipe and boot.

Paul Cézanne: Three Skulls on an Oriental Rug (1898)

A Horde of Destructions

Everyone, it seems, took something from you in the end. 

Braque took the tabletop your peasant leans against 

and stole the browns (piano lid and beers), the sharp 

orthogonals for the viaduct at L’Estaque, gable ends 

and houses, the Rio Tinto Factories, breaking up 

the picture into cubes and wayward facets where the sky 

went missing for forty years. Picasso ransacked the bathers 

Matisse had got from you, watching from his easel 

while he made them twist and spread their thighs

or lift their mutilated babies where the hero statue falls. 

Giacometti exploited your bald exploding head.

Johns stole your hand for the Stars and Stripes (forever).

But despite these pillagings and takings, the analytics

and disgrace, if we could linger long enough to look 

at this bone-idle smoker or that woman turning round,

we’d see you’ve left everything exactly as you found it.

9 Foreword by Christopher Lloyd

16 Cézanne and the Colour Palette 

17 The Method of Loci

19 One Hundred Cloche Hats

21 The Apple’s Progress 

22 The Ambiguities of Place

23 Angels in Peckham

25 The Black Clock

26 The Mannequins of Paris 

27 Madame Cézanne with Anti-Representational Effects

29 Five Studies for Marie-Hortense 

31 Self-portrait of the Artist Wearing a Hat 

32 Rilke on the Place de la Concorde

33 Sunday Bells

35 Cézanne’s Dog

36 The House of the Hanged Man

37 The Pissarro Portrait

39 Cézanne in the Studio

41 This Painting of a Mountain

43 Man with a Pipe 

45 Léontine 

49 Cézanne’s Peasant

51 The Artist’s Mother

52 The Church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte

53 Einstein’s Watch 

57 Human Things

58 Apple, Chairback and Dish

59 The Disfluency of Cézanne 

60 Kukai in Provence 

61 Il Était Plus Grand Que Nous ne le Croyions

63 Afterthought 

64 The Red Teapot

65 Art Tutorial 

67 Rilke Writes to His Wife from the Salon D’Automne 

69 Morning in the Studio: Les Grandes Baigneuses

70 This Perpetual Dazzlement

71 Cut-outs

73 Matisse in the Studio

75 Roger Fry at Langham Place

76 For the Artist of Anahorish 

77 The Quarry at Bibémus 

78 Sufficient Blueness to Give the Feel of Air

79 A Worm Composing on a Straw

81 Salt

83 At the Vollard Shop

84 The Three Inseparables

85 Bathers at Rest 

87 L’Œuvre

88 Burnt Lakes 

89 Two Dozen Mongoose-Hair Brushes

91 The Mountain Ode

93 Under Linden Trees

95 Vallier

96 Opusculum

97 On Rough Ground 

99 Two Ways of Closing

101 A Horde of Destructions

103 Notes

‘Maitreyabandhu’s work beautifully, and seriously, contains the possibilities of what other traditions might call insight’ – Fiona Sampson, Poetry Review.