...of a portrait

The Cezannes that I saw at an exhibition in the spring of 1978 struck me as such things of the beginning, and I was overcome with a desire to study such as had hitherto been inspired only by Flaubert’s prose style. These were works of his last decade, when he came so close to his aim of “realising” his subject that the colours and forms alone sufficed to do it honour. (“By relaity and completeness I mean one and the same thing,” said the philosopher.) And yet these paintings show no added light. The feted subjects owe their effect to their own colours, and sometimes the overall effect of the lighter landscapes is one of darkening. The nameless Provencal peasants of the late nineteenth century, the heroes of the portraits, loom large in the foreground; with no particular insignia of royalty, they dominate an earth-coloured ground, which is there land, their country.
Darkness, lines, composition, reinforcement, darkening eyes; yes, I was shaken. And after two years of “study,” an appropriate sentence fits itself together: the silence of these pictures seemed so complete because the dark lines of a composition reinforced an overall tension which (as the poet put it) I could attain by “darkening over” to it, that is, by a leap, in which two pairs of eyes, separate in time, met on a painted surface.
“The picture has begun to tremble,” I jotted down at the time. “What freedom, to be able to sing someone’s praises.”
One portrait in particular moved me, because it pictured the hero of the story I had yet to write. It was titled The Man with the Folded Arms: a man, whose picture would never bear a proper name (but who was not no one or just anyone), seen in the corner of a rather empty room defined only by its wainscoting; sitting there in the darkness of the earth tones that also modulate the man himself; a man, it seemed to me, at “an ideal age: already substantial, but still capable of yearning.” (True, when I studied his posture, I was put off by the hand tucked back under the arm, and it took an effort of will to unbend it.) The man’s eyes looked obliquely upward, without expectancy. One corner of the mouth was slightly distorted by a thicker shadow line: “humble sorrow.” His open white shirt was bright, as was his large rounded forehead under his deep-black hair - vulnerable in its nakedness. I did not see this man in my own image, or as a brother; I saw him, rather, as an accomplice, who, now that I have finished his story, is once again the inviolate Man with the Crossed Arms, radiating a silent little smile.

[The Lesson of Mont Sainte-Victoire, from Slow Homecoming, Handke, P.]