aixcentric

A series of half-hour programmes, each dedicated to one painting with a commentary by art critic Waldemar Januszczak, finishes tomorrow with a detailed analysis of ‘The Card Players’.  Cézanne painted the subject 5 times – this one is part of the Courtauld collection.

It was  painted at the Cézanne home at Jas de Bouffan, but not in  his studio up on the top floor of the bastide.  When researching for my book, ‘Aix en Provence, The Inside Story’, I visited the home of Anna Wakhevitch-Corsy who had spent her youth at the bastide, which her father owned.  She was then living in a delightful small house behind the main building.  In Cézanne’s time it had been part of a complex of agricultural buildings where the models for the card-players, agricultural workers, were based.  And that’s where they had to be painted, she told me, as old M Cezanne didn’t allow such people to come into his house!

As for the programme, it features ‘the lush landscape of Provence where he (Cezanne) explores the effect of Mary Magdalene on both the region and the artist’s work, showing how religion permeated his vision,’ according to the preview in The Times. ‘It’s Januszczak’s thesis that the two men borrow the look of secular saints adorning Aix’s grand cathedral and lean in like arches’.

BBC4 Tuesday 7th April: https://www.bbc.co.uk/mediacentre/proginfo/2020/11/the-art-mysteries