After Cézanne

By Maitreyabandhu

After Cézanne is a sequence of fifty-six poems exploring the life and work of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Reimagining his friendships with Zola and Pissarro, his impact on Matisse and Picasso, as well as his posthumous reputation, Maitreyabandhu celebrates Cézanne’s apples and card players in poems at once tender, urgent and amused. The book includes 26 colour reproductions, a preface by Christopher Lloyd (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, 1988-2005) and extensive textual notes. After Cézanne is Maitreyabandhu’s third collection.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloodaxe Books
• Release date: Oct 24, 2019
• ISBN: 9781780374833

Maitreyabandhu

Maitreyabandhu was born Ian Johnson in 1961, in Henley-in-Arden, Warwickshire. His parents ran a coach firm on the High Street. Initially trained as a nurse at the Walsgrave Hospital, Coventry, he went on to study fine art at Goldsmiths College, London, alongside Sarah Lucas and Damien Hirst. He started attending classes at the London Buddhist Centre (LBC) in 1986, and moved into a residential community above the LBC in 1987. He was ordained into the Triratna Buddhist Order in 1990 and given the name Maitreyabandhu. Since then he has lived and worked at the LBC, teaching Buddhism and meditation. He has written three books on Buddhism, Thicker than Blood: Friendship on the Buddhist Path (2001), Life with Full Attention: a Practical Course in Mindfulness (2009) and The Journey and the Guide, all from Windhorse Publications. In 2010 he founded Poetry East, a poetry venue exploring the relationship between spiritual life and poetry, and attracting many leading poets, including Jo Shapcott, David Constantine, Mark Doty, Don Paterson and Sean O’Brien. Maitreyabandhu has won the Keats-Shelley Prize, the Basil Bunting Award, the Geoffrey Dearmer Prize, and the Ledbury Festival Poetry Competition. His first pamphlet The Bond won the Poetry Business Book and Pamphlet Competition (2010) and was shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award. Vita Brevis, his second pamphlet, won the iOTA Shots Award (2011). His first book-length collection, The Crumb Road, was published by Bloodaxe in 2013 and is a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. His second collection, Yarn, followed in 2015. His third Bloodaxe title, After Cézanne, an illustrated meditation on the life and work of the painter, is published in 2019.

Book preview

MAITREYABANDHU

AFTER CÉZANNE

After Cézanne is a sequence of fifty-six poems exploring the life and work of the post-impressionist painter Paul Cézanne. Reimagining his friendships with Zola and Pissarro, his impact on Matisse and Picasso, as well as his posthumous reputation, Maitreyabandhu celebrates Cézanne’s apples and card players in poems at once tender, urgent and amused. The book includes twenty-five colour reproductions, a preface by Christopher Lloyd (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures, 1988-2005) and extensive textual notes. After Cézanne is Maitreyabandhu’s third collection.

‘A resoundingly authentic collection with no lapses in concentration. Maitreyabandhu’s understanding of Cézanne and his motivation are endlessly persuasive without ever crossing into presumption. A rich and intense book, unashamed of its erudition and its powerfully keen sight.’ – Sasha Dugdale

‘All the aspects of Cézanne’s ordeal are fused together in Maitreyabandhu’s remarkable poems in which the varied forms of composition and wide range of reference provide a refreshingly unique insight into Cézanne’s art. What is achieved here is an incomparable poetic expression of the artist’s personal idiosyncrasies and manifold achievements.’ – Christopher Lloyd (Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures 1988-2005)

‘These remarkable poems remind us of the close kinship between painting and poetry. Maitreyabandhu shares insights into Cézanne that can, perhaps, only be grasped through poetry. The poems speak eloquently of Cézanne’s art and of the experience of trying to comprehend a great artist.’ – Barnaby Wright, Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery, London

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

Cover painting: The Bay of Marseille, seen from L’Estaque (c. 1885) by Paul Cézanne

Oil on canvas. The Art Institute of Chicago, IL, USA / Mr and Mrs Martin A. Ryerson Collection (Bridgeman Images)

MAITREYABANDHU

AFTER CÉZANNE

‘Talking about art is virtually useless’

– Cézanne to Émile Bernard, 26th May 1904

i.m. Alex Danchev (1955–2016)

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Some of these poems, or earlier versions of them, were published in Acumen, Brixton Review of Books, The Compass, Envoi, The High Window, Hotel, The Keats-Shelley Review, Long Poem Magazine, Magma, The New Humanist, The New Statesman, Oxford Poetry, PN Review, Poem, Poetry Ireland Review, The Poetry Review, Poetry Wales, Prole, The Rialto, Siècle 21 (France), The Spectator, and Tears in the Fence. ‘One Hundred Cloche Hats’ was runner up in the Keats-Shelley Prize, 2017. A Cézanne Haibun, originally intended for this collection, was published as a pamphlet by Smith | Doorstop (2019). Poems from After Cézanne appeared in a digital installation at StAnza, Scotland’s Poetry Festival, 2017.

My thanks go to Barnaby Wright (Deputy Head of the Courtauld Gallery) for his encouragement, and to Christopher Lloyd for his wonderfully concise and lucid Foreword. Alex Danchev, author of Cézanne: A Life (Profile Books, 2013) and The Letters of Paul Cézanne (Thames and Hudson, 2013), originally agreed to write the Foreword, but Alex died suddenly not long after I interviewed him for PoetryEast. I have dedicated this collection to him.

I am grateful to Neil Astley for his unfailing generosity; to Sasha Dugdale for reading After Cézanne in manuscript; to Vishvantara Julia Lewis for her friendship and support; and to Warren Davis for proofreading. I am especially grateful to Mimi Khalvati without whose guidance this collection could never have been written. And I am greatly indebted to Arts Council England for their generous support.

CONTENTS

Title Page

Epigraph

Acknowledgements

Foreword by

CHRISTOPHER LLOYD

Cézanne and the Colour Palette

The Method of Loci

One Hundred Cloche Hats

The Apple’s Progress

The Ambiguities of Place

Angels in Peckham

The Black Clock

The Mannequins of Paris

Madame Cézanne with Anti-representational Effects

Five Studies for Marie-Hortense

Self-portrait of the Artist Wearing a Hat

Rilke on the Place de la Concorde

Sunday Bells

Cézanne’s Dog

The House of the Hanged Man

The Pissarro Portrait

Cézanne in the Studio

This Painting of a Mountain

Man with a Pipe

Léontine

Cézanne’s Peasant

The Artist’s Mother

The Church of Saint-Jean-de-Malte

Einstein’s Watch

Human Things

Apple, Chairback and Dish

The Disfluency of Cézanne

Kūkai in Provence

Il Était Plus Grand Que Nous ne le Croyions

Afterthought

The Red Teapot

Art Tutorial

Rilke Writes to His Wife from the Salon D’Automne

Morning in the Studio: Les Grandes Baigneuses

This Perpetual Dazzlement

Cut-outs

Matisse in the Studio

Roger Fry at Langham Place

For the Artist of Anahorish

The Quarry at Bibémus

Sufficient Blueness to Give the Feel of Air

A Worm Composing on a Straw

Salt

At the Vollard Shop

The Three Inseparables

Bathers at Rest

L’Œuvre

Burnt Lakes

Two Dozen Mongoose-Hair Brushes

The Mountain Ode

Under Linden Trees

Vallier

Opusculum

On Rough Ground

Two Ways of Closing

A Horde of Destructions

NOTES

About the Authors

Copyright

FOREWORD

Paul Cézanne’s reputation as an artist who stands at the threshold of modern art is incontrovertible, but it was hard won. Concerned at all times to learn from the lessons of the past and willing momentarily during the 1870s to align himself with the avant-garde art of the Impressionists, it was the two last decades of his life that were to be the most influential. Having by then established his independence and begun to attract attention it was only in relative isolation that he started to comprehend the full complexity of his most important challenge. This was to create a wholly convincing record on canvas or paper of those sensations that he personally experienced when confronting nature. For this he developed a technique of carefully juxtaposed brushstrokes in oil or watercolour combining drawing with colour to suggest spatial recession and to evoke a sense