Peter Handke

There is a painting by Cézanne which has been referred to as The Great Pine. (He himself never gave his paintings titles, and seldom signed one.) It shows a tall, solitary pine by the Arc River southeast of Aix. This was the river of his childhood. After bathing, he and his childhood friends would sit in its shade; later, at the age of twenty, he asked Emile Zola, who had been one of these friends, in a letter: “Do you remember the pine on the bank of the Arc?” He even wrote a poem to the tree. In it the mistral blows through the bare branches; and the picture, too, suggests the wind, particularly in the way the lone tree slants. That tree, more than just about anything else, might be titled: “Out in the Open.” It transforms the ground from which it rises into a plateau, while the branches, twisted in all directions, and the infinitely varied green of its coat make the empty space around it vibrate. The Great Pine is depicted in other paintings, but never is it so solitary. In one of them (which is signed) the bottommost branch seems to wave in the direction of the landscape. Along with the branches of a neighboring pine, it forms a vaulted gateway leading into the distance, where the slopes of Mont Sainte-Victoire lie stretched beneath the bright colors of the sky.