Topic 24: After He Was Dead

Carol:

Mountain Sketches 

When we moved to Prescott in the early 1980’s we sacrificed the convenience of the town and the serenity of the pines for the Williamson Valley vistas of Bill Williams Mountain and the San Francisco Peaks. But, the view framed by the windows at the front of our house gives me the greatest sense of wonder.  The official height of Granite Mountain is 7626 feet although 5000 of those feet are already the altitude of Prescott.  This mountain isn’t one of grandeur or of breath-stopping scale; it is one of daily, even hourly change as the light and weather play across its rocky surface. I wish I could paint it. No, I wish Cezanne could paint it.

Cezanne had plenty of practice painting mountains, well one mountain-- the limestone ridge outside the city of Aix-en-Provence in Provence.  Like Granite Mountain, Mont St. Victoire  would not not immediately impress those used to the Alps or the Canadian Rockies, but at a height of 3317 feet it dominates an otherwise fairly flat terrain. When I was a student  in Aix in 1968, I used to contemplate Cezanne’s mountain from  the wide windowsill in my room at the LaPlane family’s 300-year old farmhouse. I understood why Cezanne would paint it over 60 times from different angles, under different lights and weather conditions.

Aix was the childhood home of both Paul Cezanne and the future writer Emile Zola. Cezanne’s  love of Provence and its intense light, colors and varied landscape would bring him back to the Midi despite a complex and often painful relationship with his own family and with the town itself.  Retreating from the Paris art scene, he spent his final years in an almost reclusive lifestyle but one of great artistic energy and productivity.  However, his reputation in his own town was so low that the director of Aix’s Musee Granet, Henri-Modeste Pontier, refused to exhibit Cezanne’s work (Murphy 166).

"Cezanne was the ultimate outsider and misunderstood during most of his life. Success came little and late, although young promising painters came to visit him during his last years"  (Exposhop).

Paul Cezanne died on October 23, 1906 after contracting pneumonia. Days earlier, he had been caught in a storm while walking home from one of his painting excursions near Mont St. Victoire. He was buried in one of Aix’s oldest cemeteries.

One year after he was dead, a successful 1907 exposition of his work in Paris marked his increasing influence on  the 20th century modern art movement.

Twenty years after he was dead, the Musee Granet displayed the first Cezanne painting -- after the death of Director Pontier.

Fifty years after he was dead, The Musee Granet held its first major exhibition of Cezanne’s work.

One hundred years after he was dead, France declared 2006 “The Year of Cezanne.”
The highlight of national events was a celebratory exhibit at a newly renovated Musee Granet.  Aix-en-Provence finally learned to love its native son.

After he was dead.

 

Sources:

Cezanne, the Artists' Artist

Cezanne - Wikipedia
Exposhop.com: Cezanne 

Coutagne, Denis. Cezanne in Provence. Universe/Vendome 1996

Murphy, Richard W. The World of Cezanne 1839-1906 Time-Life Books, New York 1968

Megan:

Posthumous Executions

In England, I lived across the street from the Oliver Cromwell Hotel. Throughout Cambridgeshire County numerous places and landmarks are named for him because he was born in Huntingdon in 1599, which is about 20 miles south of March, where I lived.  I didn’t (and still don’t) know much about English history, so I did a little research. Apparently, he played a significant role in the English Civil War and is credited with making England into a republican Commonwealth. After he helped kill King Charles I, Cromwell became Lord Protector. He’s not too popular with the Irish because he’s responsible for killing a lot of them, but that doesn’t seem to be something the English hold against him. He died a hero in 1658, and was buried with great ceremony in Westminster Abbey.

Politics in England shifted dramatically as Charles II was restored to the monarchy in 1660. Cromwell’s body was exhumed in 1661, and he was publicly executed – hung then beheaded – for his crimes against Charles I. His body was dropped in a pit, but the head was passed around for the next 300 years until it was finally buried at Sidney Sussex College in 1960.

I have to say I find the idea of posthumous executions bizarre.  They indicate extreme rage, but also frustration on the part of the executioners, especially if the victim first died of natural causes. Anyway, I did some more research because I was curious about who else might have been executed after he was dead. The ever-helpful, if not completely accurate Wikipedia has a list of them, the most interesting are reprinted below:
 

• Li Linfu, Chancellor of Tang China during the reign of Emperor Xuanzong (712–756) in the latter years, was exhumed and executed for crimes of high treason by his rival Yang Guozhong for his implication in the An Lushan Rebellion.
• John Wycliffe (1328–1384), was burned as a heretic 45 years after he died.
• Captain William Kidd, whose body was gibbeted in 1701 — left to hang in an iron cage over the River Thames at Tilbury Point — as a warning to future would-be pirates for twenty years.
• In 1917 the body of Rasputin, the Russian mystic, was exhumed from the ground by a mob and burned with gasoline.
• In 1918 the body of Lavr Kornilov, the Russian general, was exhumed from the ground by a pro-Bolshevik mob, beaten, trampled down and burned.
• In 1945 the body of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini was lynched, hung (upside down), kicked in the head by passers-by, and shot several times after his execution by a firing squad.
• General Gracia Jacques, a supporter of François Duvalier ("Papa Doc") (1907–1971), Haitian dictator, whose body was exhumed and ritually beaten to 'death' in 1986.

Source: Posthumous Executions