Colm Toíbín

Colm Tóibín: In The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann, Hans Castorp sees an X-ray of himself for the first time, and it’s almost erotic, he sees what really his soul or his body, what the X-ray has done. There’s something about your recent paintings that have that element of looking at X-Rays. Could you tell me technically how the paintings are made?

Miquel Barceló: It’s bleached canvas. In the beginning, I used black paper or board and bleach and a little bit of white chalk.

What emerges from Cézanne’s letters more than anything is his determination, his solitude, his seriousness and his eccentricity. Even though his work was being rejected by the Salon and mocked by the locals, he slowly built a reputation among dealers and critics. None of this seems to have bothered him much. In general he stayed in Provence, becoming a sort of legend in Paris. Danchev includes an extract from a letter written by woman to a friend in 1894, when Cézanne was 55: “Monsieur Cézanne is from Provence . . . When I first saw him he looked like a cut-throat with large red eyeballs standing out from his head in a most ferocious manner, a rather fierce-looking pointed beard, quite grey, and an excited way of talking that positively made the dishes rattle.”

Increasingly, Cézanne became a subject of fascination for Zola. As early as 1861, when Zola and Cézanne were still in their early 20s, Zola wrote to a friend: “He is made of one single piece, obstinate and hard in the hand; nothing can bend him, nothing can wring a concession from him.” In 1886 Zola published a novel based on him. When Cézanne received the book, which is translated into English as The Masterpiece, he wrote Zola a very polite letter of thanks, and then, despite more than 30 years of friendship, he never spoke to Zola, or communicated with him, again. Zola’s portrait of the artist as genius had him end in failure and suicide. The rift between the two men should be a lesson to all novelists and, indeed, all their friends.