Cézanne and Monet: Repetition as a Perceptual Method in Art

Between 1870 and 1906, Paul Cézanne (1839-1906) painted Sainte-Victoire Mountain more than eighty times . Claude Monet (1840-1926) did the same around thirty times between 1892 and 1894 with Rouen Cathedral . What did this repetition, this reiteration of the theme, conceal? It was not simply a matter of formal insistence; in both cases, repetition was conceived as a perceptual method, as a way of exhausting appearances in order to reach visual truth.

As Marcel Proust wrote in In Search of Lost Time (1908-1927), a work in which he reflects, among other things, on sight and perception, “The only true journey, the only bath of youth, would not be to go towards new landscapes, but to have other eyes, to see the universe with the eyes of another, of a hundred others…”

In a letter to Émile Bernard, Cézanne wrote, "Everything in nature is modeled after the sphere, the cone, and the cylinder." With this phrase, Cézanne was not proposing a simplification of reality, but rather, on the contrary, a profound restructuring based on these three geometric forms, which he considered fundamental to the configuration of space in nature.

This aphorism will be the pictorial and spatial universe in which his work will move and focus, and each brushstroke on the canvas will seek to answer different enigmas in this sense. Where is the line? How is the plane articulated? What makes a color advance or retreat on the surface?

For Cézanne, painting is not simply the reproduction of a landscape, but a stable and lasting form of existence that allows the construction of a deeper and more solid truth through form and color.

But Cézanne doubts his own vision, and this doubt is what gives rise to his method. A formula where the reiteration of the motif does not imply mechanical repetition, but rather variation. Cézanne does not rely on a first impression; he returns, corrects, reinterprets, and observes, not from a single point of view, but from different angles at once, fragmenting the image, splintering it. A process of fragmentation of the point of view that radically anticipates the searches and studies that Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso would carry out years later and that would give rise to Cubism . Not in vain, Picasso would say: "Cézanne is the father of us all."

In this process, the mountain becomes a kind of teacher. Sainte-Victoire is not a landscape; it is a thinking form, an organism that provides answers, an ontological presence. Fidelity to Sainte-Victoire is not sentimental or nostalgic: it is epistemological.

In Monet 's case, the chosen motif - Rouen Cathedral - is, paradoxically, a solid form transformed into fog, making this work one of the most radical explorations and studies of the perception of time and light and how these intervene and modify matter.

In this series, developed between 1892 and 1894, Monet works and represents the experience of seeing different moments, not as something unconnected or dissociated, but as a profoundly unitary gesture, where far from fragmenting the image, he multiplies it in order, in this process, to unify the diverse.

Monet places the eye at the center of the experience. He doesn't paint the cathedral, he paints the duration of the gaze before it. In this gesture, he approaches a philosophy of the sensible. The world is flux, perception, and transit. And painting, far from being a stable record, is unstable, mobile, and subjective.

The same façade is painted more than thirty times from almost the same angle, but always under different lighting conditions, making it the subject, not an accident. His painting is a way of doubting the solidity of the world. But his doubt doesn't immobilize him; on the contrary, it challenges him, prompting him to observe more closely, to return insistently to the same motif, to paint again, to wait for another time of day, transforming nature into an object of calculation.

The cathedral's firm, vertical Gothic architecture ceases to be a symbol of eternity and becomes a fleeting, transitory present, where stone is merely a screen on which time is projected . Monet takes his Impressionist credo to the limit: reality does not exist outside the instant of perception, and the different versions of the cathedral thus constitute a field of study, where the transformation of color and constant vibration transform it into something almost liquid, elusive.

Cézanne and Monet's obsession with their subjects—one with the Mont Sainte-Victoire, the other with Rouen Cathedral —is not irrational; on the contrary, it embodies a methodical, Cartesian discipline. Doubt—as in Descartes—a radical distrust of all inherited knowledge, all immediate perception, and all unexamined custom—is the method. Doubt, far from being paralysis, becomes a way, a habit, to reach the truth.

Cézanne doubts every form he paints, every relationship between color and volume. Nothing can be taken for granted in his painting: every sketch, every canvas, is a questioning of the visible world. Monet, on the other hand, doubts the permanence of things. The light changes, the atmosphere mutates, the moment escapes, dissolves. In both cases, doubt is fruitful and transforms into a method, into an ethic of perception.

The Cartesian method subjects the world to the judgment of thought. Cézanne and Monet subject it to the patience of the eye. And if the philosopher distrusts the senses, painters choose the opposite path: trusting in phenomenological perception, but subjecting it to a rigorous, slow, almost ascetic test. In all of them, the truth is not what imposes itself, but what is revealed after many tests. Each brushstroke is a judgment, each version, an attempt to reach that undisguised evidence that allows us to understand a little more. Not what is visible in itself, but what the eye feels and encodes when exposed again and again to the same thing. And, like Elstir and Vinteuil—those two artistic archetypes that represent painting and music within the Proustian universe—Cézanne and Monet also teach us to travel within the gaze, with the sole condition of knowing how to look again.

From this perspective, the motif becomes a silent teacher. Sainte-Victoire educates Cézanne's gaze; Rouen Cathedral guides and demands from Monet such intense attention that it pushes him to the brink of abstraction.

In both cases, the obsession is not confinement, but openness : the more one paints, the more the enigma unfolds. Ultimately, both embody that Aristotelian quest, where excellence is not an act, but a habit; a habit that becomes visible in the daily practice of these two artists, who tirelessly and methodically return to the same motif, to the same insistent gesture, as a path toward the essential, where the repetition of a form can, as Kandinsky said, reveal its soul.

Gonzalo Manuel Arias is a political scientist, professor, and visual artist. He studied art history at the MNBA in Argentina, the Prado Museum, the Reina Sofía Museum, and the Carlos III University of Madrid.