Odds And Ends -- Mid-Day -- March 7, 2022

Is anyone paying attention? From John Biden and Joe Kerry, at the top, to Joe Six-Pack at Target, I don't think anyone's paying attention. From a reader -- see post and comment here ...

UPDATED: European natural gas prices zoom to a fresh all-time high, rising >75% today. Benchmark TTF is trading above €345 per MWh.

** That's equal to more than $100 per million Btu, or more than $600 a barrel of oil equivalent ** (I promise you there are not typos there).

Nickel: if you're wondering, it's called a "short squeeze." 

So unhappy: The Bismarck Tribune bemoans the fact that Covid-19 is so over in North Dakota. My hunch: the Covid-19 editor is not a geopolitical expert, probably not sure what countries border Ukraine. Link here:

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The Art Page

Cézanne in the Barnes Foundation, Rizzoli Electa, c. 2021.

From p. 60, "River Bend," the earliest painting by Cézanne in the Barnes Foundation.

Like Gustave Courbet, Camille Pissaro was a primary influence on Cézanne's early work. The two men met in the French capital in 1861 -- US Civil War had just broken out; both were outsiders in the Parisian art world and hostile to the academic training and prevailing traditions of the official Salon. 

Pissaro encouraged the younger artist to paint out of doors. Setting up their easels in suburbs around Paris, they applied thick layers of paint ot their canvases to create an almost sculptural effect.

In an 1866 letter to his childhood friend Émile Zola, Cézanne observes, "You know all pictures painted inside, in the studio, will never be as goo as those done outside. When out-of-door scenes are represented, the contrasts between the figures and the ground is astounding and the landscape is magnificent. I see some superb things and I shall have to make up my mind only to do things out-of-doors."

"Cézanne was the first man in the impressionist group, "Lawrence Gowing declared, "perhaps the first man in history, to realise the necessity from the manner in which paint is handled to build up a homogenous and consistent pictorial structure ... [discovering] an intrinsic structure inherent in the medium and the material." "River Bend" marks the beginning of that lifelong process. 

Cézanne never turned back.