探祕塞尚筆下的法國如畫小鎮

It was Paul Cézanne who went to L'Estaque first, in 1864. He escaped the gray dreariness of Paris and later avoided army conscription in the Franco - Prussian War of 1870 in this sunny shorefront village outside Marseille. From the windows of a rented house next to the little church on the hill, he could look out on the tile rooftops leading down to the harbor, with its fishing boats, and across the wide bay to Marseille, the low, rocky mountains at its back.

1864年，保羅·塞尚(Paul Cézanne)初次來到埃斯塔克。他逃離了巴黎灰色的倦意，後來又逃過1870年法俄戰爭的部隊徵兵，來到馬賽郊外這座陽光明媚的海濱漁村。坐在山上小教堂邊一間租來的小屋裏望向窗外，他能看見連綿的瓦片直通海港。浩淼的馬賽港內漁船往來，背後是低矮的岩石山丘。

He painted intensely. With every brush stroke and every year, the landscape changed, the picture plane began to dissolve — the rooftops, the sea, the barren rocks, the forest-green scrub, all becoming new versions of themselves, transformed by his vision. “It's like a playing card. Red roofs against a blue sea,” Cézanne wrote of L'Estaque to his friend the painter Camille Pissarro in an 1876 letter. “There are olive trees and pines that always keep their leaves. The sun is so frightful that it seems as if all the objects are reduced to silhouette, not only in black and white, but in blue, in red, in brown, in violet.”

他充滿激情地畫着。一筆筆，一年年，風景漸次改變，畫面逐日融合。屋頂、海水、荒蕪的岩石、青翠的灌木叢，在他的視野中幻化爲獨特的新模樣。“就像打牌。紅屋頂對藍海洋。”塞尚在1876年寫給朋友、畫家卡米耶·畢沙羅(Camille Pissarro)的信中這樣描述埃斯塔克，“橄欖樹和松樹四季長青。陽光如此耀眼，萬物似乎只剩剪影，卻又不是黑白兩色，而是藍色、紅色、棕色、紫色的。”

In 1906, Georges Braque went to L'Estaque after seeing Cézanne's work on view in Paris. He stayed five months. “It was in the South that I felt my rapture rise in me,” wrote Braque, who grew up in Le Havre, on the English Channel. That same fall, Cézanne died. One century was giving way to the next. Braque had reshuffled the playing cards, making the familiar landscape even more unfamiliar. With his brush, the boxy roofs became puzzle pieces, the arches of the local viaduct a study in the contrast between positive and negative space. By 1908, he had flattened the windswept trees to the boundary between the second and third dimensions. Impressionism changed to Fauvism in Braque's hallucinatory forests, where solitary walkers lose themselves in oneiric expanses of yellow and purple — and then to Cubism.

1906年，喬治·布拉克(Georges Braque)在巴黎觀賞了塞尚的風景畫之後追隨而來，在埃斯塔克住了五個月。“到了南部，一陣狂喜油然而生，”布拉克寫道。他童年成長於英吉利海峽邊的法國港市勒阿弗爾。就在那個秋天，塞尚死了，於是一個世紀讓位另一個世紀。布拉克重新洗牌之後，本已熟悉的風景更加陌生。在他的畫筆下，四方的屋頂都變成了拼圖的碎片，在正副兩種空間的對照之下，當地高架橋的拱門成爲獨特的傑作。到了1908年，他的畫筆撫平了輕風拂過的樹林，模糊了二維與三維的界限。在布拉克幻覺的森林裏，印象派變成了野獸派，孤獨的行者迷失在黃色與紫色的茫茫大夢中。立體主義隨之而來。

I wanted to see it for myself, this landscape of L'Estaque that I had known from so many paintings over the years, and that I had rediscovered in the Musée d'Orsay and the Pompidou Center since moving to Paris last year. And so, one weekend this spring, I took a train to Marseille to look around. The sun was bright, but I was in a ruminative mood. My own picture plane was starting to shift. I wanted new vistas. I wanted, I think, to step into a painting.

我想親眼見識這埃斯塔克的風景。多年來，我在許多繪畫中見過。去年搬家到巴黎，在奧賽美術館和蓬皮杜藝術中心再次得見。於是，今年春天的一個週末，我搭火車來到馬賽觀光。陽光燦爛，我卻若有所思。畫面在切換。我想見到全新的風景，期待自己踏入一幅畫卷。

But scenes change over time. While van Gogh's Arles maintains much of its postcard perfection, and Monet's gardens at Giverny theirs, L'Estaque, in spite of its significance in art history, is perhaps the least touristic and least romanticized of the locales that so inspired the great French painters. Today, L'Estaque is not the sleepy fishing village that Cézanne and Braque found more than a century ago. It is part of the 16th Arrondissement of vivacious Marseille, a working-class area absorbed into the busy larger city, with a pretty harbor, one main street lined with shops and cafes, and a dearth of parking. I was glad to be there anyway. After all, what is travel — or life, for that matter — but a continuing negotiation between expectation and reality?

但是景物已經在光陰中更改。梵高(van Gogh)筆下的阿爾勒和莫奈(Monet)筆下吉維尼小鎮的花園如實展現了明信片般的美景，而埃斯塔克呢，儘管在藝術史上地位顯赫，啓迪了許多法國藝術家的創作靈感，卻恐怕是附近最不適合旅遊，也毫不浪漫的地方。今天，埃斯塔克不再是一百多年前塞尚和布拉克眼中鬱悶的小漁村，從16世紀起，這個工人階級聚居地就是生機勃勃的馬賽郡的一部分，最終劃入了繁忙的大城市。這裏有美麗的海港和一條主幹道，街邊都是店鋪和餐廳，停車場遠不夠用。無論如何，我很高興自己來到了那裏。旅行或者人生究竟是什麼？不就是期待與現實之間不斷地調整嗎？

A friend and I arrived at midday on a lazy Saturday. In the cafes by the harbor, people drank coffee or stirred glasses of cloudy yellow Pernod. There were market stalls with cheap socks, housewares and towels, and a flea market where women in abayas browsed for bargains. We settled into a waterfront restaurant and ate fish and got drowsy on dry rosé, watching boats bobbing in their moorings. Off a nearby dock, young boys, tanned and fearless, somersaulted off the rocks into the water, like so many of their kin around the Mediterranean, over so many centuries.

一個慵懶的週六中午，我和一個朋友來到了埃斯塔克。海港邊的餐廳裏，大家在喝咖啡，或者攪動玻璃杯中雲霧般的黃色茴香酒。附近市場上有便宜襪子、家用器皿及毛巾出售。跳蚤市場裏，身穿阿拉伯阿巴亞袍的婦女們搜尋着物美價廉的物品。我們走進一家海濱餐廳，吃了魚肉，喝了粉紅玫瑰酒，醉眼朦朧地看着門外一艘艘小船輕靈地泊入港口。附近一座碼頭邊，麥色肌膚的青年英勇無畏，一個筋斗就翻進了水裏，就像千百年來他們在地中海的親戚們那樣。

Up the hillside on the edge of town, the landscape opens up to a wide view of the harbor. You can see a small island, and the hills east of Marseille, bluish in the distance, just as they appear in so many of Cézanne's landscapes, “Gulf of Marseille Seen From L'Estaque,” which are now scattered in museums around the world. On a lookout point near the Fondation Monticelli, which celebrates Adolphe Monticelli, a lesser-known Marseille painter who died in 1886, a group of young men were drinking beer and having a makeshift barbecue. Their car radios played Arabic-inflected hip-hop. On the beach below, people were sunning themselves on the rocks.

小城邊的山坡上視野開闊，可直接望見海港。你可以看到一座小島，正如塞尚許多風景畫展示的那樣，馬賽東部的山巒在遠方幻化淡淡的藍灰色，比如《從埃斯塔克一嵐馬賽灣》(Gulf of Marseille Seen From L'Estaque)，而今，這些畫作散落在世界各地的博物館裏。蒙蒂切利噴泉附近的觀景臺上，一羣男青年一邊喝啤酒，一邊將就着烤肉，汽車電臺播放着阿拉伯曲風的街舞音樂。這座噴泉是爲了紀念一位不太知名的馬賽畫家阿道夫·蒙蒂切利(Adolphe Monticelli)而建的，他於1886年去世。在下方的海灘上，人們在岩石上曬着太陽。

When Cézanne was here, there were no doubt 19th-century locals also picnicking nearby. But the artist willfully left out the quotidian, the bustling harbor, instead shaping the landscape to his own imaginative needs. “I have a lot of good points of view, but that doesn't exactly add up to a theme,” Cézanne wrote of L'Estaque to his friend émile Zola in a letter. It was Cézanne's mother who had first taken a house in L'Estaque in the summer of 1864, when the painter was 25. Later, in 1870, he hid out here to avoid army conscription, and also to hide the existence of his partner, Marie-Hortense Fiquet, from his father, who disapproved. One wonders how the course of art history might have turned out had Cézanne's mother chosen a house in a different town.

毫無疑問，19世紀塞尚寄居此地時，本地人也在附近野餐。但是這位藝術家任性地拋棄了寫實的生活瑣事和熙熙攘攘的港口，反而讓風景在筆下迎合自己的想像需求。“我有許多好觀點，卻無法構成一個主題。”塞尚在給朋友愛彌兒·左拉(émile Zola)的信中如此描述埃斯塔克。1864年，塞尚25歲那年，他的母親在埃斯塔克買了一座房子，後來到了1870年，他隱居於此，不僅爲逃避兵役，也揹着父親，悄悄帶來了自己的情婦瑪麗·浩特思·菲凱(Marie-Hortense Fiquet)，因爲父親不贊成他倆交往。人們很想知道，假如塞尚的母親在另一座小鎮買房，藝術史的走向是否會由此改寫？

or artists who found their way here, the village was a place of refuge, but also a place of nostalgia. In 1877, Zola spent time here, escaping the polemics directed against his novel “L'Assommoir,” about a working-class alcoholic. “The country is superb,” he wrote in a letter that year. “You might find it arid and desolate, but I was brought up on these exposed rocks and these bare moors, so I am moved to tears when I see them again. The smell of the pines alone brings back my youth.” While there, Zola wrote a short story, “Na?s Micoulin,” about a hunchback who works in a local factory, which Marcel Pagnol adapted into his 1945 film, “Na?s.”

對於在此找到出路的藝術家們，這座漁村是避世之土，也是懷舊之鄉。1877年，左拉(Zola)來到這裏，藉以逃離世人對他的工人階級酒鬼主題小說《小酒店》(L'Assommoir)的非議。“這片鄉村非常好，”那年他在信中寫道。“你或許會嫌它乾旱荒蕪，但我就在這裸露的岩石和荒野中長大，所以，再次見到這一切時，我竟流淚了。僅僅是松樹的氣息，就讓我瞬間回到年輕時代。”左拉在這裏創作了短篇小說《納伊斯·米庫蘭》(Na?s Micoulin)。它記述了本地一名駝背工人的故事，1945年，劇作家馬塞爾·帕尼奧爾(Marcel Pagnol)將它改編爲一部電影——《納伊斯》(Na?s)。

In 1882, Pierre-Auguste Renoir came to visit Cézanne, and the two painted together. Renoir's “Rocky Crags at L'Estaque” of that year shows the hillside and vegetation in his characteristically fuzzy style. Cézanne always stayed more angular, more intense. He painted like a man working out a mathematical problem. Each brush stroke, each painting, reveals how he reached his conclusions. Every painter had a different perspective. In 1908, Raoul Dufy arrived to paint with his friend Braque, after seeing Braque's L'Estaque works displayed in Paris. The Fauvist André Derain painted colorful, happy harbor scenes that make Cézanne's look melancholy in comparison.

1882年，皮埃爾·奧古斯特·雷諾阿(Pierre-Auguste Renoir)來探訪塞尚，二人攜手作畫。那一年，雷諾阿用他特色的朦朧畫風在作品《埃斯塔克的峭壁》(Rocky Crags at L'Estaque)中刻畫了此地的草木山川。塞尚總是更清瘦、更熱烈，繪畫時就像在孜孜不倦地解答數學難題。每一筆、每一幅畫，都在揭示自己如何得出了結論。每一位畫家都有獨特的視角。1908年，勞爾·杜飛(Raoul Dufy)在巴黎看過朋友布拉克的傑作之後，與後者一起來到這裏作畫。野獸派畫家安德烈·德蘭(André Derain)再現了這裏五光十色的快樂港口景象，相形之下，塞尚的作品頓顯憂傷。

The best way to visit L'Estaque is as an afternoon or twilight jaunt, by boat, from Marseille, that great Mediterranean port city — Naples meets Barcelona — famous for its blinding light, its bouillabaisse, its couscous, its close ties to the Maghreb, and, alas, its often violent organized crime. Ferries to L'Estaque leave every hour from Marseille's Old Port, a deep harbor that has been in continuous use since the days of the ancient Greeks. The boat pulls out of the harbor and rounds the bend by the MuCEM — the Museum of European and Mediterranean Civilizations — a spectacular new space designed by Rudy Ricciotti, an architect based in nearby Bandol.

遊覽埃斯塔克的最佳方式是選個下午或黃昏，乘坐小船從偉大的地中海港口城市馬賽來到這裏徒步遠遊。這是那不勒斯與巴塞羅那相遇的地方。讓它聞名遐邇的，有刺眼欲盲的強烈陽光，還有本地的濃香魚湯、蒸麥粉，以及與非洲城市馬格利布的密切紐帶，哦！還有本地頻繁的有組織犯罪。渡船每小時一趟，從馬賽舊港出發，駛向埃斯塔克。舊港是一座偏僻的港灣，從古希臘時代就一直在使用。小船從港口出發，沿着歐洲及地中海文明博物館(MuCEM)的曲線行駛。這座恢弘的新建築是附近邦多爾的建築師盧迪·瑞希奧提(Rudy Ricciotti)設計的。

Today, some of the best views of L'Estaque are from the roof of the MuCEM. With its dark cement latticework facade meant to evoke a casbah, the MuCEM is also a study in positive and negative space. (Mr. Ricciotti has said that in Marseille, the light is one of the strongest architectural elements.) From the top of an adjacent fortress, the MuCEM's roof stretches just below the line where the ocean meets the shore. In the foreground, a sparkling new tower by the architect Zaha Hadid swoops up into the air, reflecting the light and straddling the highway running west toward L'Estaque. Along that road, a billboard for Panzani Zakia halal lasagna fills the entire side of a tall building. Huge ferries bound for Tunisia and Algeria sit in the harbor.

而今，埃斯塔克最美的風景要從MuCEM的屋頂上領略。它陰暗的水泥網格正門讓人想起阿拉伯城堡，同時，也是正副空間對照的傑作。（瑞希奧提先生在馬賽說過，光線是最強大的建築元素）從毗鄰的城堡頂端望下去，MuCEM的屋頂就在海洋與海岸的交界線之下綿延。前景上，由建築師扎哈·哈迪德(Zaha Hadid)設計的新樓拔地而起，燦爛奪目，橫跨西行至埃斯塔克的公路。路邊一塊廣告牌上是百珍妮扎奇婭(Panzani Zakia)的清真烤面，填滿了這座高大建築的整個側面。駛向突尼斯和阿爾及利亞的巨大渡船在港口停泊。

L'Estaque is only a 10-minute drive from downtown Marseille, and a half-hour trip by ferryboat, part of the city's transportation system. I did both, and I much preferred the boat. As it slowly neared the shore, I felt as if I were on the verge of entering a painting. One day, it was cloudy, and the dark sky against the pale rocky hills really did evoke a landscape by Cézanne. The viaduct painted by Braque stood out against the hillside. On the boat, I sat by a handful of local teenage girls with dark eyeliner, short skirts, fluorescent T-shirts and sneakers. They chatted more in Arabic than French and played with their cellphone ring tones. They were looking after a mischievous young boy with a balloon, which he popped gleefully as we reached the dock, startling me.

埃斯塔克距離馬賽市中心只有10分鐘的車程，然後再乘坐半小時的渡船。渡船是該市公共交通系統的一部分。公交車和船都坐過之後，我更喜歡坐船，因爲當它漸漸接近海岸時，感覺自己恍然融入一幅畫。一個多雲的日子，黯淡的天空反襯着蒼山隱隱，真讓我記起塞尚的畫中風光。布拉克筆下的高架橋聳立在山腰的背景之下。我坐在船上，身邊一羣本地少女畫着黑眼線，穿着短裙、鮮豔的熒光T恤和運動鞋。她們用阿拉伯語而非法語談笑，玩着手機鈴聲，照看着一個玩氣球的淘氣男孩。船剛抵達碼頭，男孩就興高采烈地站起身，嚇了我一跳。

My friend and I went to see the viaduct. Its tall arches were instantly recognizable from Braque's Cubist paintings. Someone had spray-painted the word “Orage,” or storm, in white bubble letters with black trim. There were rusted cars in the hills underneath it. The boxy houses now have satellite dishes on their roofs. One afternoon, we sat in a cafe in the harbor, where the sounds of bad Europop drifted over the water. Eventually, the waiter remembered us and brought cold drinks. Nearby, someone had spray-painted "Ne nous cultivez plus, on s'en charge," or "Don't educate us anymore, we'll take care of it," on a cement quai, where a yacht named for the writer André Malraux was docked. Mothers with headscarves watched their children frolic in the waterfront park.

我和朋友去看了高架橋。那高大的拱門可以在布拉克的立體主義畫作中不斷找到蹤跡。有人用噴漆寫下了“風暴”這個詞，用的是白色的泡沫字體與黑邊。低處的山巒上有陳舊的汽車。方方正正的房屋如今屋頂上已經安裝了衛星接收天線。一天下午，我們坐在海港的一座餐廳裏，歐洲流行(Europop)的糟糕音樂聲從海上飄來。終於，服務員想起了我們，端來了冷飲。附近的水泥碼頭上，有人用噴漆寫下了一行字：“別再教育我們了，我們自會照顧它。”一艘以作家安德烈·馬爾羅(André Malraux)命名的遊艇泊在港口。戴着頭巾的母親們看着孩子們在水濱公園裏追逐打鬧。

Kiosks on L'Estaque's main street sell local specialties: chichi frégi, fried dough with a hint of crushed black pepper inside and coated in coarse sugar, and panisses, chickpea flour fritters. We bought a snack and a cold bottle of La Cagole, a Marseille beer, and strolled up the quiet back streets. They were empty of people, except for a few other tourists hoping to walk in the footsteps of the great artists, and looking a bit disappointed. There were posters for the coming European parliamentary elections, for the Greens and the right-wing National Front, which would later triumph. We sat in the square by the church, by Cézanne's house, now marked by a small, unassuming plaque, and watched the sun set, turning the mountains behind Marseille a reddish pink. Some new buildings blocked the view of the harbor. Cranes rose high in the industrial port and the hulks of vast cruise ships lingered in the blue waters.

埃斯塔克大街上的售貨亭供應各種本地特產：香酥炸糕，即炸麪糰里加少許壓碎的黑椒粉，表面裹上粗糙的糖粒，還有鷹嘴豆餡的炸糕。我們買了點心和冰冷的馬賽拉格高啤酒，漫步在僻靜的小巷。四周空無一人，偶有若干遊客本想追尋大藝術家的腳步，因而露出失望的神色。牆上貼着即將到來的歐洲議會大選的海報，支持綠黨或右翼的國民陣線，後來後者贏了。我們坐在教堂邊廣場上看蒼山落照，附近的塞尚舊居只用了一塊低調的小標牌標示出來。夕陽將馬賽城邊的羣山染成了一片緋紅。新城擋住了視線，無法望見港口。起重機高高地矗立在工業港，龐大的遊輪在蔚藍的海面徘徊。

For years, Cézanne had ignored the parts of L'Estaque that he didn't want to paint. By 1885, he stopped coming. The landscape was changing too much for his taste, becoming too industrialized, with factories and chimneys cropping up along the shore. Economic development and artistic development subtly intertwined. Braque saw the factories, with their smokestacks spewing sodium and sulfuric acid, as source of inspiration. In 1910, he painted "Rio Tinto Factories at L'Estaque," a Cubist study in grays and browns that is now in the collection of the Pompidou Center.

多年來，塞尚對於埃斯塔克無法入畫的片段視而不見。1885年之後，他沒有再來。風景變得太多，不再符合他的品味。太工業化了。海岸上雨後春筍般冒出許多工廠和煙囪，經濟發展和藝術發展微妙地糾纏。而布拉克見到工廠，目睹高大的煙囪噴出納與硫酸氣體，卻找到了靈感的來源。1910年，他繪製了《埃斯塔克的力拓工廠》(Rio Tinto Factories at L'Estaque)，這幅用灰色與棕色線條構成的立體主義傑作如今是蓬皮杜藝術中心的珍藏。

Cézanne moved elsewhere, to find new vistas. I remember that one spring, in my early 20s, I took the TGV from Avignon to Nice. Out the window, fields of lavender blurred by. And then, in the distance, there it was: Mont Ste.-Victoire. I already knew it by heart, the mountain Cézanne had painted so many times — a study in form, an exercise of style, a realm of the imagination. Not just a mountain, but the idea of a mountain. It was even more familiar out the windows of the fast train, the perspective ever changing. "Magnificent in the distance, meaningless closer up, mountains are but a surface standing on end," Joseph Brodsky wrote in "An Admonition," one of my favorite poems. Like Petrarch in the 14th century, who opened the door to the Renaissance and to new ways of thinking when he climbed Mont Ventoux simply to take in the view, Cézanne, by power of his vision, also changed forever the way we think and see.

塞尚去了別處尋找新的風景。記得我二十多歲時的一個春天，我乘坐巴黎至里昂的高速火車從阿維尼翁到尼斯。車窗外，薰衣草田飛馳而過，遠處隨之出現的是聖維多利亞山。我已經猜出來了。這座山，塞尚在他的作品中畫過無數次，那是他對形狀的研究，也是風格的練習與想像的國度。不僅是一座山，還是如山的理念。那在飛馳的火車窗外不斷變換的，反而更爲熟稔。透視角度無時無刻不在變幻。“山在遠方甚是壯美，漸行漸近時反覺毫無意義，不過是平面豎着站起。”約瑟夫·布羅茨基(Joseph Brodsky)在他的詩作《告誡》中如是寫道。這是我最愛的詩句之一。正如14世紀的彼得拉克(Petrarch) 攀登旺圖山飽覽山河，開啓了文藝復興的大門，開闢了嶄新的思維方式，而塞尚，藉助自己瑰麗的視野，也永遠改變了我們思考與欣賞事物的方式。

At a monumental retrospective of paintings by Georges Braque at the Grand Palais in Paris that I saw last year, I found myself unexpectedly moved by some of the artist's late paintings, tiny landscapes from the mid-1950s, when he was in his 70s. His career had traced almost every new development in art for half a century, and then, nearing the end of his life, he returned to the beginning, to landscapes with rough brush strokes, more like van Gogh than Picasso. They seemed not just landscapes, but memories of landscapes.

去年，我在巴黎大皇宮觀看不朽的喬治·布拉克作品回顧展，不期然被這位藝術家生前的一些作品感動了，那是他創作於20世紀50年代中期的若干小幅風景畫。當時他已經七十多歲，在半個世紀的藝術生涯中，幾乎經歷了每個流派的發展，到了生命的暮年，卻又回到了初心。他樸拙筆觸下的風景更像梵高，而不是畢加索。那似乎不止是風景，更是對風景的記憶。

In the end, the L'Estaque of the artists may outshine the L'Estaque of life. But the place still lingers in my mind. I revisit the paintings in the museums. I think back to the weekend — to the sun, to the crusted sugar on the fried dough, to the ferries headed for the Maghreb, to the rocky coastline. The boat glides across the harbor toward the village. Marseille is at our back, the limestone hills approaching in the distance. There is a cool breeze. The ocean opens up before us. It is filled with possibility — and with the memory of possibility.

最後，埃斯塔克的藝術家或許讓埃斯塔克的世俗生活相形見絀。但這個地方仍然在我的腦中徘徊，就再次到博物館參觀了他們的傑作。我的思緒回到了週末，那豔陽，那炸糕上酥脆的糖殼，那駛向馬格利布的渡船，那崎嶇的海岸線。小船滑過港灣，駛向漁村。馬賽已拋在身後，遠方石灰岩的小山漸行漸近。一陣清風吹來，大海在面前徐徐展開，洋溢着一切可能，一切紛紜的記憶。