Consider the things colour can be made to express in the hands of a great painter. The catalogue which accompanies the Tate Modern’s Cézanne exhibition explains that “Cézanne’s blue radiates from the canvas and signals Europe’s rampant move into the tropical region of the Americas”.
A few pages later you find another writer wondering whether Cézanne could really have painted the “disintegrating” landscape of Sous-Bois, a study of woodland in the south of France, “if he was unaware of the disintegration happening on his and his countrymen’s behalf in the likes of Algeria, the Congo, Vietnam and the rest of France’s colonies?” The idea that anybody might manage to paint a tree without an awareness of colonial injustices in Vietnam apparently strikes the writer