Cezanne

Post-Impressionism

Cezanne

• Father was stock broker• Cezanne trained as lawyer, while attending

drawing academy• Studied in Paris, painted in Impressionists style,

but was rejected at 1874 Impressionists exhibition

• Went back home (Aix-en -Provence) to continue painting in obscurity

• Impressionists used colour to dissolve form, He used patches of colour to build it up.

Cezanne as Impressionist

• He was largely untrained so his early work was crude compared to other Impressionists.

Cezanne as Post-Impressionist

• Cézanne's grasp of form and solid pictorial structures came to dominate his mature style.

• His overriding concern with form and structure set him apart from the Impressionists from the start.

Composition and Solid Form

• The subject of the work is less important than a well constructed design and solid forms.

Composition and Solid Form

Composition and Solid Form

• The main objects are arranged roughly in a triangle or pyramid.

Composition and Solid Form

• He paints still-life, landscape, and the figure as if there is a permanent geometry (cones, cylinders, & spheres) under the surface.

Jug and Fruit 1906

Squarish Patches

• Cezanne uses flat squarish patches of colour to serve two purposes:1) To create a 2D surface for compositional unity, and2) To suggest separate planes that shape 3D solidity and space.

Still-life with Onions 1895

• Painted over a long period of time ( often fruit rotted - replaced with wax fruit)

• Forms based on basic geometric forms - cylinder, cubes, cones, & spheres.• Design most imp. - distorts for design - more imp. than imitation of objects.

Works like Still-Life with Onions are often seen from multiple perspectives.

Subject• Form & composition, with colour used to achieve both• Actual subject not as imp. as solid and unified qualities of work as whole

Perspective• Not sitting in same position each time• Influenced Cubism

Composition • Objects, and direction of line are carefully placed for overall asymmetrical

balance.• He will even tilt objects to add to flow of composition.

Colour• Warm hues of fruit contrast cool of surroundings.• Warm colours advance and cool colours recede.

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

Subject

Domestic Still-life objects combined with dramatic baroque sculpture (art history)

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

Plaster cupid by Puget is a plaster copy (copy of a copy) & in the background is a painting of a copy of The Flayed Man (copy of copy of copy)

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

Tension between foreground and background

Which is real & which is illusion?

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

There is a tension between two dimensional qualities and three dimensional qualities.

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

Painting contains subtle shifts of perspective due to long period of painting

The artists position changes so perspective changes.

Still-life with Plaster Cast 1895

The apple placed in background floor is same scale as foreground apples.

Traditional scale & perspective are intentionally ignored in order to balance the composition.

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904

Mont Sainte-Victoire

• Part of a series painted more than 30 times• The mountain dominates landscape

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904

• Form - Distorted, reduced to pyramid shape (geometry)

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904

• Perspective- wanted canvas to remain flat, so he didn't use traditional aerial perspective

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904

• Space - depth achieve through contrast of warm & cool colour• Compressed space - foreground, middle ground & background

painted with same intensity, and similar squarish patches of colour• Canvas maintains flat quality - sky seems as close as foreground

Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1904

• Colour- Felt free to adjust relationships of colour (distort) for design sake.

• Modulated - colours and values distributed to produce visual balance