6th Year:6th May
Hi Class, What I would like us to look at is the work of Post-Impressionist Artist Paul Cezanne.
There is alot of info here so perhaps go over this the next few days.
Take notes/mind map .
I will have an Art History question to follow soon.
Paul Cézanne was a nineteenth century artist whose work was misunderstood by his contemporaries. A shy man who worked a great deal in Aix-en-Provence, the home town where he was born and raised, Cézanne moved Paris when he was young and, despite his father's wishes, pursued a career in art rather than law.
Cézanne was a modern artist whose work was a precursor for Cubism and Fauvism. His compositions were usually dark in tone and he often chose to work inside rather than en plein air.
Cézanne didn't receive critical acclaim until very late in his life and after his first solo exhibition. He never formed close friendships with many of his fellow artists but before he died there was a great deal of interest in his works.
Paul Cézanne's modern style and technique was avant-garde and therefore misunderstood for many years. Even the other breakthrough artists of his era, the Impressionists, were dismissive of Cézanne's progressive style and method. After the first Impressionist exhibition many of them petitioned to have him banned from the other shows because Cézanne's compositions were too controversial.
Cézanne worked with thickly placed layers of paint and undefined forms and attempted to simplify everything into shapes that could be broken down. Although he was close with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, and influenced by Pissarro's en plein air style of painting Cézanne was not an Impressionist. He was a highly modern artist who did not fit into any one category of painting style. His style was a precursor for the fauvism and cubism movements.
Early years:
Paul Cézanne was born to a wealthy family in Aix-en-Provence, France. His father was a successful banker whose riches assisted Cézanne throughout his life and his mother was a romantic who supported her son's career.
In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon where he met his good friends Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. The three were famously close for a long period of time. After a classical education in Aix-en-Provence Paul Cézanne's father wished him to become a lawyer. However after attending law school for two years (whilst receiving art lessons) he could not bear the thought of continuing his education and left for Paris.
In Paris Paul Cézanne spent a large period of his time with Émile Zola, a French writer. He enrolled at the Académie Suisse, which is where he met his mentor, Camille Pissarro. After five months of trying to work as a painter in Paris, France, to no critical success, Cézanne returned to Aix-en-Provence at his father's request.
In his home town Paul Cézanne enrolled at the local art school and attempted to work as a banker but was also unsuccessful in this venture. Consequently in 1862 he returned to Paris to work as a painter. Disappointingly he failed the entrance exam to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but continued to work between Paris and Aix-en-Provence and submitted many of his works to the Salon jury.
By this time he was good friends with Impressionist painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro and had met his future wife. However, he also had a long-term mistress - Hortense Fiquet - and in the Prussian war Cézanne and Fiquet absconded from the Paris and stayed in L'Estaque, France, until 1871.
Middle years:
In 1872 Paul Cézanne was living in Pontoise, France with Hortense Fiquet and his newborn son Paul (whom his father did not know about). Cézanne was still enthusiastically working on his paintings and was spending time outside with his idol, Camille Pissarro.
In Pontoise Paul Cézanne met Dr Paul Gachet, who was an admirer of his work and thus spent the years of 1872 to 1874 living at Gachet's home in Auvers-sur-Oise.
In 1873 Cézanne met Vincent van Gogh and in 1874 he exhibited at the Impressionist's first showcase. Cézanne's work was highly criticized along with the Impressionist's paintings but Cezanne's paintings were disliked by the other painters too. Cézanne's compositions from this period of working close to Camille Pissarro reveal that he was slightly influenced by the Impressionist's en plein air style of painting.
In 1877 Cézanne showcased 16 of his paintings to a great deal of scorn from critics and vowed never again to show his work at an Impressionist's exhibition. Although still influenced by Pissarro's Impressionist style Cézanne continued to work inside his studio and didn't believe in always painting from nature.
In the early 1880s Cezanne started to move even further away from the Impressionist's style of painting. He fell out with Emile Zola in 1886 because of his interpretation of Zola's novel, L'Oeuvre, and the two never saw each other again. In 1886 Cezanne married his mistress and inherited a large estate from his father, meaning he never had to worry about making money from his art.
Advanced years:
In November 1895 Paul Cézanne held his first solo exhibition in Paris and Ambroise Vollard bought every artwork. He then moved to Aix-en-Provence permanently.
In the early 1900s his work was shown all around Europe to wide critical acclaim but throughout his life Cézanne was shy and hostile towards other painters and he maintained this attitude. He died in October 1906 of pneumonia and is buried in the cemetery in Aix-en-Provence.
Paul Cezanne Style and Technique
Paul Cézanne used heavy brush strokes during his early years and thickly layered paint onto the canvas. The texture of the compositions is tangible and the marks of his palette brush can be obviously discerned.
Cézanne's early work has previously been called 'violent' in nature because of the hasty brush work. Before he became friends with Camille Pissarro Cézanne worked mainly within his studio, painting from his imagination. However after meeting Pissarro Cézanne occasionally moved his painting outside and began painting from nature. As a result his style and technique became more structured although his brushstrokes were still thick and heavy. Also, his works became brighter in color (although he still preferred to work inside with darker shades).
In the late 1870s the texture of Cézanne's compositions became smoother and he attempted to create form using his paintbrush. Rather than work from sketches he was influenced by Monet's ability to create shapes on the canvas and applied color with big, broad strokes.
Many of Cézanne's compositions were left incomplete because of the difficulty of finishing a piece of art work. He took months to finish any piece and his style made working en plein air too challenging. Thus he returned to the studio and worked there instead.
In his later years his style and technique continued to shift as he learned more about his craft.
Method:
Cézanne was highly analytical of his subjects and perceived them as different shapes that could be placed together to make an overall form. He created his works slowly, building upon each previous figure with a new outline. Using this method it took Paul Cézanne months to finish a portrait or a still-life. This technique became such a problem that Cézanne was unable to use real flowers because they would wilt before he was able to finish his painting.
Although Cézanne did use drawings and sketches before he placed his paintbrush to canvas a lot of the work was done on the canvas itself. He found working from nature to be extremely arduous and for him returning to the scene of a landscape was often more challenging than completing the painting itself. Cézanne's complicated method of painting explains why he often painted the same subject matter time and time again.
Who or What Influenced Paul Cezanne
Cézanne was influenced by Impressionism in the 1870s. As a modern artist who was being constantly rejected by the Salon jury he felt some affinity with the group. Furthermore although he was never an Impressionist, after working alongside Camille Pissarro and spending time with Claude Monet his color palette brightened up and he began to work en plein air. Nonetheless after exhibiting with the Impressionists twice Cézanne ended his relationship with the group due to artistic differences.
Camille Pissarro was one of Paul Cézanne's biggest influences and after spending time with him in 1872 Cézanne started to work outdoors with a wider range of colors. He met van Gogh around this time and was also influenced by his style. Consequently, Cezanne's brush strokes became less dense and more fluid in style. Compositions from this period clearly reveal that Cézanne's technique and subject matter was becoming Impressionistic.
Even so his interest in working indoors persisted and Paul Cézanne created a number of still-life paintings of flowers. In the late 1870s Cézanne moved away from Impressionism for good with the use of heavy and dark colors, and he wished to analyze the scene before him rather than copy it as the Impressionists did.
Throughout his life Cézanne became more and more influenced by nature and particularly the beauty of his home in Aix-en-Provence. He wanted to capture the part of nature that was constant rather than the surface beauty that changed with the seasons.
Mont Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas - The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow
This is one of the last landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, favored by Cézanne at the end of his life. The view is rendered in what is essentially an abstract vocabulary. Rocks and trees are suggested by mere daubs of paint as opposed to being extensively depicted. The overall composition itself, however, is clearly representational and also follows in the ethos of Japanese prints. The looming mountain is reminiscent of a puzzle of various hues, assembled into a recognizable object. This and other such late works of Cézanne proved to be of a paramount importance to the emerging modernists, who sought to liberate themselves from the rigid tradition of pictorial depiction.
In Cézanne's mature work, the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight. The primary means of constructing the new perspective included the juxtaposition of cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. The light was no longer an "outsider" in relation to depicted objects; rather light emanated from within. Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth.
The Large Bathers Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Large Bathers is one of the finest examples of Cézanne's attempt at incorporating the modern, heroic nude in a natural setting. The series of very human nudes, no Greco-Roman nymphs or satyrs, are arranged into a variety of positions, like objects of still life, under the pointed arch formed by the intersection of trees and the heavens. The figures are devoid of any particular personality - the artist assembles them for purely structural purposes. Here Cézanne is reinterpreting an iconic Western motif of the female nude, but in an exceptionally radical way. The sheer size of the painting is monumental, confronting the viewer directly with abbreviated shapes that resolve themselves into the naked limbs of his sitters. This is not yet abstraction, but in such instances Cézanne has already moved beyond the figurative tradition.
There is alot of info here so perhaps go over this the next few days.
Take notes/mind map .
I will have an Art History question to follow soon.
Paul Cézanne was a nineteenth century artist whose work was misunderstood by his contemporaries. A shy man who worked a great deal in Aix-en-Provence, the home town where he was born and raised, Cézanne moved Paris when he was young and, despite his father's wishes, pursued a career in art rather than law.
Cézanne was a modern artist whose work was a precursor for Cubism and Fauvism. His compositions were usually dark in tone and he often chose to work inside rather than en plein air.
Cézanne didn't receive critical acclaim until very late in his life and after his first solo exhibition. He never formed close friendships with many of his fellow artists but before he died there was a great deal of interest in his works.
Paul Cézanne's modern style and technique was avant-garde and therefore misunderstood for many years. Even the other breakthrough artists of his era, the Impressionists, were dismissive of Cézanne's progressive style and method. After the first Impressionist exhibition many of them petitioned to have him banned from the other shows because Cézanne's compositions were too controversial.
Cézanne worked with thickly placed layers of paint and undefined forms and attempted to simplify everything into shapes that could be broken down. Although he was close with the Impressionist Camille Pissarro, and influenced by Pissarro's en plein air style of painting Cézanne was not an Impressionist. He was a highly modern artist who did not fit into any one category of painting style. His style was a precursor for the fauvism and cubism movements.
Early years:
Paul Cézanne was born to a wealthy family in Aix-en-Provence, France. His father was a successful banker whose riches assisted Cézanne throughout his life and his mother was a romantic who supported her son's career.
In 1852 Cézanne entered the Collège Bourbon where he met his good friends Émile Zola and Baptistin Baille. The three were famously close for a long period of time. After a classical education in Aix-en-Provence Paul Cézanne's father wished him to become a lawyer. However after attending law school for two years (whilst receiving art lessons) he could not bear the thought of continuing his education and left for Paris.
In Paris Paul Cézanne spent a large period of his time with Émile Zola, a French writer. He enrolled at the Académie Suisse, which is where he met his mentor, Camille Pissarro. After five months of trying to work as a painter in Paris, France, to no critical success, Cézanne returned to Aix-en-Provence at his father's request.
In his home town Paul Cézanne enrolled at the local art school and attempted to work as a banker but was also unsuccessful in this venture. Consequently in 1862 he returned to Paris to work as a painter. Disappointingly he failed the entrance exam to the Ecole des Beaux-Arts but continued to work between Paris and Aix-en-Provence and submitted many of his works to the Salon jury.
By this time he was good friends with Impressionist painters Claude Monet and Camille Pissarro and had met his future wife. However, he also had a long-term mistress - Hortense Fiquet - and in the Prussian war Cézanne and Fiquet absconded from the Paris and stayed in L'Estaque, France, until 1871.
Middle years:
In 1872 Paul Cézanne was living in Pontoise, France with Hortense Fiquet and his newborn son Paul (whom his father did not know about). Cézanne was still enthusiastically working on his paintings and was spending time outside with his idol, Camille Pissarro.
In Pontoise Paul Cézanne met Dr Paul Gachet, who was an admirer of his work and thus spent the years of 1872 to 1874 living at Gachet's home in Auvers-sur-Oise.
In 1873 Cézanne met Vincent van Gogh and in 1874 he exhibited at the Impressionist's first showcase. Cézanne's work was highly criticized along with the Impressionist's paintings but Cezanne's paintings were disliked by the other painters too. Cézanne's compositions from this period of working close to Camille Pissarro reveal that he was slightly influenced by the Impressionist's en plein air style of painting.
In 1877 Cézanne showcased 16 of his paintings to a great deal of scorn from critics and vowed never again to show his work at an Impressionist's exhibition. Although still influenced by Pissarro's Impressionist style Cézanne continued to work inside his studio and didn't believe in always painting from nature.
In the early 1880s Cezanne started to move even further away from the Impressionist's style of painting. He fell out with Emile Zola in 1886 because of his interpretation of Zola's novel, L'Oeuvre, and the two never saw each other again. In 1886 Cezanne married his mistress and inherited a large estate from his father, meaning he never had to worry about making money from his art.
Advanced years:
In November 1895 Paul Cézanne held his first solo exhibition in Paris and Ambroise Vollard bought every artwork. He then moved to Aix-en-Provence permanently.
In the early 1900s his work was shown all around Europe to wide critical acclaim but throughout his life Cézanne was shy and hostile towards other painters and he maintained this attitude. He died in October 1906 of pneumonia and is buried in the cemetery in Aix-en-Provence.
Paul Cezanne Style and Technique
Paul Cézanne used heavy brush strokes during his early years and thickly layered paint onto the canvas. The texture of the compositions is tangible and the marks of his palette brush can be obviously discerned.
Cézanne's early work has previously been called 'violent' in nature because of the hasty brush work. Before he became friends with Camille Pissarro Cézanne worked mainly within his studio, painting from his imagination. However after meeting Pissarro Cézanne occasionally moved his painting outside and began painting from nature. As a result his style and technique became more structured although his brushstrokes were still thick and heavy. Also, his works became brighter in color (although he still preferred to work inside with darker shades).
In the late 1870s the texture of Cézanne's compositions became smoother and he attempted to create form using his paintbrush. Rather than work from sketches he was influenced by Monet's ability to create shapes on the canvas and applied color with big, broad strokes.
Many of Cézanne's compositions were left incomplete because of the difficulty of finishing a piece of art work. He took months to finish any piece and his style made working en plein air too challenging. Thus he returned to the studio and worked there instead.
In his later years his style and technique continued to shift as he learned more about his craft.
Method:
Cézanne was highly analytical of his subjects and perceived them as different shapes that could be placed together to make an overall form. He created his works slowly, building upon each previous figure with a new outline. Using this method it took Paul Cézanne months to finish a portrait or a still-life. This technique became such a problem that Cézanne was unable to use real flowers because they would wilt before he was able to finish his painting.
Although Cézanne did use drawings and sketches before he placed his paintbrush to canvas a lot of the work was done on the canvas itself. He found working from nature to be extremely arduous and for him returning to the scene of a landscape was often more challenging than completing the painting itself. Cézanne's complicated method of painting explains why he often painted the same subject matter time and time again.
Who or What Influenced Paul Cezanne
Cézanne was influenced by Impressionism in the 1870s. As a modern artist who was being constantly rejected by the Salon jury he felt some affinity with the group. Furthermore although he was never an Impressionist, after working alongside Camille Pissarro and spending time with Claude Monet his color palette brightened up and he began to work en plein air. Nonetheless after exhibiting with the Impressionists twice Cézanne ended his relationship with the group due to artistic differences.
Camille Pissarro was one of Paul Cézanne's biggest influences and after spending time with him in 1872 Cézanne started to work outdoors with a wider range of colors. He met van Gogh around this time and was also influenced by his style. Consequently, Cezanne's brush strokes became less dense and more fluid in style. Compositions from this period clearly reveal that Cézanne's technique and subject matter was becoming Impressionistic.
Even so his interest in working indoors persisted and Paul Cézanne created a number of still-life paintings of flowers. In the late 1870s Cézanne moved away from Impressionism for good with the use of heavy and dark colors, and he wished to analyze the scene before him rather than copy it as the Impressionists did.
Throughout his life Cézanne became more and more influenced by nature and particularly the beauty of his home in Aix-en-Provence. He wanted to capture the part of nature that was constant rather than the surface beauty that changed with the seasons.
Here are some of his most famous Art paintings
The Bay of Marseille, Seen from L'Estaque
In this view of L'Estaque, the artist's palette bursts with a vibrant bouquet of colors previously unseen in his work. The rigid architectonic forms of the houses define the foreground, while the rest of the picture is realized just as "solidly" through the bold blues of the sea and the sky. The complementary colors are skillfully employed by the artist to create an illusion of pictorial depth. The entire composition reminds us the artist's stated desire to "make of Impressionism something solid and enduring, like the art in museums." Cézanne painted numerous views of L'Estaque, which was one of his favorite destinations in the south of France.
Oil on canvas - The Art Institute of Chicago
The Card Players
Cézanne produced his series of Card Player paintings, drawings, and related studies in his ancestral home in the South of France, where he found in the image of men playing cards something timeless, like the mountains cradling an ancient people. As though they came together around a simple peasant table for a seance or cosmic conference, the card players seem at once transient and unmoving, very much masters of their environment and yet weathered testaments of time's passing.
Oil on canvas - The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Table, Napkin, and Fruit (A Corner of the Table)
Oil on canvas, 47 x 56 cm (18 1/4 x 22 in) - The Barnes Foundation, Pennsylvania
After studying Dutch and French Old Master still life painting at the Louvre and other Parisian galleries, Cézanne formulated his own semi-sculptural approach to still lifes. Typically strewn across an upturned tabletop, Cézanne's pears, peaches, and other pictorial elements seem at once to rest on a solid, wooden plank and yet float across the surface of the canvas like a new kind of calligraphy. As if to press home that point, Cézanne typically includes chairs, wooden screens, water pitchers, and wine bottles to suggest that the gaze of the viewer rise vertically up the canvas, rather than plunge deep within any implied corner of a real kitchen.
Mont Sainte-Victoire Oil on canvas - The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow
This is one of the last landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, favored by Cézanne at the end of his life. The view is rendered in what is essentially an abstract vocabulary. Rocks and trees are suggested by mere daubs of paint as opposed to being extensively depicted. The overall composition itself, however, is clearly representational and also follows in the ethos of Japanese prints. The looming mountain is reminiscent of a puzzle of various hues, assembled into a recognizable object. This and other such late works of Cézanne proved to be of a paramount importance to the emerging modernists, who sought to liberate themselves from the rigid tradition of pictorial depiction.
In Cézanne's mature work, the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight. The primary means of constructing the new perspective included the juxtaposition of cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. The light was no longer an "outsider" in relation to depicted objects; rather light emanated from within. Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth.
The Large Bathers Oil on canvas - The Philadelphia Museum of Art
The Large Bathers is one of the finest examples of Cézanne's attempt at incorporating the modern, heroic nude in a natural setting. The series of very human nudes, no Greco-Roman nymphs or satyrs, are arranged into a variety of positions, like objects of still life, under the pointed arch formed by the intersection of trees and the heavens. The figures are devoid of any particular personality - the artist assembles them for purely structural purposes. Here Cézanne is reinterpreting an iconic Western motif of the female nude, but in an exceptionally radical way. The sheer size of the painting is monumental, confronting the viewer directly with abbreviated shapes that resolve themselves into the naked limbs of his sitters. This is not yet abstraction, but in such instances Cézanne has already moved beyond the figurative tradition.
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