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VII. Topics for discussion.
1. The methods of painting of Pissarro and Renoir.
2. The artistic heritage of Pissarro and Renoir.
UNIT XIII CEZANNE (1839-1906)
The leading painter of the late nineteenth century in France, one of the most powerful artists in
the history of Western painting, was Paul Cezanne. Son of a prosperous banker in the southern
French city of Aix-en-Provance, Cezanne never experienced financial difficulties. He received
some artistic training in Aix. Cezanne arrived in Paris for the first time in 1861, but he never set up
permanent residence there. At first Cezanne was interested m the official art of the Salons but soon
achieved an understanding of Delacroix and Courbet, and before long of Manet as well, but his
early works were Romantic. Only in the early 1870s Cezanne adopted the Impressionist palette,
viewpoint, and subject matter under the tutelage of Pissarro. Cezanne exhibited his paintings with
the Impressionists in 1874, 1877, 1882.
During most of his independent career Cezanne remained in Aix. His isolation from other
artists helped him to concentrate on the formation of a new style of painting. Cezanne's mature style
is often interpreted in the light of his celebrated sayings: "I want to do Poussin over again, from
nature," "I wish to make of Impressionism something solid and durable, like the art of the
museums," and "Drawing and colour are not distinct... The secret of drawing and modelling lies in
contrasts and relations of tones."
Among the subjects Cezanne repeatedly studied was Mont Sainte Victoire, the rocky mass that
dominates the plain of Aix. His Mont Sainte-Victoire was painted about 1885-1887. Nothing
indicates the time of the day or even the season. It neither rains nor snows in this landscape. Time is
defeated by permanence. In this picture it is not clear where Cezanne places the observer. It is not
certain where the tree is rooted. Some objects are identifiable as houses, trees, fields, but Cezanne's
visual threshold is high and below that level nothing is defined. The effect of durability and
massiveness is produced by a new use of the Impressionist colour spots. The landscape becomes a
colossal rock crystal of colour - a cubic cross section of the world. Its background and foreground
planes are established by branches and by the mountain whose rhythms they echo. The constituent
planes embrace a great variety of hues of blue, green, yellow, rose, and violet. The delicate differ-
entiation between these hues produces the impression of three-dimensional form. To construct form
Cezanne has used the very colour patch the Impressionists had used ten years before to dissolve it.
He has achieved from nature a construction and intellectual organisation much like that Poussin had
derived from the organisation of figures, and made of Impressionism something durable, reminding
us of the airless backgrounds of Giotto. Cezanne created a world remote from human experience.
The beauty of his colour constructions is abstract, and it is no wonder that many artists of the early
twentieth century, especially the Cubists, claimed him as the father of modern art.
Still life was to Cezanne second only to landscape. His Still life with Apples and Oranges was
painted between 1895 and 1900. The arrangements of fruits, bottles, plates and a rumpled cloth on a
tabletop never suggest the consumption of food or drink; they are spheroid or cylindrical masses.
The appearance of reality is neglected; the table has a tendency to disappear under the table-cloth at
one level and emerge from it at another, and the two sides of a bottle can be sharply different.
Whether Cezanne did not notice such discrepancies in his search for the right colour to make a form
go round in depth, or whether he decided on deformations consciously, has never been convincingly
determined. He cared for subjects as arrangements of form and colour, but they also possessed for
him strong psychological significance.
For his rare figure pieces Cezanne chose subjects as quiet, impersonal, and remote as his still
lifes. The Card Players, of about 1890-1892, shows three men, two of whom are clad in the blue
smock of the farmer labourer, sitting around a table, while a fourth gazes downward, arms folded.
The card game had been a favourite subject among the followers of Caravaggio. The quite figures
contemplate the cards, themselves planes of colour on white surfaces. The Giotto-like folds of the
smock of the man on the right echo in reverse those of the hanging curtain, locking foreground and