Paul Cezanne 1839-1906 | BACK |
![]() |
![]()
In spite of deteriorating health Cezanne persisted in his habitual and obsessive routines until his death in 1906. Hardly leaving the Aix area, he still preferred to work in the open air from his favorite vantage points, often returning to subjects he had painted dozens of times before. His sense of the complexity of art, of its intimate but paradoxical relationship to the perceived world, had deepened, and he continued to experiment with new techniques and ideas until his last months. At times he would strip down the shapes of his chosen subject to a few spare lines and forms, like the ellipses of a bowl of fruit or the parallels of branches and tree trunks, while at others he would build up dense and subtle reverberations of color, texture and surface incident. In his late paintings, the language of his art announces itself with increasing clarity, insisting on its separateness from observed nature while moving closer to the "vibrating sensations" of the scene that he himself described. Among the young artists who discovered Cezanne's painting in the years before his death were some of the major figures of the Parisian avant-garde, notably Matisse, Braque and Picasso. A series of exhibitions of the elderly master's work was held in Paris at the turn of the century, and his influence can be felt in the younger artists' choice of subjects, color harmonies and stylistic devices. Georges Braque went as far as to travel to Provence to paint in front of some of Cezanne's subjects, while Picasso was principally attracted to the great bather pictures. His admiration for Cezanne is openly acknowledged in his Demoiselles d'Avignon of 1907, one of the cornerstones of Cubism and of early 20th-century art. Although Cezanne did not live to see these developments - and might not have approved of them if he had - he was clearly gratified by the attentions of the younger generation. Sensing the significance of his work for the future of painting, he declared at the end of his life that, "I am the primitive of a new art." |
|
Image List |
BooksC�zanne by Himselfby Richard Kendall (Editor) C�zanne: The Self-Portraits by Steven Platzman, Paul Cezanne Conversations with C�zanne (Documents of Twentieth-Century Art) by Michael Doran (Editor), Julie Lawrence Cochran (Translator) The Paintings of Paul Cezanne : A Catalogue Raisonne by John Rewald, Walter Feilchenfeldt, Jayne Warman, Walter Felchenfeldt (Contributor) |
This listing of artists is not official. It is merely intended to group the artists in an easy to navigate format. |
![]() |
Period List artists by period... |
Post Impressionism | ABC List![]() artists in alphabetical order... |