Paul Cezanne E-Book

James H. Rubin

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: A - Z Reihe
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 78

Beschreibung

The incomparable play of light and color in Paul Cezanne's work was the foundation of his reputation as a forerunner of modernism. From the start he went his own way, and his paintings initially evoked a lack of understanding in art critics of the time, as well as ridicule. Despite his Romantic, Baroque, Impressionist, and finally Classical influences, it is still difficult to ascribe Cezanne to any particular art movement. Still, which specific places left lasting impressions on the scion of a provincial banker's family? What and who were major influences supporting and advancing his innovative oeuvre? James H. Rubin traces Cezanne's life and work from A to Z in this brief volume, creating an image of a painter who wanted to transform painting itself. The author—and established connoisseur—succeeds in closely approaching the artist while at the same time maintaining the necessary distance to his inimitable paintings. PAUL CEZANNE (1839–1906) was one of the most influential painters in the early days of modernism and has often been described as a pioneer of Neues Sehen, or New Vision. His work still exercises undiminished influence to this day. JAMES H. RUBIN (*1944) is an art historian and professor at the State University of New York in Stony Brook. His research focuses on nineteenth-century European art, especially the history, theory, and critique of French Modernism.

Leseprobe

Cezanne

A–Z

Paul Cezanne

A–Z

James H. Rubin

Foreword

A → Aix-en-Provence

B → Bathers

C → Classicism

D → Dramatic Paintings

E → L’Estaque

F → Finito / Non-finito

G → Gardanne

H → Hortense Fiquet

I → Impressionism

J → Jas de Bouffan

K → Kahn, Gustave

L → Legacy

M → Mount Sainte-Victoire

N → Nature

O → Ochre

P → Philosophy

Q → Quarry

R → Rewald, John

S → Serial Brushstrokes

T → Textiles

U → Uncanny

V → Vollard, Ambroise

W → Water-based media

X → X-Ray

Y → Y Chromosome

Z → Zola, Émile

Acknowledgments

Notes

Biography

Illustrations

Bibliography

Imprint

Foreword

Since graduate school, when I decided a PhD thesis on Cezanne would take the rest of my life, and despite some articles and chapters devoted to the painter, plus many publications focusing on others, a book on the great Provençal master has until now eluded me. The A–Z concept narrows the framework, and the general audience to which it is addressed it forces a condensation of one’s ideas—limitations I found both challenging and refreshing. At the same time, I have in general tried when possible to build from each entry, or at least many of them, towards a cumulative effect. Although the book represents my current ways of thinking about Cezanne, my hope is that it will lead to many fruitful future thoughts both for myself in a more thoroughly researched essay, and for others.

I follow the recommendation of the Société des Amis de Cezanne, based in Aix-en-Provence, to drop the accent in Cezanne’s name, returning to its original Provençal spelling. Cezanne added the accent in order to clarify pronunciation of his name in Paris, but he did not use it to sign his paintings.1

A → Aix-en-Provence

A Historic view of Le Cours MirabeauAix-en-Provence

Schematic map of Aix and environs from Les Sites Cézanniens du Pays d’Aix (Paris, 1996) pp. 234–35

Paul Cezanne’s birthplace (January 19, 1839) and home city, Aix—meaning “water” or “watering place” for the thermal baths built on Roman ruins there—is a place with deep historical roots and a balmy inland Mediterranean climate. Once the seat of a regional parlement, as it was called in French, it is the site of stately aristocratic town houses (hôtels particuliers) on one side of the old city, and narrow, intricate shopping streets and bustling outdoor cafés on the other.→ p. 8 Today, Aix is filled with tourists, many of whom follow the Chemin de Cezanne (Cezanne trail), an itinerary indicated by metal sidewalk plaques that lead upward to the painter’s final studio on the Lauves Hill, called l’Atelier des Lauves. Beginning with its establishment in 1902, the painter walked there nearly every day from his flat at 23, rue Boulegon, about fifteen minutes away in town.

At Aix, Cezanne’s father, Louis-Auguste Cezanne, had risen from a hatmaker to become a rich banker, the epitome of the self-made man. With his wealth, he acquired a large, wooded farming estate called the Jas de Bouffan.→ Jas de Bouffan Having afforded his son a classical education as a boarder at Aix’s Collège Bourbon, he was disappointed when Paul insisted on becoming a painter rather than following the pre-ordained path to a lucrative profession in law or banking. During his upbringing and studies, Cezanne met the future journalist and novelist Émile Zola → Zola, Émile along with other lifelong friends with intellectual and artistic ambitions. Among them were the naturalist Antoine-Fortuné Marion, with whom he hiked in the countryside and discovered fossils, Baptistin Baille, who became a professor of optics and acoustics, the painter Antoine Valabrègue, and the journalist Numa Coste, who also painted.

With the exception of his earliest decades in Paris, Cezanne spent practically his entire career in Aix, especially following his father’s death in 1886, when the Jas de Bouffan became his permanent home until its sale in 1899. Cezanne’s most famous landscapes are sited in areas surrounding Aix,→ p. 8 many of which have retained much of their original character. → Quarry He felt so profoundly identified with his region and its provincial status that he often accentuated his southern accent when in Paris. It was a time of fierce regionalism opposing the centralizing power of the national government. Cezanne was also following the example of the militant Realist painter from the Franche-Comté province, Gustave Courbet, whom he took as a model for an outsider challenging the established institutions and their old-fashioned academic conventions, which still held sway in Paris.→ Classicism

B → Bathers

Among Cezanne’s most ambitious paintings are large nudes in landscape settings. Such scenes had both a personal and art-historical significance for him. On the personal side, they likely recalled the halcyon days of Cezanne’s youth, when along with his comrades he swam naked in the River Arc, near his home in Aix. Of at least equal if not greater importance was the presence of such scenes in revered pictorial traditions. The nude figure set into a landscape was a staple of the classical repertory,→ Classicism echoing not only tales of the ancient Roman writer Ovid, but the images of gods, goddesses, and nymphs prolific in old-master art since the Renaissance. There could be found a certain classicism Cezanne claimed he wished to recover.

In 1862, the radical painter Édouard Manet had taken a scene of river gods from the great Italian painter Raphael as the basis for a parody of the bather scene, which he converted to a modern picnic. Originally entitled Le Bain (The Bath, or Bathing), now known as Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass),→ p. 13 Manet’s picture was eliminated by the jury for the official government-sponsored art exhibition of 1863, called the “Salon.” It became notorious when, following protests by many artists, Emperor Napoleon III decided to authorize a Salon des Refusés held in an annex to the Salon, allowing viewers to decide for themselves the worthiness of rejected works. For the young Cezanne, Manet became a foil in the 1860s, in part because his childhood friend Zola → Zola, Émile began to defend Manet in the press. Manet had updated the classical theme by dressing its participants in contemporary clothing and locating them in a Paris suburb along the River Seine, where weekenders enjoyed fresh air and bathing. His figures were elegant portraits of men who were related by family, as well as an obvious professional model, the entire composition certainly produced in the studio.

B Édouard ManetLe Déjeuner sur l’herbe 1862–63Oil on canvas 208 × 264.5 cmMusée d’Orsay, Paris

BMale Bathers at Rest c. 1876–77Oil on canvas 82.2 × 101.2 cmBarnes Foundation, Philadelphia

BStanding Bather c. 1885Oil on canvas 127 × 96.8 cmMuseum of Modern Art, New YorkLillie P. Bliss Collection

The Great Bathers 1894–1905Oil on canvas 127.2 × 196.1 cmNational Gallery, London

By deliberate contrast, the Impressionists, followed by Cezanne, rejected Manet’s staged realism; they worked directly from nature out of doors. Yet, at the same time, Cezanne was tempted by the traditions of the great masters, which he hoped to “redo after nature,” as he supposedly once stated.2→ Nature The primary vehicles for those ambitions were his bather scenes, through which he evoked timelessness and grandeur as if to recapture the classicizing quality Impressionism had discarded through its emphasis on daily life. He cast his figures nude or nearly so in their settings, and he generalized their features. Their backgrounds were non-specific, or, at most, generic echoes of Provence. A relatively early Male Bathers at Rest has Aix’s famous Mount Sainte-Victoire → Mount Sainte-Victoire in the distance.→ pp. 14/15 In that picture, a sort of demonstration piece, he posed figures in a variety of positions, echoing—but in that effect only—academic exercises intended to show one’s mastery of the figure from different viewpoints.

The bather theme became especially prominent in large-scale compositions later in Cezanne’s career, as in his Great Bathers,→ p. 16 where the nudes are both more abstracted and yet grouped more naturally than in Bathers at Rest. Beside them are the dog, sometimes known as Black, and a picnic cloth with fruit, recalling the scene’s inspiration in modern leisure and in Manet. Finally, one of the greatest male nudes in modern art is certainly Cezanne’s single Male Bather,→ p. 14 with its combination of a relatively naturalistic youth standing like a Greek ephebe full length against the landscape setting. His pensive expression endows the whole with a sense of timeless dignity. It is one of his few pictures aided by a photograph (which other painters sometimes used as well), especially for the position of the arms. Otherwise quite transformed in the picture, the source can be said to emphasize Cezanne’s aim to make of nature (as here recorded by photography) an art that was solid and lasting, “like the art of the museums.”3

C → Classicism