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Post-Impressionism 869

(!"#. 28-24A), which profoundly in$u- enced the development of Cubism in the early 20th century (see “Analytic Cub- ism,” page 898).

Cézanne, like other 19th-century modernist painters, was concerned with the integrity of the painting surface. Viewers of Cézanne’s paintings are always aware that the three-dimensional forms they see are in reality two-dimensional patterns of line and color on a $at picture plane. Cézanne’s legacy was signi%cant, especially his late works, such as the un%nished !e Large Bathers 28-24A CÉZANNE, Large Bathers, 1906.

PROBLEMS AND SOLUTIONS

Making Impressionism Solid and Enduring Paul Cézanne’s desire to “make of Impressionism something solid and enduring” led him to formulate a new approach to the art of painting, whether his subject was still life (FIG. 28-23), landscape (FIG. 28-24), or the human figure (FIG. 28-24A). Cézanne’s distinctive way of studying nature is evident in Mont Sainte-Victoire (FIG. 28-24), one of many views he painted of this mountain near his home in Aix-en-Provence. His aim was not truth in appearance, especially not photographic truth, nor was it the “truth” of Impressionism. Rather, he sought a lasting structure behind the formless and fleeting visual information that the eyes absorb. Instead of employ- ing the Impressionists’ random approach when he was face-to-face with nature, Cézanne, like Seurat, developed a more analytical style. His goal was to order the lines, planes, and colors of nature. He constantly and painstakingly checked his painting against the part of the scene—he called it the “motif”—he was studying at the moment.

In a March 1904 letter, Cézanne stated his goal as a painter: “[to do] Poussin over entirely from nature . . . in the open air, with color and light, instead of one of those works imagined in a studio, where every- thing has the brown coloring of feeble daylight without reflections from the sky and sun.”* He sought to achieve Poussin’s effects of distance, depth, structure, and solidity, not by using traditional perspective and chiaroscuro, but rather by recording the color patterns he deduced from an optical analysis of nature.

Cézanne set out to explore the properties of line, plane, and color, and their interrelationships. He studied the capacity of lines and planes to cre- ate the sensation of depth and the power of colors to modify the direction

and depth of lines and planes. To create the illusion of three-dimensional form and space, Cézanne focused on carefully selecting colors. He under- stood that the visual properties—hue, saturation, and value—of different colors vary (see “Color Theory,” page 863). Cool colors tend to recede, whereas warm ones advance. By applying to the canvas small patches of juxtaposed colors, some advancing and some receding, Cézanne created volume and depth in his works. On occasion, the artist depicted objects chiefly in one hue and achieved convincing solidity by modulating the inten- sity (or saturation). At other times, he juxtaposed contrasting colors—for example, green, yellow, and red—of similar saturation to compose specific objects, such as fruit or bowls.

In Mont Sainte-Victoire, Cézanne replaced the transitory visual effects of changing atmospheric conditions, effects that preoccupied Monet, with a more concentrated, lengthier analysis of the colors in large lighted spaces. The main space stretches out behind and beyond the canvas plane and includes numerous small elements, such as roads, fields, houses, and the viaduct at the far right, each seen from a slightly different viewpoint. Above this shifting, receding perspective—so differ- ent from traditional Renaissance perspective with the viewer standing in a fixed position and with a single vanishing point (see “Linear Perspective,” page 599)—the largest mass of all, the mountain, seems simultaneously to be both near and far away, an effect achieved by equally stressing background and foreground contours. Cézanne’s rendition of nature approximates the experience a person has when viewing the forms of nature from multiple viewpoints. The relative proportions of objects vary, rather than being fixed by strict linear perspective. Cézanne immobilized the shifting colors of Impressionism into an array of clearly defined planes

composing the objects and spaces in his scene. Describing his method in a letter to a fellow painter, he wrote:

[ T ]reat nature by the cylinder, the sphere, the cone, everything in proper perspective so that each side of an object or a plane is directed towards a central point. Lines parallel to the horizon give breadth . . . Lines perpendicular to this horizon give depth. But nature for us men is more depth than surface, whence the need of introducing into our light vibrations, represented by reds and yellows, a sufficient amount of blue to give the impression of air.†

*Cézanne to Émile Bernard, March 1904. Quoted in Robert Goldwater and Mario Treves, eds., Artists on Art, from the XIV to the XX Century (New York: Pantheon, 1945), 363. †Cézanne to Émile Bernard, April 15, 1904. Ibid., 363.

28-24 P!"# C$%!&&', Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1904. Oil on canvas, 29 3 120 ( 29 11

1 40. Philadelphia Museum of Art,

Philadelphia (George W. Elkins Collection).

In his landscapes, Cézanne replaced the transitory visual effects of changing atmospheric conditions—the Impressionists’ focus— with careful analysis of the lines, planes, and colors of nature.

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