7/1/2023 0 Comments Cubism artworks![]() The early oils of Cézanne were executed in a rather somber palette. Oil on canvas - The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth. Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. The light was no longer an "outsider" in relation to depicted objects rather light emanated from within. ![]() The primary means of constructing the new perspective included the juxtaposition of cool and warm colors as well as the bold overlapping of forms. In Cézanne's mature work, the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight. 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. ![]() The looming mountain is reminiscent of a puzzle of various hues, assembled into a recognizable object. The overall composition itself, however, is clearly representational and also follows in the ethos of Japanese prints. Rocks and trees are suggested by mere daubs of paint as opposed to being extensively depicted. The view is rendered in what is essentially an abstract vocabulary. This is one of the last landscapes of Mont Sainte-Victoire, favored by Cézanne at the end of his life. Oil on canvas - The Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Mass This lively arrangement, along with the artist's obvious acknowledgment of the raw canvas as a positive component, directly anticipates the "incomplete" landscapes of the Fauves and provides future generations with a method to experiment with pictorial possibilities beyond the rigid tradition of naturalistic representation. What seems an "unfinished" composition nonetheless successfully suggests the feeling of nature without fully representing it, the overall canvas structured by intersecting diagonals that tip and turn out of the picture plane, like leaves shifting in the sunlight. In this study of trees, which invariably comes from the long tradition of Japanese woodcuts, Cézanne is moving further toward abstraction by constructing the landscape view through various constellations of color. The brushstrokes themselves seemed to speak a visual poetry entirely apart from the painting's subject. In nearly abstract watercolor landscapes dating from the latter part of his life, Cézanne achieved a perfect balance, or equilibrium, between color, form, and relatively untouched areas of the paper. The suitor may be equated with Cézanne himself, possibly referring to his well-known anxiety with the opposite sex, which he struggled with throughout his life. The interior of the room is defined by a series of sweeping diagonals and bold colors depicting draperies, fruit, and an implied floral arrangement (Manet's version of the subject sported a resplendent bouquet in the center of the canvas). Unlike Manet's treatment, however, Cézanne portrays the prostitute as an awkwardly naked and recoiling figure, setting off the figures of her suitor (completely invisible in Manet's rendering of the subject) and an African chambermaid as transgressing "outsiders." The figures are depicted in both an expressive and abbreviated, indeed almost ungainly manner, with facial features only vaguely outlined, like masks, while their fleshy, corpulent bodies are visually articulated by dynamic, curving contours. This composition is Cézanne's adaptation of the theme of the demi-mondaine, or high-class prostitute suggested in Édouard Manet's scandalous Olympia of 1863. It is as if each item of still life, landscape, or portrait had been examined not from one but several angles, its material properties then recombined by the artist as no mere copy, but as what Cézanne called "a harmony parallel to nature." It was this aspect of Cézanne's analytical, time-based practice that led the future Cubists to regard him as their true mentor.
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