Cezannes biography

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Through these series, he became increasingly concerned with capturing the underlying structure of nature, reducing the landscape into planes and simplified shapes.

• Technique: In the Mont Sainte-Victoire paintings, Cézanne’s technique of applying patches of color is evident. They focused on capturing the effects of light and color, often painting everyday scenes and landscapes.

  Cézanne’s contributions to these exhibitions were met with mixed reviews.

  Both artists viewed painting as a way to represent deeper truths about the world, beyond simple visual appearances.

• Rothko: Rothko, known for his abstract fields of color, was inspired by Cézanne’s exploration of how color could evoke emotion and structure a painting.
  
  For many years Cézanne was known only to his old impressionist colleagues and to a few younger radical post-impressionist artists, including the Dutch painter Vincent van Gogh and the French painter Paul Gauguin.

  The Paris Salon, the official art exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts, rejected his submissions repeatedly, leaving Cézanne frustrated and on the periphery of the art establishment.

  However, Cézanne was undeterred. His revolutionary approach to painting, characterized by his focus on structure, form, and color, challenged the conventions of the time and paved the way for future movements such as Cubism, Fauvism, and Abstract Expressionism.

  • Influence on Future Generations: Cézanne’s belief in painting as a process of construction, rather than mere representation, transformed the way artists viewed their work.

    In his hands, the canvas itself takes on the role of a screen where an artist's visual sensations are registered as he gazes intensely, and often repeatedly, at a given subject.

  • Cézanne applied his pigments to the canvas in a series of discrete, methodical brushstrokes as though he were "constructing" a picture rather than "painting" it.

    He sought to depict the underlying architecture of nature, reducing landscapes and objects into basic shapes like cones, spheres, and cylinders. Paris, at the time, was the center of the art world, and while Cézanne was passionate about painting, his early works were often met with criticism and rejection. 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.

    This technique, called “constructive brushstroke,” allowed him to give form to objects without relying on chiaroscuro (light and dark contrast).

  • Multiple Perspectives: Unlike traditional Western art, which emphasized a single point of view, Cézanne experimented with multiple perspectives within the same painting. He also worked in watercolor and graphite, particularly during his later years, experimenting with different techniques to capture light and form.

    Q: Where can I see Paul Cézanne’s paintings?

    A: Paul Cézanne’s works are housed in major museums worldwide, including the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, and the National Gallery in London.

    The Fauves, including artists like Henri Matisse and André Derain, were inspired by Cézanne’s use of bold, unblended color to create depth and volume in his paintings.

    • Matisse: Matisse, in particular, was drawn to Cézanne’s use of color to construct form, rather than relying on shading and gradation.
      
      In Cézanne's mature work, the colors and forms possessed equal pictorial weight.

      This technique would later become one of Cézanne’s signature methods, influencing the development of modern art movements like Fauvism and Cubism.

      Cézanne’s Shift Towards Post-Impressionism

      By the late 1870s, Cézanne had distanced himself from the Impressionists, feeling that their focus on the transitory effects of light was insufficient to express the deeper truths he sought to convey in his work.

      Instead of the illusion, he searched for the essence. Instead of the three-dimensional artifice, he longed for the two-dimensional truth.

      Oil on canvas - The Pushkin Museum of Fine Art, Moscow