ART

SHOPPING MALL > DEPARTMENT STORE > ART > ART HISTORY

COMPARISON SHOPPING SEARCH ENGINE

Fine Art Prints

Best Sellers Art Prints

Sale Art Prints

Limited Edition Art Prints

Buy Modern Art Prints, Fine Art Prints, Framed Art Prints and Art Prints Posters.

Select the first letter of the artist's last name to search the Fine Art Prints: A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

PAUL CEZANNE
Still Life: Apples, Bottle and Chairback (1902-1906)
Pencil and watercolour
44.3cm X 59cm/17 1/2 in X 23 1/4 in

Cezanne's painting provides a link, possibly the most vital link, between the naturalism of the nineteenth century and the conceptualism of the twentieth. Largely because his work pointed in the direction of Cubism and, in the opinion of some observers, in the direction of Abstraction, Cezanne has earned the title 'the father of modern painting'.

Cezanne was born at Aix-en-Provence in 1839, the son of a local banker. He was the schoolfriend of the novelist Emile Zola (1840-1902) and in 1861 he went to Paris to study painting. Influenced by Delacroix, Honore Daumier (1808-1879), Courbet and Edouard Manet (1833-1883), Cezanne's early paintings in oil, unlike his late works, are often dark in color, and violent in both subject matter and the handling of paint which he plastered on thickly. It was not until the 1870s that he began to find his own direction. In 1872 he joined Camille Pissarro (1830-1903) at Pontoise, later moving to Auvers. Here he learnt the principles and practices of the Impressionists, aided by Pissarro, although he applied them to different ends. Above all, he learnt the importance of pure color and the study of nature. He later remarked that the Louvre was 'a good book but only a means to an end' and that he wished to 'do Poussin over again after nature'. Nature was the obsession and the key.

Dissatisfied with the fleeting atmospheric effects of the Impressionists, Cezanne was interested in rendering the volume and the solidity of objects, using planes translated into color. This feeling for form expressed in his work and in his much quoted advice to see objects in nature in terms of 'the cone, the cylinder and the sphere' was matched by an equally strong sense of the structure of the painting itself.

Cezanne passed much of his life working in isolation at Aix-en-Provence. Although he was moderately successful in his lifetime, it was a retrospective exhibition held in Paris in 1907 which had a profound, immediate and lasting impact. In the first place, it influenced Picasso and Braque who were struggling to work out a way of painting which would represent visible reality in a new way, namely Cubism. Secondly, Matisse was very interested in Cezanne; he purchased Three Bathers (1879-1882) which was to remain a long-lasting inspiration to him.

Cezanne worked mainly in oil on canvas or in watercolor on paper. For Cezanne, the spontaneity required by the medium of watercolor seemed at first to be a relaxation from producing works in oil, what he considered the painter's great vocational responsibility: The picture is not going badly but the days seem long,' he wrote to Zola on 30 June 1866. 'I must buy a box of watercolors so that I can paint when I am not working on my picture.' Lionello Venturi ends his book on Cezanne watercolors, Cezanne: Son Art, Son Oeuvre (1936), with the words 'And to those who love Cezanne, his watercolors are the dearest creations of his imagination.' In them the artist is caught at his most intimate.

'To read nature is to see it, as if through a veil, in terms of an interpretation in patches of color following one another according to a law of harmony. These major hues are thus analyzed through modulations. Painting is classifying one's sensations of color,' Cezanne wrote at about the time he painted Still Life: Apples, Bottle and Chairback.

This work belongs to the artist's last and mature period. The subject, a still life with apples, was a favorite one; although, paradoxically, the specific subject was probably of little importance to Cezanne, despite his obsession with nature. The still life was painted at the beginning of the twentieth century which has witnessed a great exploration of the visual and emotional effects of color. Cezanne's sense of color was impeccable and often discreet, but in this particularly rich painting the two primary colors, blue and red, are used with boldness. A distinctive technique of Cezanne's, which was considered a daring innovation at the time, was leaving part of the paper blank: here, the warm-toned paper indicating those areas of the apples which catch the most light. In this way the artist suggests volume while representing light. Such a device was part of Cezanne's struggle to break away from what he considered to be the insubstantial atmospheric effects of the Impressionists.

The picture exemplifies another important aspect of Cezanne's vision, style and technique. When the viewer tries to join up the right and lefthand rims of the apple bowl, he or she discovers that Cezanne has been looking at and rendering the scene in front of him from more than one angle, thereby breaking with the typically monocular vision of Renaissance perspective. More important, this shifting of viewpoint may be seen as a step in the direction of Cubism.

The brushstrokes vary in size more considerably than in Cezanne's oil paintings. The marks which complement and emphasize the pencil contour round the apples are literally drawn with a brush - a small sable brush or perhaps the tip of a large one. Cezanne did not lay on washes successively covering whole areas of the paper. He placed large and small planes of pure color in a manner that keeps the forms open. The transparent watercolor has been laid on in a way that keeps the whole pictorial architecture in a state of pleasurable continuity.

The painting is, as it were, complete at every stage. Aware of the potency of suggestion, Cezanne always stopped long before the paper looked overworked.

Cezanne's scrupulous but exciting sense of design, his obsession with the relation between forms on a flat surface and in the round, produces in this late work a remarkable confrontation between the swirls and flumes of pencil marks, the painstakingly worked translucent touches of watercolor, and the gaps, cracks and open spaces between these two modes.

Cezanne's treatment of a similar subject in oil paint reveals an exaggeration of many of the effects handled with such delicacy of touch in the watercolor. The material thickness of the oil imparts a greater sense of volume to the apples but at the cost of a luminous color range and the substitution of bolder painted black lines for the animated buzz of pencil marks.

Cheap Posters

ART

SHOPPING MALL > DEPARTMENT STORE > ART > ART HISTORY

Shopping Mall : Art Gallery, Fine Art Collection, Art History, Art Supply & Art Print

ART Category: Art, Arts, Fantasy Art, Wildlife Art, Art Gallery, Fine Art, Art History, Art Print, Digital Art, Art Supply, African Art, 3d Art, Poster Art, Cartoon Art, Nude Art, Art Wall, Religious Art

Shopping Mall: Art Store offers Arts, Fantasy Art, Wildlife Art, Art Gallery, Fine Art, Art History, Art Print, Digital Art, Art Supply, African Art, 3d Art, Poster Art, Cartoon Art, Nude Art, Art Wall, Religious Art

ART Topics: Art, Arts, Fantasy Art, Wildlife Art, Art Gallery, Fine Art, Art History, Art Print, Digital Art, Art Supply, African Art, 3d Art, Poster Art, Cartoon Art, Nude Art, Art Wall, Religious Art