The Humanistic Tradition, Book 5 Romanticism, Realism, and the Nineteenth-Century World

139

TJ123-8-2009 LK VWD0011 Tradition Humanistic 6th Edition W:220mm x H:292mm 175L 115 Stora Enso M/A Magenta (V)

CHAPTER 31 The Move Toward Modernism 139

Cézanne

More so than Seurat, Paul Cézanne (1839–1906) served as
a bridge between the art of the nineteenth century and
that of the twentieth. Cézanne began his career as an
Impressionist in Paris, but his traditional subjects—land-
scapes, portraits, and still lifes—show a greater concern for
the formal aspects of a painting than for its subject matter.
His effort to “redo nature after Poussin,” that is, to find the
enduring forms of nature that were basic to all great art,
made Cézanne the first modernist painter.
Cézanne’s determination to invest his pictures with a
strong sense of three-dimensionality (a feature often neg-
lected by the Impressionists) led to a method of building up
form by means of small, flat planes of color, larger than (but
not entirely unlike) Seurat’s colored dots. Abandoning the
intuitive and loosely organized compositions of the impres-
sionists, Cézanne also sought to restore to painting the stur-
dy formality of academic composition. His desire to

achieve pictorial unity inspired bold liberties of form and

perspective: he might tilt and flatten surfaces; reduce (or

abstract) familiar objects to basic geometric shapes—

cylinders, cones, and spheres; or depict various objects in

a single composition from different points of view.

Cézanne’s still lifes are not so much tempting likenesses of

apples, peaches, or pears as they are architectural arrange-

ments of colored forms (Figure 31.32). In short, where

narrative content often seems incidental, form itself takes

on meaning.

Cézanne’s mature style developed when he left Paris

and returned to live in his native area of southern France.

Here he tirelessly studied the local landscape: dozens of

times he painted the rugged, stony peak of Mont Sainte-

Victoire near his hometown of Aix-en-Provence. Among

his last versions of the subject is a landscape in which

trees and houses have become an abstract network of

Figure 31.32 PAUL CÉZANNE, The Basket of Apples, ca. 1895. Oil on canvas, 25^3 ⁄ 4 32 in. The rear edge of the tabletop
marks the horizon line at two different places; the top two lady-fingers are seen from above, while those below and the plate
itself are seen straight on. Such deliberate deviations from optical Realism characterize many of Cézanne’s still lifes.