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

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140 CHAPTER 31 The Move Toward Modernism

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colored facets of paint (Figure 31.33). By applying colors

of the same intensity to different parts of the canvas—

note the bright green and rich violet brushstrokes in both

sky and landscape—Cézanne challenged traditional

distinctions between foreground and background. In

Cézanne’s canvases, all parts of the composition, like the

flat shapes of a Japanese print, have become equal in

value. Cézanne’s methods, which transformed an ordinary

mountain into an icon of stability, led the way to modern

abstraction.

Figure 31.33 PAUL CÉZANNE, Mont Sainte-Victoire, 1902–1904. Oil on canvas, 27^1 ⁄ 2  351 ⁄ 4 in. Between 1880 and his death

in 1906, the so-called Master of Aix produced no less than twenty-five oil paintings and watercolors of his favorite mountain

as seen from the countryside around his native city. In this rendering, dense patches of color come close to pure abstraction.