The Art Of Cezanne

Cézanne at his most modern: a major career-spanning appraisal of his extraordinarily experimental drawings Although he is most often celebrated as a painter, Paul Cézanne's extraordinary vision was fueled by his experiments on paper. In pencil and watercolor, on individual sheets and across the pages of sketchbooks, the artist described form through multiple probing lines; realized compositions through repetitions and transformations; and conjured kaleidoscopic color through layering of watercolor. It is in these material realities of drawing where we see Cézanne at his most modern: embracing the unfinished, making process visible and actively inviting the viewer to participate in the act of perception. Published to accompany a major exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, this is the most significant effort to date to unite drawings from across Cézanne's entire career, tracing the development of his practice on paper, exploring working methods that transcend subject, and devoting both curatorial and conservation-based research to these remarkable works.

Drawing on a broad foundation in the history of nineteenth-century French art, Richard Shiff offers an innovative interpretation of Cézanne's painting. He shows how Cézanne's style met the emerging criteria of a "technique of originality" and how it satisfied critics sympathetic to symbolism as well as to impressionism. Expanding his study of the interaction of Cézanne and his critics, Shiff considers the problem of modern art in general. He locates the core of modernism in a dialectic of making (technique) and finding (originality). Ultimately, Shiff provides not only clarifying accounts of impressionism and symbolism but of a modern classicism as well.

In this remarkable book the sculptor and writer Sidney Geist presents a revolutionary interpretation of the art of Cézanne. Geist argues that Cézanne's paintings are fertile with reflections of the artist's private world and passionate concerns. Looking at more than two hundred works, all reproduced in the book, he identifies the symbolism that gives form to a hidden significance in the paintings--concealed allusions to Cézanne himself and to his relations with his wife and mother, his father, his son, and his friend Zola, as well as a circle of colleagues including Pissarro, Frederic Bazille, and Ambroise Vollard. It is a complex pattern of symbols expressed in both secondary visual images and in verbal connections, including rebuses and puns. In reading these paintings for symbolic meaning Geist opens the way to a fuller understanding of Cézanne as well as to new ways of looking at pictures. Interpretation of this kind in its turn explains formal aspects of the paintings with a richness not possible in abstract analysis.

A monumental volume devoted to one of the world’s largest and most spectacular collections of Cézannes. The Barnes Foundation’s holdings of works by the renowned Post-Impressionist Paul Cézanne (1839–1906)—sixty-one oils on canvas and eight works on paper—are among the most significant in the world. The Barnes Foundation was established in 1922 by scientist, entrepreneur, and educator Dr. Albert C. Barnes, a passionate supporter of European modernism. His virtually unrivaled collection, which can only be viewed at the Barnes Foundation, also includes exceptional paintings by Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, and many others. Beginning in 1912, Barnes acquired works by Cézanne from major Paris dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel and soon ranked among the artist’s most prominent collectors. At the time, this expressed a pioneering taste that Barnes shared with only a small group of enthusiasts, even though Cézanne had been posthumously hailed as a father of modern art at the turn of the twentieth century. The foundation’s impressive holdings of Cézannes—never before published in a single study in their entirety—span every period of the artist’s career and include his largest rendition of The Card Players and one of the three versions of The Large Bathers, one of his signal testaments. This lavishly illustrated landmark volume is both a work on Cézanne and his time, and an impetus for further study of an artist whose oeuvre is at once luminous, austere, challenging, and deeply confounding.

In the last years of his life Paul Cézanne produced a stunning series of watercolors, many of them sill lifes. Still Life with Blue Pot is one of these late masterpieces that is now in the collection of the Getty Museum. In Cézanne in the Study: Still Life in Watercolors, Carol Armstrong places this great painting within the context of Cezanne’s artistic and psychological development and of the history of the genre of still life in France. Still life—like the medium of watercolor—was traditionally considered to be “low” in the hierarchy of French academic paintings. Cézanne chose to ignore this hierarchy, creating monumental still-life watercolors that contained echoes of grand landscapes and even historical paintings in the manner of Poussin—the “highest” of classical art forms. In so doing he changed his still lifes with new meanings, both in terms of his own notoriously difficult personality and in the way he used the genre to explore the very process of looking at, and creating, art. Carol Armstrong’s study is a fascinating exploration of the brilliant watercolor paintings that brought Cézanne’s career to a complex, and triumphant, conclusion, The book includes new photographic studies of the Getty’s painting that allow the reader to encounter this great watercolor as never before, in all of its richness and detail.

Catalog of an exhibition held at the Museum of Modern Art, June 26-Sept. 12, 2005, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Oct. 20, 2005-Jan. 16, 2006, and the Musée d'Orsay, Paris, Feb. 27-May 28, 2006.

Drawing was central to Cézanne's indefatigable search for solutions to the problems posed by the depiction of reality. Many of his watercolours are equal to his paintings, and he himself made no real distinction between painting and drawing. This book's six chapters are arranged thematically covering the whole range of Cézanne's oeuvre: works after the Old Masters such as Michelangelo and Rubens; his period as one of the Impressionists; his exploration of both portraiture and the human figure, including the magnificent bathers; his interaction with landscape, particularly in his native Provence and the dominating form of Mont Sainte-Victoire; and finally the magisterial still lifes. In the Introduction, as well as throughout the book, Lloyd sets the drawings and watercolours in the context of Cézanne's life and overall artistic development. The result is a greater understanding of the process that led to some of the most absorbing art ever produced.

Catalogue of an exhibition of the same name held at the Princeton University Art Museum, Princeton, New Jersey on March 17-June 14, 2020 and at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, England on July 12-October 18, 2020.