Cézanne, Paul:Cézanne early work
PaulCézanne (1839-1906) is certainly as great an artist as any that everlived, up there with Titian, Michelangelo, and Rembrandt. Like Manet and Degas,and also Morisot and Cassatt, he came from a wealthy family — his was inAix-en-Provence, France. His banker father seems to have been an uncultivatedman, of whom his highly nervous and inhibited son was afraid. Despite parentaldispleasure, Cézanne persevered with his passionate desire to become anartist. His early paintings display little of the majesty of his late work,though today they are rightfully awarded the respect that he certainly neverreceived for them.
His earlyyears were difficult and his career was, from the beginning, dogged withrepeated failure and rejection. In 1862 he was introduced to the famed circleof artists who met at the Café Guerbois in Paris, which included Manet,Degas and Pissarro, but his awkward manners and defensive shyness prevented himfrom becoming an intimate of the group. However, Pissarro was to play an importantpart in Cézanne's later development.
One of themost important works of his early years is the portrait of his formidablefather. The Artist's Father (1866, 199 x 119 cm (78 x 47 in)) isone of Cézanne's ``palette-knife pictures'', painted in short sessionsbetween 1865 and 1866. Their realistic content and solid style revealCézanne's admiration for Gustave Courbet. Here we see a craggy,unyielding man of business, a solid mass of manhood, bodily succint from thetop of his black beret to the tips of his heavy shoes. The uncompromisingverticals of the massive chair are echoed by the door, and the edges of thesmall still life by Cézanne on the wall just behind: everythingcorresponds to the absolute verticals of the edges of the canvas itself,further accentuating the air of certainty about the portrait. Thick hands holda newspaper--though Cézanne has replaced his father's conservativenewspaper with the liberal L'Evénement, which publishedarticles by his childhood friend, Emile Zola. His father devours the paper,sitting tensely upright in the elongated armchair. Yet it is a curiously tenderportrait too. Cézanne seems to see his father as somehow unfulfilled:for all his size he does not fully occupy the chair, and neither does he seethe still life on the wall behind him, which we recognize as being one of hisson's. We do not see his eyes-- only the ironical mouth and his great frame,partly hidden behind the paper.
Mystery of nature
Cézannewas in his twenties when he painted The Artist's Father. Wonderfulthough it is, with its blacks and greys and umbers, it does not fully indicatethe profundity of his developing genius. Yet even in this early work,Cézanne's grasp of form and solid pictorial structures which came todominate his mature style are already essential components. His overridingconcern with form and structure set him apart from the Impressionists from thestart, and he was to maintain this solitary position, carving out his uniquepictorial language.
Abduction,rape, and murder: these are themes that tormented Cézanne. Abduction(c. 1867, 90 x 117 cm (35 x 46 in)), an early work full of dark miseries, isimpressive largely for its turgid force, held barely under his control. Thesefigure paintings are the most difficult to enter into: they are sinister, withpassion in turmoil just beneath the surface.
Cézanne'slate studies of the human body are most rewarding, his figures often depictedas bathers merging with the landscape in a sunlit lightness. This became afavorite theme for Cézanne and he made a whole series of pictures on thesubject. This mature work is dictated by an objectivity that is profoundlymoving for all its seeming emotional detachment.
It wasbefore nature that Cézanne was seized by a sense of the mystery of theworld to a depth never expressed by another artist. He saw that nothing existsin isolation: an obvious insight, yet one that only he could make us see.Things have color and they have weight, and the color and mass of each affectsthe weight of the other. It was to understand these rules that Cézannededicated his life.
Structure and Solidity
From 1872,under Pissarro's influence, Cézanne painted the rich Impressionisteffects of light on different surfaces and even exhibited at the firstImpressionist show. But he maintained his concern for solidity and structurethroughout, and abandoned Impressionism in 1877. In Le Château Noir,Cézanne does not respond to the flickering light as an Impressionistmight; he draws that flicker from deep within the substance of every structurein the painting. Each form has a true solidity, an absolute of internal powerthat is never diminished for the sake of another part of the composition.
It is thetension between actuality and illusion, description and abstraction, realityand invention, that makes Cézanne's most unassuming subjects soprofoundly satisfying and exciting, and which provided a legacy for arevolution of form that led the way for modern art.
Thespecial attraction of still life to Cézanne was the ability, to someextent, to control the structure. He brooded over his apples, jugs, tables, andcurtains, arranging them with infinite variety. Still Life with Applesand Peaches glows with a romantic energy, as hugely present at MontSainte-Victoire. Here too is a mountain, and here too sanctity and victory: thefruits lie on the table with an active power that is not just seen butexperienced. The jug bulges, not with any contents, but with its own weight ofbeing. The curtain swags gloriously, while the great waterfall of the napkinabsorbs and radiates light onto the table on which all this life is earthed.
Список литературы
Для подготовкиданной работы были использованы материалы с сайта www.ibiblio.org/louvre/paint/