Paul Cezanne Essay, Research Paper

Vincent DiIorio

Art Major III

12/20/00

Paul Cezanne

Paul Cezanne was born in Aix-en-Provence, a small town south of France. As a young boy, Cezanne?s passions lay in his poetry. Cezanne is included in the time of the Post-Impressionists. He wanted to ?make Impressionism into something solid and enduring like the art of museums.? Cezanne did not have a typical relationship with his father, he had problems with him. Cezanne?s father wanted for Cezanne to become a lawyer. He sent Cezanne to a college for lawyers but his friend Zola coaxed Cezanne otherwise. Cezanne?s father bought Jas de Bouffan, which was the place that Cezanne did many of his works. Cezanne and Zola played an important role in each other?s life with Zola helping start Cezanne?s art career and Cezanne?s helping Zola to start thinking about pictorial art.

Cezanne based his work on the observation of nature and used separate strokes that were visible to make to make rich surfaces. Cezanne tried counting on the connection between adjacent strokes of color to show the entirety of the form and the space decreasing. In Cezanne?s ?The Saint Victoire? from Bellevue you can see how Cezanne uses this technique to show space and depth from a flat plane. Cezanne liked to make alterations on nature and enlarge the mountain. Cezanne utilized color contrasts to show depth playing with cool and warm color shifts. Cezanne had a very distinct style of painting. To move out of the style of the broken-color of the Impressionists, Cezanne created the system of modulating the colors from a volume of cool to warm or light to dark. Cezanne very seldom ever made a line around his paintings. He would make the lines virtually disappear off the edge thus creating more volume. This would make Cezanne?s paintings pass to the negative. This technique can be seen in Cezanne?s ?Still Life with Apples, a Bottle, and a Milk Pot.?

Cezanne?s light sources were moderately consistent and his shadows were a very important element to his color. Cezanne was known to work on several canvases at one time changing from one to the other depending on the time of day or the location of the sun. One of his paintings that express this color balance is ?Chestnut Trees and Farmhouse? at the Jas de Bouffan. Cezanne used ?lines? to create planes, but he used planes to create volume. Cezanne relied on warm-to-cold contrasts and overlapping forms to give the volume instead of linear and aerial perspective. Cezanne had trouble with perspective. In his ?Road to Gardanne?Cezanne drastically changes the scene in order to organize space. Cezanne compressed the size of the foreground and made the road with a sharper turn. Cezanne also reduced the size of the trees immensely, but increased the size of the bridge immensely. It is said that because Cezanne had not reduced himself to simple, abstract shapes there were distortions. He was still trying to capture the realistic look by smudging and smearing. The painting?s distortions can also be explained by the fact that he did all canvases at one time which did not allow him much accuracy on the human figure.

Paul Cezanne was truly a unique artist. He tried so many ways of painting until he finally found a few that worked for him. With the color schemes and the multi-canvas works, he accomplished many beautiful pieces. With all the time and effort that Cezanne put into painting he undoubtedly mastered the art and will forever be known as one of the great painters of the 1800?s.