Lecture Notes on Paul Cézanne's Landscape Painting

Overview

• Artist: Paul Cézanne
• Famous for: Still lifes with apples and landscapes of Mount Saint-Victoire
• Painting in Focus: Mount Saint-Victoire, 1902-04

Key Points about Cézanne's Technique

• Painted the same mountain repeatedly, but not rapidly like Impressionists.
• Considered a Post-Impressionist, associated with Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Seurat.
• Moved from Paris back to Provence later in life.
• Paintings seem 'unfinished' with visible canvas, forming shapes.

Style and Approach

• Uses a series of hash marks creating optical movement.
• Challenges tradition by emphasizing two-dimensionality.
• Tradition emphasized believable space; Cézanne presents a 'curtain of paint'.
• Brush strokes are visibly present, contrary to traditional high finish.
• Reflects a personal vision, focusing on subjective optical experience.

Influence and Legacy

• Impact on Cubism:
  • Influenced artists like Braque and Picasso.
  • Began investigating breaking contour; opening up form subtly.
  • Example: Houses in the foreground blend colors, suggest geometry.

Techniques and Effects

• Denies illusionism of Western painting since the Renaissance.
• Leaves out cues like atmospheric perspective.
• Treats all parts of canvas uniformly; uses color to delineate distance.
  • Blue browns in foreground, reds/greens in mid-ground, blues in background.
• Introduces ambiguity by blending colors across realms, e.g., gray-purple from foreground into sky.
• Focuses on a more permanent depiction rather than transitory effects of light.

Conclusion

• Cézanne offers a different investigation of landscape.
• Creates tension between expected depth and flatness of the canvas surface.