Paul Cezanne (Part 2 of 2)
Plate 2
Plate 3
Comparing Plate 2, (Paul Cezanne’s, Six Women, 1873-77), to Plate 3, (Paul Cezanne’s, The Large Bathers, 1906), we see a massive change in the artists approach. In plate 2, illustrating Cezanne’s early work, we see his naïve method of having to cover the whole canvas with paint and detail as oppose to plate 3, illustrating his maturity; his developed stance on being able to leave the painting with an unfinished look, almost as if it’s an undercoat. The two differ greatly in the sense that, he has used colour to depict light in plate 2 whereas in plate 3, his mature attitude allows him the flexibility of using the bare parts of the canvas to represent the light as it hits the bathers. Noticeably, this painting of the Large Bathers, was painted in the year of his death. Getting older, we see what is not only believed to be Cezanne’s matured technique but what could be seen as a desperate attempt before he died, to create the durability that he always talked about. The application of paint in plate 2, appears to be quite impasto like where the application is quite subtle in plate 3 as well as having only using the necessary amount to suggest form.
Cezanne blasted the impressionists maintaining they had no structure and that he wanted to make of impressionism ‘something solid and durable, like the art of the museums’. He regarded the ‘cylinder, sphere and cone’ to be the shapes that were the basis of all form in nature. His fixation with Saint-Victoire Mountain, lead him to believe that this was the essence of what the impressionists lacked, ‘firmness, solidity, permanence’. The way Monet used colour and rendering gave him the stability and simplicity that Cezanne admired much about him saying, ‘It’s only an eye but my goodness, what an eye he’s got’.
“I am working as never before, I am happy with what I am doing, and if the new glasses are better still, I ask only to live until I am a hundred.” – Paul Cezanne
