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     Essay: Research on Cezanne

Introduction: French painter Paul Cezanne (1839 - 1906) is considered by many as the father of modem art, with oil painting being his primary medium. His new approach to space and his rejection of conventional perspective rules brought about a paradigm shift in art.
However, as are most radical geniuses, Cezanne did not receive recognition until his last years.

Background: Cezanne came from an upper middle class family in Aix-en-Provence where he lived a comfortable childhood. Having overcome his own doubts and resistance from his authoritarian father, Cezanne studied painting in Paris.

His persistent copies of the Old Masters in Louvre and in books influenced his early expressive pieces, which articulate his own fears and passions. Restricted to high contrasts and dark colours, the expressionistic paintings depicted scenes of violence and sexuality such as murder, abduction and temptation.

To escape drafting into the army in 1939, Cezanne moved to the small fishing village ofL'Estaque where he started to concentrate on painting nature.

In 1972, along with Hortense Fiquet and their son Paul, he started work in Pontoise alongside Camille Pissaro, one of the early Impressionists.
As a result of his encounter with the Impressionists, Cezanne came to a critical moment of his development. This was when he adopted brighter colours and the Impressionist "signature" brushstroke of graduated colour placed closely together. The result is a realistic depiction of the landscapes with the shimmering effects created by the, shower of sunlight.

Now that he was introduced to painting in the open and to the precise observation of nature, he worked on developing his technique of landscape painting, studying the countryside of Aix-en_Provence, L'Estaque and Paris. Eventually, colour assumed a central role in his composition and he was determined to create harmonious paintings. Cezanne was determined to create space and perspective by means of planes of colour.

In innumerable studies of apples, he tried to model them without using lines, painting the apple as he saw it, a collection of various colour tones. He was obsessed with form over content, that is, whether the subject was bathers or fruits, he focused on their colour tones and their harmony with the rest of the composition rather than define their features. During the last stage of his development,

Cezanne increasingly reduced the individual components of his landscapes to simple shapes. Moreover, he reduced the contrast between the natural forms portrayed by the evenness of technique and brush strokes. Such paintings paved the way for later artists such as the cubists and the Fauves.

The Card Players


This is a painting of a scene from everyday life - two card players, two different atmospheres. The


1893 - 1896, Oil on Canvas 47.5 x 57 cm Paris, Musee d'Orsay

player on the left is relaxed, leaning back on his chair and smoking a cigarette; his partner, on the other hand, is hunched forward and more absorbed in the game. One hat is firm and composed, with a regular brim, while the other is irregular, soft and
battered. The first has a heavy body compared to the head yet this oddly makes he seem further away from the artist even though the two bodies have the same weight. One pair of arms is parallel and the other is converging. All these bring out the two players from the painting without compromising the integrity of the other subjects. The better-illuminated, bulkier and more muscular player on the right is carefully placed off picture to achieve balance; the left player is more completely in the picture whereas the other is marginal. Without using linear perspective, a sense of depth and space is achieved by three stages of depth: - the players in the foreground, the window in middle and the dark exterior at the
back. The darkness out of the window and the artificial overhead lighting from the reflection

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