Paul Cezanne

Post Impressionists

Post Impressionism
A French art movement that immediately followed
Impressionism.
Post-Impressionism is an umbrella term used to describe a
variety of artists who were influenced by Impressionism
but took their art in different directions.
There is no single well-defined style of Post-Impressionism.
In general it is less casual and more emotionally charged
than Impressionist work.

Post Impressionism
The artists had a greater concern for expression, structure
and form than did the Impressionist artists.
Building on their works, these artists rejected the
emphasis the Impressionists put on naturalism and the
depiction of fleeting effects of lights.
The Post-Impressionists introduced a variety of bold new
styles
Including innovative uses of color and brushwork that
sometimes bordered on abstraction.

Paul Cezanne
Czanne a French painter, was one of the greatest of the
Post Impressionists.
His works and ideas influenced the aesthetic development
of many 20th-century artists and art movements,
especially Cubism.
Czanne's art , grew out of Impressionism and eventually
challenged all the conventional values of painting in the
19th century.

Paul Cezanne
Cezanne insisted on personal expression and on the
integrity or wholeness of the painting itself.
Czanne's pictures are restrained, impersonal and remote.
His isolation from the other artists is considered essential
for his intense concentration on the formation of a new
painting style.

Self Portraits, Paul Cezanne, Oil on Canvas

Early works
Followed official art style of salons
Thematicaly Romantic
Expressionistic in terms of their impasto paint surface,
broad use of the palette knife.
Thickly painted in a palette limited to black, white, tans
and greys and an ocasional touch of bright colour.
Soon he achieved an understanding of the paintings of
Courbet and the impressionists like Monet.

Early works
From 1872, under Pissarro's influence, Czanne
experimented with Impressionism and adopted the
impressionistic palette, viewpoints and subject matter.
Combined the principles of light with more structured
forms. He painted the rich Impressionist effects of light on
different surfaces.
He maintained his concern for solidity and structure
throughout, and abandoned Impressionism in 1877.

Forms
From defused or submerged impressionistic forms to
structural regularity of subjects with defined edges in
shapes and forms
In his own words Each form has a true solidity, an
absolute internal power that is never diminished for the
sake of another part of the composition
Obsessed with form rather than content; subject matter
always remain secondary to the act of painting itself
Methods and objective of the painter to be more important
than the image; subject of the painting must not
overshadow the artist's act of creation

 He composed the pictures the way he wanted them in the

configurations he decided upon.
Tension in the depiction of forms and their arrangements
create excitement.
1.
2.
3.

Actuality and Illusion

Description and Abstraction
Reality and Imagination

Interpretations provided a legacy for a revolution of form

that led the way for modern art.
Colors in nature and their combination with natural light
could never be truly reproduced.
Rather than responding to the flickering lights like the
Impressionists, he emphasized in the use of colours to
obtain a solid structural quality in the painting.

Still life
Cezannes principal subject that he used for his analysis of
form , drawing and modeling through colours in contrast
and relationship of tones.
Colours used for modelling and to achieve the solidity as
well as a sense of depth
His still-lifes done in the studio, with props, in their
simplicity have a typical characteristic
The fruits and objects are readily identifiable, but they
have no tactile appeal (Producing a sensation of touch).

Landscapes
Cezannes landscapes never indicate the time of the day or
even season.
In contrast to the momentary glimpses of the
impressionist paintings in a Cezanne landscape time is
defeated by the permanence of the subject.
Simplification; the objects are just identifiable through
blocks that are described through colour patches/strokes.

Landscapes
Colour strokes assume definite directions - diagonal ,
vertical or horizontal and grouped to form planes.
The planes of smaller masses if completely realized in its
totality, suggest individual imageries.
The constituent planes hold astonishing hues of blue,
green, yellow, rose and violet and it is the delicate
differentiation between the hues that produce the
impression of three dimentional form.
To put it simply, he has used to construct a form the very
colour patch that the impressionists had employed before
to dissolve it.

 Paul Czanne never drew his picture before painting it and

instead, he created space and depth by establishing planes
of color, which are freely associated and distributed.
The facets produced through colours dominate the
composition - remains no longer a product of the line but
rather of the color itself.
He said that the nature is based on rectangles,
cylinders, cones and spheres reducing architecture and
figures to geometric forms and paving the way for Cubism.
The beauty of his colour construction is abstact and that
was the reason why many artists of the early 20th century
especially the cubists claimed him as the father of modern
art.