Work: Farm in Normandy
Paul Cézanne's work demonstrates a mastery of design, colour, tone, composition
and draughtsmanship. His often repetitive, sensitive and exploratory
brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes
of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields, at once
both a direct expression of the sensations of the observing eye and an
abstraction from observed nature. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study
of his subjects, a searching gaze and a dogged struggle to deal with the
complexity of human visual perception.
Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century
Impressionism and the early
20th century's new line of artistic enquiry,
Cubism. The line attributed to both
Matisse and
Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us
all" cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne was interested in the simplification of naturally occurring forms to
their geometric essentials; he wanted to "treat nature by the cylinder, the
sphere, the cone" (a tree trunk may be conceived of as a cylinder, an apple or
orange a sphere, for example).
